Happy Pentecost !

image from Derek &...

Today in many Christian traditions is Pentecost, a day of celebration for what is though of as the birth of the church.  Quite honestly, as big celebrations at churches go, Pentecost is sorta like Gummo, the quiet Marx brother who everyone forgets.

Most days I would have a very hard time defining what exactly church is. Wikipedia, the source of stuff to know, defines a church as:

an association of people with a common set of religious beliefs, respectively their place of worship. It derives from an old Greek word and is generally used to refer to Christian meanings, though the term is sometimes popularly applied to other religions and/or buildings.

Nowadays, when people use the term church, they usually mean a building, usually run by someone paid to preach & lead worship, often assisted by a paid musician and a paid person to traffic documents & run off "those people".  Or they may mean the institution of faithful people, the large bodies of people & places that commonly are divided into denominations or worship styles or some other empty categorization scheme.

Those definitions serve their purpose, but they do not begin to even scratch the surface of what I mean when I say church.  As an example of truth being found in the oddest places, take a look at this from an anonymous commenter on this marketing blog:

If you look at an open mic session, the "audience" turns up and sometimes, somepeople join in. People start by foot tapping, after a few ales they might pick up the courage to play an instrument, sing along at a table or even grab the mic. The boundary between audience and artist is practically non-existent. They are also playing, improvising and "remixing" copyright free music. Most importantly, you don't have to do anything, just by being there you feel as if you are participating.

I love how the person uses the construct of the word folk - people as the carriers of culture, esp. as representing the composite of social mores, customs, forms of behavior, etc., in a society - to get at how the lines between "performer" and "audience" are  blurred at best, and more likely artificial.

There is a lot of resonance for me in thinking of church along the lines of folk music, as described in Wikipedia:

Folk music, in the most basic sense of the term, is music by and for the common people. The Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary defines it as "music of the common people that has been passed on by memorization or repetition rather than by writing, and has deep roots in its own culture."  According to Webster's dictionary, folk music is the "traditional and typically anonymous music that is an expression of the life of the people in a community". People play and sing together rather than watching others perform.

A tradition passed on by repetition, with roots deep in its indigenous culture, people playing & singing together - that is church for me, no matter where, how or when it takes place.

Growing up, I learn a "folk" song among the common people I was raised near, one that captures my gratitude for church and my greatest hope for what it can be:

They lived not only in ages past,
There are hundreds of thousands still,
The world is bright with the joyous saints
Who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or
In lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
For the saints of God are just folk like me,
And I mean to be one too.

Becky Garrison captures a bit of the joy of being one of these joyous saints: