Tag Archives: Fellowship

Gathering

December 19, 2025 Tom Vander Well Leave a comment

But you are to seek the place the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his Name there for his dwelling. To that place you must go…
Deuteronomy 12:5 (NIV)

A few weeks ago I was working on a personal project assembling photographs of Wendy and me through the years. A little something for our 20th wedding anniversary on New Year’s Eve. As I was going through the photos I laughed when I got to the Covid years. I let my hair grow during the pandemic. It was the longest it had ever been in my life. Oh, the ways that the pandemic lock downs changed our lives. So many rhythms of life were interrupted.

One of those rhythm interruptions was certainly weekly gatherings for worship. Everything moved online for a while, and I will confess that there was something novel and enjoyable about cuddling in on the couch with Wendy in our pajamas to watch worship online. I know I was not alone. I observed that some people never returned to physical gathering.

This came to mind this morning as I meditated on today’s chapter. For eleven chapters Moses has been teaching Israel how to remember. Today, he teaches them how to desire. The mantra of “remember” has been his constant refrain. In today’s chapter, Moses shifts his gaze to the future.

Someday, when the Hebrews have taken possession of the land and settled down, God will name the place where they are to bring all of the prescribed sacrifices and offerings. The chapter communicates three important concepts for their spiritual health.

First, they are to rid the land of other gods and their forms of worship. Why? These other religions were appetite indulgence masquerading as religion—desire without discipline, pleasure without protection. God even calls out their practice of child sacrifice.

“This is not who I am. This is not who you are.”

Second, God prescribes centralized worship. The traveling tent temple known as the Tabernacle has been with them for forty years as they wandered. The Tabernacle was always at the center of their camp. Someday, Moses says, God will name a place in the land for a permanent location for His name.

Third, God makes a distinction between daily appetites and sacred offering. You may eat meat freely wherever you live—but sacrifice belongs only in God’s chosen place. Appetite is allowed. Worship is consecrated. Desire is honored—but not deified and indulged in unhealthy ways.

God’s prescription isn’t prudish. It’s ordered. It is God’s invitation to learn how to desire rightly, how to worship with our whole bodies without letting our appetites run the show. God doesn’t outlaw pleasure – in fact He created it and celebrates it. He shuns exploitation, however. Holiness protects from the unhealthy consequences of appetites run amok. It shields bodies from being used in the name of spirituality.

The prescriptive rhythm that I see in today’s chapter is God’s desire for gathering. You can have your daily life at home, but I want you to gather together with me and your people at a central location. We are one. We need one another. The entire Great Story leads to one final and eternal gathering of God and His people in one City. Jesus said He was going to prepare that place and would return to gathering everyone there.

After Jesus ascension to begin those preparations, God sent His Holy Spirit to indwell those who believe and receive. God’s presence shifts from tent to temple to the bodies of believers. My body is God’s Temple, His Spirit dwelling within me.

It’s tempting to think, therefore, that worship can be centralized wherever I happen to be. After all, I discovered during Covid that sitting on the couch in my pajamas is quite comfortable and enjoyable. Bedside Baptist. Pillowcase Presbyterian. Lounge Chair Lutheran. Recliner Reformed. I kinda like the ring of all of them.

Please don’t read what I’m not writing. I’m grateful for technology that allows people who are shut-in to feel like they are a part of things from afar in real time. That is, however, different than me choosing to do so because it’s easy, comfortable, and requires little or nothing from me. I observed during the pandemic that this can easily become a return to appetite indulgence wrapped in a blanket of spirituality.

Jesus gathered His followers around the table. Even when He sent them out on missions He sent them in twos, never alone. Then, He always had them return. They gathered. They shared a meal. They broke bread together. They passed a cup. They sang together. They prayed together. Being alone has never been God’s paradigm. Gathering and doing Life and Spirit together has always been the prescription and the plan from tent to temple to table.

On Sunday Wendy and I will join our own local gathering of Jesus’ followers as we do pretty much every week. Yes, we will sing, we will pray, and we will follow an ordered form of worship. But that’s just the surface motions. They are good, instructive, and beneficial. It’s what really happens in the gathering over the weeks and months and years that is where the good stuff happens. These are our people. We know names and stories. They know ours. We do life together. We walk through life’s struggles. We support one another, encourage one another, and serve one another. We break the bread. We pass the cup.

Each week becomes a communion of Life and Spirit—something that only happens when bodies gather, voices rise, and stories intertwine.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

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Uncategorized

Community

November 30, 2023 Tom Vander Well Leave a comment

“All the neighbors were filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things.”
Luke 1:65 (NIV)

The last few nights, Wendy and I have visited one of our local eating establishments. It’s always enjoyable to eat out, but living in a small town makes it a bit different experience. You tend to know people. You not only know people but you tend to know their stories. People stop and have conversation. It’s a communal experience.

I get that small town life isn’t for every one. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Community has become one of the things I have grown to value most on this earthly journey. People walking life’s journey together, sharing experiences and sharing tragedies. I have found there to be a psychological, social, and spiritual strength in being an active part of healthy community.

One of the reasons Wendy and I went out to eat last night is that every Wednesday night we allow our house to be used by four small groups of high schoolers and their youth program. Twenty or thirty kids and their adult leaders invade our home for two hours, while we have a date (see featured photo of our front door on Wednesday evenings). As Wendy and I drove home last night from our very sociable dinner and entered the house filled with a cacophony of teen voices, we were filled once again with gratitude for living in community.

As the holidays approach, I thought I’d go back to Luke’s version of Jesus’ story on our chapter-a-day journey. Luke was a doctor, and he was one of the many believers who became a follower of Jesus based on the witness and stories of those who’d been with Jesus and testified to Jesus’ message, miracles, death, and resurrection. Luke decided to thoroughly investigate all of these stories, interview those who were part of the story, and write them down for his friend Theophilus and other believers back in his own home community. Luke became a companion of Paul on his missionary journeys and documented those experiences, as well.

I love Luke’s version of the story because of the fullness he brings. In his opening chapter, it is Luke who fills in the stories of the miraculous birth of John the Baptist, Mary’s account of her angelic visitation and subsequent visit to John the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth who was a relative. A woman who had been childless suddenly gets pregnant in her old age. Her husband, a respected priest in the community, is struck dumb yet claims an angel appeared to him in the Temple and told him this would happen. Mary arrives to add her own angelic experiences and miraculous conception to an already miraculous story.

I found it interesting when Luke the investigator adds, “All the neighbors were filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things.” That’s what happens in a small, close-knit community. Word travels. Stories get shared. People both know and care about other people in their community. Personal events are communally felt. As an investigator and chronicler of these events, Luke is saying that people in that small Judean hill country were still talking about it: Zac and Liz’s miracle boy who became the famous Baptizer. Local boy makes good, then tragically loses his head because of Herod.

Our small town here in Iowa has produced a well-known professional athlete and a rock-star. Everyone in our town knows it. We know their parents and their siblings. People feel a communal connection. They feel part of the story. It was no different for the community in the Judean hill country where Zechariah and Elizabeth lived.

In the quiet this morning, I find myself meditating on living in community. Yes, I’ve known and experienced some of the unhealthy and annoying things that living in a small community of other flawed human beings brings with it. I have, nevertheless, found the positives to far outweigh the negatives. In our post-covid world, I continue to read about the negative consequences created by forced isolation. The psychological affects were felt by everyone from children who couldn’t be with their classmates to elderly individuals who were virtually shut off from any physical contact with their loved ones. It takes a mental and spiritual toll.

I need community. Jesus modeled with his disciples and the entourage of men and women who accompanied Him on His ministry. Luke experienced it as the followers of Jesus in his day met regularly in people’s homes to share meals and share lives. I’m convinced I would find community no matter where I lived. I’d seek it out. I need it for my own mental and spiritual health. But I’m here in a small Iowa town where I’m blessed to have it in abundance.

Today, I’m going to bask in the sheer joy of it.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

Vertical and Horizontal

March 18, 2022 Tom Vander Well 3 Comments

Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.
Hebrews 13:15-16 (NIV)

I began yesterday with coffee and an English muffin at a friend’s office. We chatted about what is going on in each other’s lives. We shared about the challenges we’re facing with family, work, and our bodies that are feeling the natural strains of age. We prayed together. It was a good start to the day.

It was St. Patrick’s Day, so Wendy and I knocked off of work a little early and met friends in the late afternoon for a pint and some Irish music. As the after-work crowds began to swell we were on our way to pick up pizza and retire to their house where we continued sharing life and conversation. Their college-age child was home on Spring Break and we got the whole 411 on life, studies, and relationships at school.

It was a fun day. It was late by the time we returned home.

In today’s final chapter of Hebrews, the author wraps up his letter with more exhortations to the Hebrew followers of Jesus for whom the letter was addressed. Throughout these instructions are more than subtle allusions to the old sacrificial system of Moses that the author has argued was fulfilled by Jesus and is no longer valid or necessary.

In that old system, there were all sorts of ritual religious sacrifices that an individual was expected to make in order to stay in good standing with God. Of course, like all religious rituals, it is possible for a person to go through the motions without there being a heart or life change, and the author has argued that Jesus has provided the once-for-all sacrifice through His death and resurrection.

“So, are there no more sacrifices?” the author hears his readers asking.

Yes, the author answers. The sacrifice of self just as Jesus taught that His followers must take up their own cross in following Him. Jesus’ word picture tells me that I’m supposed to die to myself, to sacrifice myself for God and others. The author provides a picture of this in continuous sacrifices that are both vertical (me to God) and horizontal (me to others). The vertical sacrifice is that I consciously, willfully stay connected to God through offering my praise and prayer (which is simply conversation). The horizontal sacrifice is my goodness and generosity towards others. Not just physical gifts and needs, but also the generosity and goodness of life and spirit through relationships and sharing the life journey together.

Which made me think of my day yesterday. Along my life journey, I’ve experienced that good relationships, the kind that is mutually and spiritually life-giving, require the ongoing generosity of time, conscious thought, intention, energy, vulnerability, and grace. Over time and in every case, every one of those ingredients becomes sacrificial for me as my friends may need more from me at certain times than I can comfortably provide. But the same is true on the other side of the equation. I need them at times and in ways that require their sacrificial generosity.

With Jesus, I can never get around the reality that He emptied Himself, left heaven, came to Earth, and endured the suffering of a horrific death. He sacrificed everything for me. I can ignore that fact. I might allow other thoughts and distractions to drive it from my mind, but it’s always there. What is asked of me in return? To live in a relationship that is essentially no different than my horizontal ones: time, conscious thought, intention, energy, vulnerability, and generosity that comes out in worship, prayer, life, obedience, trust, hope, and perseverance.

I’m grateful this morning for life-giving relationships, both horizontal and vertical.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

Pajama Worship

March 15, 2022 Tom Vander Well Leave a comment

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Hebrews 10:24-25 (NIV)

One of the things that changed for many Jesus followers during the COVID pandemic was our “meeting together.” Our local gathering, like most others, moved to produce weekly worship online. I don’t think I’ll ever forget delivering messages to an empty auditorium and a camera.

Like everything in life, there were both opportunities and challenges with staying home and watching worship online. I confess that it was nice to enjoy a lazy morning sitting on the couch in my pajamas. Likewise, I know a lot of families who took advantage of online church to consciously make it a family event. “When life gives you lemons,” as they say.

Our community has been back in regular meeting mode for a long time, though we’re still broadcasting worship online each week. Data from the Institute for Family Studies revealed that the number of regular attenders is down in every demographic while the number of “never attend” is up by similar percentages. There are a number of factors to this decline. Some have legitimate health concerns and a reason to continue being cautious. There are other reasons, however, including those who simply found that they prefer watching, on their couch, in their pajamas.

I thought about this as I read the author of Hebrews encouragement to “not give up meeting together.” For the author, the decline in regular in-person participation was very different. He is writing to Hebrew believers who had gone back to the Jewish synagogue and the sacrificial system of Moses. It’s why he has written so much, and so passionately, about the old system becoming obsolete as Christ ushered in an entirely new spiritual reality. Some couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the change. They walked away and went back. Old habits die hard.

In the quiet this morning, I find myself mulling over both the opportunities and challenges I’ve experienced in the return to a new “normal.” Since in-person meetings opened back up again, Wendy and I have chosen a couple of times to stay home together and watch online. It was a bit of a sabbath from the routine, and it was good for the soul. We also have loved being able to watch online when we travel or are at the lake, and it’s kept us more connected when we’re away.

At the same time, I have personally found that there’s no substitute for meeting together in person. This is also true in business, as the work world has embraced video meetings as a substitute for in-person meetings. What I’ve observed is that there is so much relationship, connection, and conversation that happens around the meetings themselves. Just this past Sunday I caught up with so many friends who are going through different struggles and circumstances in life. I get to hug them, hear how things are going, and learn how I can pray more specifically for them and their situation.

I thought this morning about every personal interaction and conversation I had with individuals before and after our last meeting together. I made a list in my head, pictured the individuals, and considered what we talked about. I then asked myself if those interactions were beneficial for me, for my life, and my relationships, and whether I would have been missing something had I stayed home and watched on the couch in my pajamas. For me, there’s no doubt about the answer. Those personal interactions are as vital and life-giving as anything that happened within the meeting itself.

Things change, and I’m sure that COVID has changed life in ways that we’ll be sorting out for decades to come. Reading about these changes in the media, I observe that the take is often the way the media enjoys simplifying things into binary choices: good or bad. When it comes to people not returning to in-person worship I find it a “yes, and.” There are both good things and bad things that have resulted in the change. C’est la vie.

As for me, I know that spurring fellow believers on and being spurred on by them, encouraging and being encouraged, and loving and being loved don’t happen in equal measure when I’m sitting on the couch watching in my pajamas.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

“Holy Huddle”

May 13, 2016 Tom Vander Well Leave a comment

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.
1 Corinthians 5:9-10 (NIV)

For my entire life’s journey I have belonged to a local church. I’ve actually belonged to many churches of different sizes and denominational affiliations. One of the patterns of behavior I have noticed among believers is referred to by some as “the holy huddle.”

The “holy huddle” is a group of Jesus’ followers who huddle together in life to the general exclusion of anyone else. The huddle worships together, socializes with one another, spends free time together, gathers on holidays, vacations together, and pretty much keep to themselves.

I have, at different times of life, been part of holy huddles. I get the allure of it and understand why it’s easy to fall comfortably into the pattern. We all like socializing with people with whom we share common thoughts, opinions, and socio-economic status. Followers of Jesus also tend to desire the avoidance of both temptation and conflict. As a young man, hanging out almost exclusively with members of my youth group meant being around an environment of positive peer pressure. That’s not a bad thing.

I’m reminded this morning, however, that the “holy huddle” was never God’s paradigm. Yes, those who follow Jesus are encouraged to meet together regularly. Yes, we need to be in relationship with our fellow believers to encourage, comfort, confess, and build one another up. This is not, however, to the exclusion of those outside our spiritual sphere.

In today’s chapter, Paul makes a very clear distinction that is important for any of us who follow Jesus. When Paul had told the believers in the city of Corinth that they were not to associate with immoral people, he was not talking about non-believers in their community. He was referring specifically to those individuals in their local gathering who claimed to follow Jesus but also considered God’s forgiveness as a license for doing whatever they wanted. These people boasted that they could do whatever they wanted morally because Jesus’ forgiveness covered it all, and they encouraged others to join them in their “freedom.”

This morning I’m reminded that I can’t make a difference in my world if I’m not living in it and fostering relationship with those who are not in my holy huddle. Jesus washed His followers feet and encouraged them to do the same. The word picture is both clear and powerful: “Your whole body is clean,” Jesus said, “but your feet get dirty when you’re out walking in a dusty, dirty world. So, you’ll need to wash each other’s feet on occasion.”

My feet will never be dirty if I confine my journey within the “purity” of my holy huddle.

Chapter-a-Day

The Depth’s in the Details

June 2, 2014 Tom Vander Well 2 Comments

…and Uriah the Hittite.
2 Samuel 23:39 (NIV)

This past weekend was our annual time at the lake with our friends Kevin and Becky. We’ve been walking the journey together for many years and our time together at the lake is always, for us, one of the pinnacles of the summer season. When Kev and Beck are here, the conversation just seems to flow non-stop from one subject to another from early morning until deep into the night’s watch.

With all of the conversation we’ve enjoyed through all of the years, you’d think we would run out of things to talk about. The truth of the matter is that the conversation simply gets deeper, more transparent, and more intimate. Late on Saturday evening, as we sat on the deck under the light of the tiki torches, the four of were led into what I sensed was a God ordained conversation into deeply personal matters. It was a subject we’d touched on multiple times before, but on this evening we dove into details that led to what may very well be a powerfully transformational moment.

I’ve found a parallel experience in reading God’s Message day after day through the years. I can read each day, and even have read through the entirety multiple times, and I keep coming back for more. You’d think it would get old. You’d wonder why I keep reading through it. And yet, it’s a lot like conversation with Kev and Beck: It just gets deeper, more transparent, and more intimate. And sometimes you hit upon a detail that you’ve read before, but it never really registered.

So it was today that I was reading through what seems to most readers a boring list of strange, ancient names thrown into the appendices of David’s biography. This particular list was a list of men who were David’s elite warriors. These warriors were David’s special ops, his SEALs, his Rangers, and his Green Berets. They were the cream of the warrior crop and their exploits were legendary in their day. And, as I’m reading through the list thanking God that most of these names were lost to antiquity, I land upon the final name in the list: Uriah the Hittite.

Uriah the Hittite, the husband of Bathsheba.
Uriah the Hittite, the man David tried to deceive to cover up his adultery.
Uriah the Hittite, whom David conspired to murder to avoid public shame.
Uriah the Hittite, whose own general betrayed him on the kings orders.

When I read through the story of David and Bathsheba, Uriah has always been a bit of a supporting cast member. You don’t give him a lot of thought. Somehow, the realization that Uriah was part of David’s “Mighty Men,” makes David’s conspiracy all the more damnable. Uriah was not a schmuck. He was well known to David. They’d fought together. Uriah had risked his life for David. He was one of the best. And David was willing to consider his own man as expendable, collateral damage in his cover-up.

Sometimes the real story is in the details. Even as human beings sharing life together, what makes our community and conversation transformational is in the depth and detail of our sharing. Today, I’m thinking about people who appear to plod through life’s journey on broad super highways of bland generalities and surface conversations, zipping by on cruise control but never moving closer to real relationships and transformational conversations. Today, I’m thankful for our good companions on this sojourn who navigate with us the rustic and rutty back roads of soul. It is difficult and slow-going, for sure, but ultimately I’ve found that it leads to places of increasing depth, meaning and intimacy that many, tragically, may never see.