On the final day of kindergarten last year, we had a dress rehearsal for our year-end assembly at a local Baptist church.

As I led my students down the hall, the smallest boy in the class, Miles, looked around and asked me, “What is this place?”

“This is a church,” I told him.

Miles furrowed his brow and rolled the strange word around in his mouth. “What is… church?”

Here’s another story: several years ago, I drove a girl named Olivia home from school. We were blasting music through the car speakers, listening to a Broadway tune that mentioned David and Goliath.

When the song finished, she leaned forward.

“David and Goliath?” she asked. “Who are they?”

In this secular age, I’m not surprised that young people find the great biblical stories and the very concept of church foreign. The separation of church and state is fundamental to the foundation of the United States. However, in stripping away any vestiges of faith from our everyday lexicon and literature, many children and families no longer have any knowledge of or connection to religion.

What is church? I’ve thought about Miles’ question a thousand times since. Church and religion are so woven into the fabric of my life, I cannot separate them out. To ask “What is church?”, a person might as well be asking me, “What is water?” Which is to say, I don’t come at this question from an objective point of view.

I was at an evensong service in the storied Westminster Abbey in London just a few weeks ago. As the choir sang the Magnificat, it struck me: I love church. Be it an Anglican service on Friday evening or a Methodist candlelight service on Christmas Eve, I believe. I believe in the devotion that Jews pay by walking to the synagogue on the Sabbath. I admire my Hindu friends who observe their own strict dietary laws and the Muslims who face toward Mecca and pray five time a day.

I believe that these gatherings in which we praise something outside of ourselves, take a reckoning before God, and make a pledge, however feeble, to do better, is right for our souls. It is the very fabric upon which good societies are built.

What is church? Church is a physical building, walls and pews and overused kitchens and worn hymnbooks and multipurpose rooms with accordion dividers. It is century-old stone edifices where poets are buried and queens have been crowned.

Church is a gathering place, to take the sacrament and think about Christ and pray to God. It’s a place of music, sometimes glorious, sometimes as painful as a funeral dirge. Church is a spiritual school.

Church is family, especially when you are far from home. Church is friendship and community. It is chair soccer on Tuesday nights and slogging through the mud at youth camp.

This is also church: spending an entire morning helping someone move. Taking six fillet-o-fish sandwiches to a woman in assisted living because that is all she will eat. Sitting at the bedside of a woman whose body is riddled with Parkinson’s. Bringing salad and cookies for a funeral. Taking a food order from a man so debilitated by diabetes that he can’t get out of his chair.

We all take turns needing and being needed. Church acts as a great safety net to catch those who fall through the cracks.

Church is messy, no matter the congregation or the area of the world. People oversee churches, and people are messy. They make poor choices, not once, but over and over again. They act out of self-interest. Sometimes they have ulterior motives. Sometimes they say spiteful things.

Church can be uncomfortable. It can be people who put on airs and people who judge, who lay bare their own foibles in one breath and proclaim deep devotion in the next. Church is learning to forgive them, and ourselves, and act in faith anyway. It means looking at the history of religion, from the wars and crusades and martyrs and uprisings, and deciding that not everything done in the name of God is truth.

Church is work. It’s a wrestle between God’s desires for us, and our own desires, which are often at odds. We are told to pray on our knees, and cast aside materialism. We’re commanded to feed the widows when we would rather feed ourselves.

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Church is as big as a conference of millions gathered to hear a prophet, and as small as a single verse of scripture, a pinprick of light and truth. Church is a vehicle to bring us home.

This is what I wanted to tell Miles on that day last spring. Every time I try to articulate this, I come up short. What is church? Church is the good news. It’s the greatest story ever told.

And despite the skeptics and detractors, those who blame church for the ills of their lives and the ills of the world, what I know is this: I am a better person with church in my life.

Tiffany Gee Lewis is a freelance journalist and children’s book author. Based in the Pacific Northwest, she and her family are on a year-long sabbatical in Oxford, England.

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