At College Church, how does our garden grow?

When I was a kid, one of my favorite places to eat dinner was our car. But it was only fun if we were at the A&W Root Beer Drive Thru Restaurant. You didn’t really drive thru exactly. You parked your car, spoke your order into a box that looked like the tin-sounding speakers at the drive-in movies, and then waited for a waitress or waiter to bring your food. Here’s the thing: the servers wore roller skates. They had trays that would attach to the car window and make a little table where they would put the Papa Burgers, Mama Burgers, Baby Burgers, fries and the frosty mugs of Root Beer. Those frost-covered root beer mugs were ice-cold and delightful in the California summer heat.

As a kid, it didn’t get much better than that for me.

What brought my roller-skating root beer memories to mind was last week’s Friday Night Fun. A group of people spent hours preparing pulled pork, and an assembly line of volunteers brought out the food trays and then lined up to put together the meals in clam shell take out boxes for the STARS Friday Night Fun. The cars pulled into the church parking lot as the clamshell dinners began to pile up. Once the evening prayer was offered over a loudspeaker, people were ready to enjoy their dinners.

Lorraine and I were part of the server delivery crew. We got to roll out the dinners to the people sitting outside their cars.

One thing—we were not roller skating. That would have been a disaster. Just thinking about that makes my bones ache. But we did manage to roll the carts to the parking lot without flipping clamshell meals off the cart and onto the hot asphalt. That was a win for everyone. There were regular and gluten-free options. No icy root beer mugs and no tray contraptions that sat on car windows.

But the light-hearted feeling of fun was there in spades.

Maybe it’s the pandemic we’ve been under, but a particularly enjoyable part of the evening was just seeing people. The food assembly line was a fun crew and we got to catch up a little bit with each other as we built the meals. And then there were the diners. Lorraine was approaching most of the cars and seeing how many meals per car as I wheeled the cart toward the hungry diners. More than once she exclaimed, “Oh Wil, look. It’s Ashley.” Or Tim or another long-time-no-see friend.

People looked happy to see us. There was one young man we served as his buddy at a STARS Family Retreat a few years back. It seemed like I spent several hours with him on an innertube at the lazy river, but I haven’t seen him much since then. He looked the same. It was so nice to reconnect with him and his parents.

And several former Kindergarteners were there with their families, too. Though the adult STARS looked the same, the former Kindergarteners looked more like older siblings of the little children I remembered. They smiled at me. They knew me, but I hesitated. I was remembering younger versions of them. And how they’ve grown.

And then we went into the Commons Kitchen and cleaned up the pots and pans.

A similar kind of thing happened at Sunday’s One Service in that same parking lot. The kids we used to spend time with week after week had moved on and grown up. Wow, is it really you? I wanted to ask several times. In a normal year, they might have stopped by class to say hi or we would have just seen them around church, so the growing wouldn’t have been such a shock. But this year was different. Not so many stopping by to say hello. But on Sunday in the parking lot, we were all truly delighted to see one another.

And then, Cheryce brought the Summer Crew team around and introduced them. Some were new to College Church, some had been born and raised in the church or served on a previous summer team. All of them made the deliberate choice to give themselves to ministry this summer. So I recognized them and affirmed their choice to spend their summer serving our children and pointing them to fun things and Jesus at the same time. Their choice gives them the joy of God using them right now this summer to possibly change the lives of children literally forever.

As the masks come off and we reopen, keep in mind that this isn't a summer or fall like usual. But in this season of reopening, God will use us to tend and care for his church. May it also be a season of repentance and renewal.

We grow together when we stay connected to other people. We grow together when we pray for one another. We grow together when we dare to serve even in the mundane we think no one wants to do, and sometimes it is in the most mundane of all actions that we meet someone new and discover a friend serving pulled pork sandwiches next to us. We grow when we let Jesus wash our feet and all of us. We grow when we see the best and most reliable friend ever—the man who served us all and took our sins and failures and died an unjust totally just death on the cross and rose from dead. He came to serve, not be served. So should we. We grow like the vine and the branches together.

Listen for what the Spirit is asking you to do.

Go and get the donkey.
Cast your nets on the other side of the boat.
His name is John.
Do whatever he tells you. Fill the jars with water.

Let’s get growing.