What Happens When a Community Stays

I've been thinking about a conversation I had in the parish hall a while back.

It was after the 10:30. Most people had cleared out. I was standing there with a cup of coffee, the way you do when you're not quite ready to let Sunday go, talking with someone who'd been coming to Sts. MM&M for a few months.

She told me she hadn't been looking for a church when she found us. She'd been looking for a place to breathe. She'd walked in one Sunday not entirely sure why — something made her turn into the parking lot, she said, and she just went with it. Somebody handed her coffee. Sat near her. Didn't pepper her with questions or hand her a visitor card or make her feel like a project.

She kept coming back. Not because she had everything figured out. Because whatever was happening here was the most real thing she'd touched in a long time.

And somewhere in those weeks — in the liturgy, in a conversation after service, in a Sunday morning where English and Spanish were woven into the same prayer — something shifted. A name arrived for what she'd been feeling.

She said: I think I'd been carrying it for years. I just didn't know what to call it.

I've sat with that a lot since then.

Because I think that's actually what we're doing here — and I mean that in the most ordinary, unglamorous sense. Not a program. Not an outreach strategy. Just people staying long enough for other people to find the name.

That's harder than it sounds. Staying is harder than starting. Starting has energy and momentum. Staying is what you do on the Sundays when you're tired, when the meeting ran long, when you wonder if any of it is making a difference. Staying is what you do when someone walks in for the third week in a row and still seems closed off and you just... keep showing up anyway.

Staying is the thing.

This Sunday's readings put Jeremiah front and center. And I keep coming back to him.

He tried to quit. That's the part we don't talk about enough. He made an actual decision — I will not speak in God's name anymore. The cost is too high. The mockery has gone on too long. I'm done.

And then he writes: within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

He cannot.

That word — cannot — is the most honest thing in the passage. Not he won't. Not he's choosing not to. He genuinely cannot stop. Something placed in him refuses to go quiet no matter how much he wants it to.

I think about the people in this congregation who know that feeling. Who have tried, in their own way, to step back — and found themselves showing up anyway. Who are tired and still here. Who wonder sometimes if it's worth it and keep coming back before they've answered the question.

That's a fire that doesn't belong to you, burning anyway.

Here's what I want to say to the person reading this who has been the one staying:

Thank you isn't big enough. But also — I want you to know what your staying actually does.

It creates space for someone else's name to arrive.

The woman I talked with in the parish hall didn't find God through an event or a program or a particularly brilliant sermon. She found God because someone handed her coffee and sat with her and didn't ask too many questions. Because the community around her just kept being itself — week after week — until something in her that had been locked up for years finally had room to open.

That's everything.

Jesus says in Matthew's gospel that not one sparrow falls apart from the Father. He's not promising the sparrows won't fall. He's saying the falling doesn't happen somewhere God isn't.

I think about that when I think about the people who walk through our doors carrying weight they haven't named yet. God is already in them. Already present in whatever brought them to that parking lot on that particular Sunday. We're not introducing people to a God who was absent before they arrived. We're just staying long enough — being present enough — for what was already there to become visible.

Nobody taught me to expect this kind of ministry. Less dramatic. More patient. Less about what we do and more about whether we stay.

The coffee hour conversation I mentioned — it stayed with me long enough that I tried to write my way into it. What it felt like from the inside. What this community does without always knowing it's doing it.

I'm not sure I got all the way there. But I got close enough to know that what happens in that parish hall on a Sunday morning, over bad coffee and good company, is not a small thing.

It is, I think, exactly what the church is for.

The staying. The sitting with. The willingness to be present long enough for someone else's name to come.

That's the fire in our bones.

And it will not go out.