You Are Welcome Here

Many Monday mornings find me in the sanctuary picking up things left behind from the previous day’s worship services and rifling through chair backs for trash while I return phone calls. Sometimes I find artwork on coloring pages or messages scribbled in the margins of worship guides. It makes me feel like Carl the high school janitor from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club when he tells a group of teenagers, “I am the eyes and ears of this institution, my friends.”

Recently I found a Welcome card that had been filled out and left in the chair back instead of being placed in the offering plate during a worship service. It was filled out by a guest from out of state…back in March of 2023. Still, I wrote them a much-belated note, where I thanked them for their visit and signed off by saying, “Wherever you are on life’s journey, you are always welcome here.”

That’s part of what we say at the start of most worship services at Friends Congregational Church: “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” It’s important for us to repeat that hospitable phrase for all ears in the sanctuary and those engaging online to hear, because you never know what someone is carrying.

Maybe you’ve been told that you are unworthy of belonging, that who you are is abominable, that you might catch fire if you dare to darken a church’s door. Maybe you’ve been led to believe that the stage of life you find yourself in right now can’t fit in a God-shaped box, that the curiosities and doubts and questions you have about faith and spirituality are blasphemous, that where you are on the course of mortality is a mulligan that will be counted against you on life’s scorecard. No one should have to carry all those antagonistic falsehoods. No one should have to bear the weight of culturally contrived fears that keep us from loving God fully, and loving one another as we love ourselves. For those reasons, I believe it’s not just important, but a matter of salvation to say to a gathering of beautifully imperfect people on any given Sunday morning, “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”

There’s a song by the American singer-songwriter Iris DeMent that I think captures the spirit of those words of welcome. It’s called “Let the Mystery Be.” Some of the lyrics go like this:

Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from

Everybody is worrying ‘bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done

But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me

I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever

And some say you’re gonna come back

Some say you rest in the arms of the Savior if in sinful ways you lack

Some say that they’re coming back in a garden

Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas

I think I’ll just let the mystery be

That song not only makes me think of Jesus; it helps me to see him better, clearer—because Jesus always met people wherever they were in life—no matter who they were or what they’d been through or what they believed—and he loved them. No matter what some folks said, Jesus loved them. He loved them with an unconditional relentlessness love that revealed to the whole world, then, now, and always, what God looks like. I would let go of a lifetime of certainty to carry that.

One day on the youth group’s mission trip to Denver earlier this month, we had lunch at Lakewood United Church of Christ. On the way to the church’s fellowship hall, I noticed a message above the sanctuary doors: “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” It felt liberating to read that, like our group and I weren’t strangers in that church that we had stepped into for the first time, like love was present in that place, like we belonged. What a weight lifted. What a blessed assurance. What a world of difference that simple phrase made. Thanks be to God.