The local church that we attend, Faith Community, San Diego, is doing some remodeling after many decades with basically the same decor and site layout. It’s not that the superficiality of fashion is greatly important, but safety and clean upgrades are meaningful to those who gather to worship in a fellowship that highlights the faces of those around us as we look to Jesus for His sustenance.

One of the things that a lot of people seem agreed upon is the necessity of the replacement of the lights in the sanctuary. They are looking a somewhat rickety after their 30 years or so of luminous travail! Worship and media will be enhanced by an improved design that incorporates better optics and a positioning that lights-up all the areas where ministry can take place.

But as I think about the changes, something about the old lights has touched my heart. Each one is a kind of a simple chandelier with a few cylindrical golden glass tubes coming off the ironwork, with a cross at the bottom. Many people have found Jesus under this glow, we have sung and cried, laughed and known silence, been healed and held in prayer, and we have wonderfully told the stories of our testimonies beneath the hard-working little lamps, placed a bit too high in the vaulted ceiling.

I wasn’t trying to be sentimental, but the lights made me think about what I really love about our church. And that is this: That it is the people-lights in our church that don’t respect a wall, or the height of a ceiling, or the design of the light cylinder, that makes my heart race to be together with these people of God each week.

They cast their beams into the city that we inhabit every day. We don’t need either rickety or elegant fixtures to spread abroad the love of Christ from a street corner. We need Jesus’ words rising from our hearts with the understanding that comes from Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” The real lights of the Church will penetrate, with a fervent passion, the streets where we live--where people long for a break in the unrelenting darkness. We must be a people that bring the healing warmth of light to the open wounds of the brokenness in the darkest places of the city--far from the hospitality of our well-positioned lamps in a building called the church.

In Daniel 2:22 it is said of the Lord: “It is He who reveals the profound and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, And the light dwells with Him.”

The darkness alive in the everyday world of the city is something that I cannot fully know, but the Lord does, and He takes us into the places of hidden things to redeem them by the Light that always dwells with Him as He accompanies us.

We don’t yet have a new design for our lamps at the church building, but I thought that I might submit for consideration such a one as the photo I’ve posted. This way we could constantly remember the brokenhearted with a light appropriate to the streets, and alleys, and dumpsters, and the evil that can lurk there, and we would know that the wattage necessary to reveal the Light in such darkness is always that of the supernatural Light of the Sun of Righteousness.