Reflections on God's Work
Part 12
God is at work. Throughout 2023, the Beacon has featured articles seeking to capture a snapshot of the ways God is working in churches across our conference. We pray that these articles have encouraged your faith and spurred you on to join God in the work He is doing in your local congregation.
~Kelsey Jurkovich, Publication & Literature Committee
Elida Road shoots you straight from Lima to Delphos, past glowing signs for McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Five Guys, Arby’s, Taco Bell, KFC, Chipotle, Panera, Jimmy John’s, Tim Hortons, and Starbucks. If there is no drive-through, there is an app for curbside pickup. There’s no reason to get out of your car. Why would you?
To me, Elida is dissolving in the contactless flow of traffic and money. Houses in the shadow of the Elida water tower (like mine) receive about half of their mail addressed to Lima, and I suspect that the percentage of “Lima” mail is increasing. In 100 years, if Elida endures in the popular imagination, it will probably be as Elida Road, swollen to six lanes, but still a reliable shot from Lima to Delphos.
If Elida Road is a CrunchWrap Supreme...then Pike is Wilma Hofstetter’s taco soup...
Elida Road is the “New Delphos Pike.” Yet the Old Delphos Pike is still around. It’s barely two lanes wide. It doesn’t shoot anybody anywhere. It curves through corn and soybeans, progress interrupted by the creative placement of yield signs and the unexpected crossing of barn cats. It wends toward the Pike meetinghouse, which sits, white and unadorned, beside the Old Delphos Pike, much as it has for nearly 150 years. There’s a letterboard sign on the corner, which I haven’t updated in nine months. Why would I? “The time has come! The kingdom of God has come near! Repent and believe the Good News!”
If Elida Road is a CrunchWrap Supreme, eaten in haste behind the wheel of a Kia Rio, then Pike is Wilma Hofstetter’s taco soup, served out of a Crock-Pot and eaten around tables in the church basement. If Elida Road is a straight shot from Lima to Delphos in 20 minutes of autopilot, then Pike is five months of Thursday nights with Ben Baldauf, tracing the weave of God’s Word to the prophet Zechariah.
We do not champion the slow for slowness’s sake or the small for smallness’s sake. The wood paneling and orange upholstery in our sanctuary do not make us morally superior. To be sure, we have taken the road less traveled, but this is no reason to assume that we are on the correct road. No, our assurance has everything to do with Jesus. So does our attachment to this congregation, to this way of being the Church.
In Christ, we have God’s unshakeable grace, which alone makes it sane and truly possible for us to rest. How else could we take the winding road of discipleship? How else would we have time to break for barn cats, if we did not have eternity? Jesus has favored us with a new way of life, which cannot be lived all alone in the car, but which flourishes around bowls of soup in church basements. We are close enough to know when there are feet to wash, and this is the work of God.
In a world increasingly designed for cars, not humans, is it really so strange to believe that people are locked into their loneliness from the inside? Or that people need a compelling reason to come out—a reason that the world cannot give? If they were to step out, would they not need a place to live together, as humans among humans? Christ has become, for us, such a reason; Christ has made Pike such a place. We are the work of God.
