Pancakes and Church Community

What can churches learn from sitting around and eating pancakes?

Today I continue my conversation with Tanya Hackney - sailor and author of Leaving the Safe Harbor. Tanya talks about how they found Christian community throughout their boating experience. She also shares her frustrations with the American church's relunctance to foster good community - both inside and outside the walls of the building.

Excerpt

Reuel Sample:
You refer in the book to the living temple. What is the living temple?

Tanya Hackney:
Oh, the I think the definition of the living temple is the the people who love God for in all time and all place. It's a it's a church that exists outside, you know, the physical walls of a building. Ah, it's the temple of our own hearts where we have, you know, put God on the throne and allowed his spirit to to live inside of us and to live through us and to do good through us and you know, the restraint of our own for a lack of a better word, sinfulness and selfish desires that living temple is made of of human beings and we managed to find people everywhere we went. You know, sometimes complete strangers that turned out to be, you know, part of that family and part of that living temple. And that is a powerful testimony of God's love and grace for us that you know, that his people are everywhere and look very different in all shapes and sizes and colors and languages. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to discover, you know, after we left the four walls of a sort of organized religion. And we've kind of adopted what I would call disorganized religion. And we actually discovered something deep and true that we weren't finding inside the building.

Reuel Sample:
That's an interesting I can't let that go. What were you not finding inside the building?