Showing up for each other

Ruth brought a casserole the week my mother died. I don’t remember what kind it was or even whether I ate it. But I do remember that she knocked on the door on a Tuesday afternoon, handed over a warm dish covered in foil, said “I love you” and left before I could say anything to her.

That was eight years ago. Of all the things people said to me during those weeks, her words are what I still think about most.

There is a particular kind of ministry that isn’t part of any church committee. It doesn’t appear as a line item in the budget or get reported at the annual meeting. It shows up at your door on a Tuesday. It sits with you in a hospital waiting room without trying to explain why any of this is happening. It drives you to an appointment when your car is in the shop and doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Often it’s so quiet and so ordinary that the person doing it would probably be embarrassed to hear it called a ministry.

But that is exactly what it is.

The work that goes unseen

My congregation, St. Andrew Lutheran in Poplar Bluff, Mo., isn’t large. We have maybe 90 people on a good Sunday, a parking lot that floods when it rains hard and a fellowship hall that smells faintly of decades of coffee. What we have in abundance, though, are people like Ruth—people who have somehow absorbed, without anyone having to say it out loud, that showing up for each other is the whole point.

I’ve watched this happen in my church community for my entire adult life, but have only recently begun to understand what I was seeing.

God is at work through ordinary people.

One woman in our congregation, Darlene, has been bringing communion to homebound members for 11 years. She doesn’t call it a ministry. She calls it “visiting.” Every other Thursday she packs a small kit—consecrated bread and wine, a tiny cup, her well-worn copy of the liturgy—and drives to apartments and care homes across our neighborhood.

She sits. She prays. She stays long enough to hear about the grandchildren and the doctor’s appointment and the dream someone had last week. Then she goes home and doesn’t mention it to anyone.

I found this out only because I happened to be at the church office one afternoon when she was picking up the communion supplies.

What Luther might recognize

Martin Luther championed the idea of a “priesthood of all believers.” Depending on how this phrase is deployed, it can sound like a rallying cry or a vague abstraction. But watching Darlene walk out of that church office with her bag, I thought, “This is what the priesthood of believers looks like.” Not vestments. Not a title. A woman with bread and a cup and nowhere more important to be.

Luther insisted that faith was not the exclusive property of clergy or institutions. God is at work in the world through ordinary people doing ordinary things with extraordinary faithfulness. The neighbor who helps. The friend who listens. The person who shows up on a Tuesday with something warm wrapped in foil and doesn’t ask for anything in return.

This is not a lesser form of ministry. It may be the most essential form.

When the church meets you there

A few months after my mother died, I was struggling in the way grief can make you struggle—not dramatically but dully, persistently, like a low fever that won’t break. I was still going to church. I was still going through the motions. Then one Sunday, while everyone else was milling around the coffee table after the service, Harold sat down next to me in a pew and said simply, “How are you really doing?”

I wonder sometimes if the most compelling thing we have to offer the world isn’t a program or strategy but simply this: a promise that when the worst Tuesday of your life arrives, someone will notice.

I don’t know how he knew to ask. I don’t know how he knew that “fine” wasn’t an acceptable answer or that his question was exactly what I needed in that moment. We talked for 40 minutes. He told me about losing his father. He didn’t try to fix anything. He just stayed.

That day, I drove home different. Not healed. But held.

The gospel in the ordinary

The early church, as described in Acts, was not primarily a series of doctrinal statements. It was a community of people who ate together, cared for each other’s needs and made sure that no one among them was left alone in their suffering. The radical thing about that first community wasn’t the theology but the practice. It was the willingness to see each other fully and to keep showing up.

We talk sometimes in our congregations about outreach, about growth, about how to bring more people in. These aren’t bad conversations. Yet I wonder sometimes if the most compelling thing we have to offer the world isn’t a program or strategy but simply this: a promise that when the worst Tuesday of your life arrives, someone will notice. Someone will knock on the door. Someone will sit down in the pew beside you and ask the real question.

Ruth’s casserole didn’t save me. But it told me I wasn’t invisible. In the economy of grace, that turns out to be everything.