*Editorial Note: Awakenings 2025, our biennial National Gathering, is 3 months away! Join us the in the greater DC area on March 6th–8th. Your voice is needed as we wrestle with wholeness and beauty in the life the Church. In light of this, we asked our 2024 Writing Fellows for a short reflection on the integration of these two disparate themes in their own local contexts. What follows is the first of three co-authored reflections, a beautifully holistic integration indeed! ~CK

Wholeness and Beauty – An Invitation to Release and Embrace

Endeavoring to embody wholeness and beauty provides the opportunity to cultivate an ability to release embedded ideologies that place the function of the church and the essence of who God is in a well defined frame. Simultaneously, this notion of releasing a should result in drawing nearer to God in order to better embrace, but never fully grasp, a wholistic vision of the Godhead being.

A major area of release is concerning our perceived need to protect who we understand God to be as well as what we often define as our required comfort zones; or simply stated as religious piety and the Christendom empire. To better embody wholeness and beauty, this posture of Spirit-led release leads Christ-followers to embrace a God who is present, all-knowing, loving, and capable of appropriately offering correction as needed. Our God transforms hearts and minds, defending himself and his creation as relevant. 

What could the scattered body of the church look like if we embrace the wholeness of God and release our staunch traditional frames of what defines beauty? Admittedly, this can feel frightening, uncomfortable, and uncertain, but the Comforter and Helper is well able to lead and guide if invited to do so. This release and embrace invites a deep dependence upon, and a true relationship with the Holy Spirit that will greatly impact our dealings with the watching world. 

~ Vatreisha Nyemba, 2024 Writing Fellow

What could the scattered body of the church look like if we embrace the wholeness of God and release our staunch traditional frames of what defines beauty? The Comforter and Helper is well able to lead and guide if invited to do so. Share on X

Wholeness and Beauty in Diverse Expressions of the Church

Something deep in all of us yearns for God’s beauty, and we can find it no matter where we are. I have longed for many years to see the immeasurable beauty of God’s people on display within the local church. The local church will better understand who God is when diverse voices are displayed to teach, worship, and create.

At some point in the last five years, I grew weary of pastoring within homogenous church gatherings where people who didn’t look like me came to worship together. Even as a leader within these gatherings, I felt out of place because I needed to possess the social status of many of the congregants, but was not brought up in an affluent neighborhood like them. I did have a similar higher education as these church members and, in some cases, even more, but because it wasn’t from one of the schools they typically admired, it didn’t hold much weight.

I decided to step away from these gatherings and start a more diverse expression of the church within my local context. It would have been hard early on for anyone to see the beauty within these gatherings, given the hodgepodge collection of people gathering within a coffee shop. Our gatherings didn’t possess any sort of fancy worship production, with thousands of worshippers singing praise with raised hands. They didn’t have attractive videos by cool young kids handling the church’s social media account. We are simply a group of people sharing their life experiences filtered through the Bible because of the preached word. And yet, this messy, diverse group has helped me understand beauty and wholeness in a deep way.

Beauty is an attribute of God and an expression of God’s character. We, as Image Bearers of God, can recognize and display beauty. For our group, each person displayed this beauty through honest storytelling and wrestling with the application of the Word of God to issues of race and discrimination, from which wholeness slowly emerged – the type of wholeness that makes each person feel seen, heard, and loved without exception. In truth, this community fulfilled my desire for diversity, similar to the psalmist’s desire in Psalm 27:4, “To behold the beauty of the LORD,” and it has forever changed my understanding of beauty and wholeness.

~ Lamont Hartman, 2024 Writing Fellow

I have longed for many years to see the immeasurable beauty of God's people on display within the local church. The local church will better understand who God is when diverse voices are displayed to teach, worship, and create. Share on X

Beauty and Goodness in the People I am Called to Shepherd

When I look at the community I’ve been called to shepherd, I see beauty and goodness everywhere. I see it in the smiles of the people gathered, in the way their eyes light up when they greet each other. It’s in the conversations in the hallway, as they carefully hold each others’ stories. I see it in the kids who jump in to help with serving coffee and in the people who reach across political or racial lines to grasp hands to pray together. And I see it as I sit with passionate people who are willing to work through relational conflict, the same ones who would jump up to lovingly serve whoever walked through our doors or even those outside our four walls. It is messy and ordinary, beautiful and gritty, joy-filled and holy. 

Perhaps we were never meant to do this perfectly, but to grapple with it faithfully as a community who are willing for the Holy Spirit to move us beyond our personal comforts and desires. 

For years, I’ve had to fight against despair and cynicism, struggling to hold on to the hope that the Church could be all that Jesus prayed for. Perhaps the wholeness and beauty in the life of the Church that’s seemed so elusive was in part due to my own rosy ideals that need to be refined. So for now, I am laying down my own grandiose ideals, trusting in the dream of the One who laid down his own life to prepare the Bride, while I faithfully attune and attend to the life of this particular faith community I am called to.

~ Cheryl You, 2024 Writing Fellow

When I look at the community I’ve been called to shepherd, I see beauty and goodness everywhere. I see it in the way peoples' eyes light up when they greet each other. It is messy and ordinary, joy-filled and holy. Share on X