Sunday, October 25, 2026
Sunday Reflection: How do you feel coming out of church?
I recently came out of church feeling joy. It was fantastic.
It was also too rare. If church is church, we should feel something emotional when we leave. After all, if we go there to encounter Christ, it should be something like when people left an encounter with him. Sometimes they were angry (when Jesus heals a paralytic in Mark 2), or sad (the rich young ruler in Matthew 19), or joyful (the blind man healed at Jericho in Luke 18), or confused (the encounter with Nicodemus in John 3).
But... they never walked away saying "that was ok," or "do you think there will be a line at Luby's?"
Churches suffer from a crisis of timidity, and too often a sense that a church's chief purpose is to affirm the person we were when we walked in. It is called to something more than that-- hard as it is to accomplish.
