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“Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return. (1)”

Representing the flavor of a faith community through the use of a few words on a web site is a daunting task. None that I can think of easily express our struggle to be a people of robust faith in Jesus Christ in the midst of all that challenges belief for us personally and coming from our society. We chose the name “wits end” (see Psalms 107:27), in no small part because of how often we’re there as a community living under the gentle hand of God’s severe mercy. We believe that he brings storms into our lives so that we may learn to cling to him in ways we’ve not yet even dreamed of. We appreciate Annie Dillard’s remarks here because there is an extent to which we are the ones with the chemistry sets who have no idea what we are doing, let alone believe, about who God is or what’s possible in relationship with Him. But here is where we live, trusting that his kind wrath and wild tenderness will call us to each other and to our broken world as we journey our way across the seas to one day reach the undying land where His face brings light to all things now dark.

You would be crazy to join us. And you would be crazy not to.

So prays,

Rob Gillgrist

Founding Pastor

—(1) Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.