A little too friendly?

I recently had a "screwtape" moment whilst visiting a church - I was finding most things about it irritating but what I began to realize was that I was probably complicit in the very thing which I was thinking I did not like - so the demons did not win and I started to ask myself what is and should be different about Church and what should be like every other place which we inhabit. Shout we sit and wait for the service with the newspaper and a cup of coffee or is there a specific and proper behavior to that place (I have seen both)?

How about the children whom we welcome into our midst - what are the boundaries, if any which we draw around their behavior. What do we teach them about the sacred and how to handle sacred space and to respect the needs of others in sacred space.

These thoughts banged around in my head for a while and I eventually decided that they were what God was asking me to think about in that place - what is different in our places of holiness? Of course places of holiness can be anywhere but that can turn into an excuse for not cultivating holiness anywhere - so in Church - what does holiness look like and feel like and sound like. What does holiness smell like and taste like?

And the body - we the people - how do we experience that? Do we just take for granted the norms which have been handed to us or do we question why we kneel here or hang a cross there. Do we teach silence or simply maintain the babble of the world in a psuedo-sacred thread of noise within the walls of our churches?

These are simply questions at the beginning of a long conversation. But what irritated me that day was simply so different to my experience of God and Church that I had no easy way to process it - by sitting with the discomfort and allowing the Spirit space to speak I learned that driving wedges into our unity does indeed prevent our growth - but so does our own refusal to own our mission - to enter ever deeper into the holiness of Christ.