Hi Friends,

Thank you for your responses to last week’s update. Your kindness, your encouragement, your questions… I’m grateful for them all.

As I mentioned, our family has been on a “church tour”. I have been praying consistently for the church of Kansas City for two decades, and I feel a bit chastened to admit that I have never been to one besides my own.

When we took a break in April, we started going to a different church every weekend. We were not “church shopping” as our primary goal, so we didn’t tailor our visits to churches we necessarily imagined ourselves joining.

(Personal side note, when I think about joining another church, planting our family in a new community, it feels overwhelming. Where to start?? But Shawn keeps reminding me We are having fun, babe! We are on tour!)

Yes, we are on tour.

We stood on the rugs of the Orthodox Church as nuns and congregants sang the Bible for two hours and incense burned. We sat in wooden pews surrounded by stained glass taking in rich theology mingled with liturgy. We stood beside old friends we had not seen in a while and prayed for Israel, accompanied by amazing music. We sat in a friendly mega church minutes down the road from us where a hundred people responded to receive Christ after a message on the cross.

There has not been a single church we’ve visited so far where my eyes have not at some point filled with tears at what I was witnessing.

The gospel is alive and well in Kansas City, and the bride of Christ is even more beautiful than I had imagined…

And we are just getting started.

There are many things about this season that have been arduous and unsettling. But like the greenery that somehow finds its way through the crushing rock of a cliff face, there’s also beauty.

Something I hope for my kids in this season is that they’ll remember this church tour. That long after we land, plant, and serve in a congregation, they’ll carry with them the memories of all the Christ-exalting-beauty we’ve seen right in front of us in our own city, church after church after church.

I hope for them that a core memory takes hold in the deepest places of their souls so that no matter where the future takes them—schools, jobs, family—they’ll feel the confidence to walk through the doors of one of any handful of Bible believing churches nearby and know what they’ll find:

Christ. Christ alive in His people, His body.

–Anna

P.S. Some of you mentioned that you have also been on a church tour, or are about to begin one. I want to to encourage those of you who (like I did) feel the pressure to figure out where to land. What if you took a season to just enjoy the body of Christ? Let Jesus be your tour guide—opening your eyes to more of Himself.

Let’s look in the faces of brothers and sisters all across our cities that we didn’t know we had, and just enjoy them and Him.

Let me know what you discover when you do!

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