Aliya’s story: My church was Hope Kingsburg

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about telling this story. There are a lot of emotions around what’s happened to my church, be it sadness, anger, excitement or any other myriad of feelings that come with such upheaval. 

In a few words, the story is this: After 60-odd years of being a church, Hope Kingsburg Mennonite Brethren Church (Kingsburg, California) is ending its time and becoming a campus of Neighborhood Church (Visalia, California). 

It’s not a new story. A lot of churches have done the same thing, but when it’s happening to your own church, it’s such a heavy and wounding process. 

I’ve grown up in this church, as have my mom and my grandpa before me. I can walk into it on a Sunday morning and recognize every face. It’s comforting to know that this community has been around for so long and that I carry in me a long family legacy with deep roots. 

I’ve pulled out my roots a bit by moving away to college, but I always have my church family to return to. Growing up in a Mennonite Brethren community so deeply grounded in the way things have always been done, I have always felt loved by and close to my church. 

The body of Christ at Hope Kingsburg has always loved its members so well. These past weeks and months of remembering have shown me how much the church has done for its community. 

Despite all this, looking back on my life in the church, a lot of it appears to be stagnant or suffocated. The rhythms and routines of a Sunday morning have in recent years become lifelines for us as God has been beckoning us to something different. 

Some people are angry that we’re moving into a different type of worship. While a lot of us are grieving this change in a healthy way, drawing closer to God as the root of our identity and then coming together to worship, I see a lot of people clinging fast to their lifetime friends and dreading the addition of strangers to our gatherings and the absence of hymns from our Sunday mornings. They’ve dug their roots into the people they’ve done life with, and they cling tightly to them. 

My church family fears that we will lose our collective sense of self when we lose our independence as our church. But our church doesn’t belong to us anymore: We are presented with a beautiful opportunity to cast off the burden of our own will and take on the light, easy burden of God’s will. We don’t have to hold our committees and traditions so tightly in clenched fists; we can surrender them joyfully knowing they’re in good and loving hands. 

I keep hearing stories of churches struggling with change. As a college student, I’m at a point in my life where everything is uncertain. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live for so long in one place and in one way like my family has and face such a fundamental change. We’ve had one identity as a church for so long that I think the core problem we face now is an identity problem: Who are we when we don’t get to decide who we are?

This transition is a difficult and often frustrating process. The limbo of waiting feels spiritually dry and desolate. I understand this all too well. I spent my first year of college diving deeply and growing so much in my faith, and then I came home and worked in a fruit stand all summer. 

Sitting alone and staring at my nectarines for four months, I questioned why God had me in a place where I felt like I couldn’t hear him. I had no idea what God wanted from me; I felt like every time I opened my Bible, I came up empty. My God is a God of light. Why does he put us in times of such shadows? 

I look back on my summer and I see that my time of loneliness opened my eyes to how spiritually rich my time at school is. I have an increased eye for how God moves in the everyday that I hope to develop in the rest of my time at school. 

My hope for my church is that we can look back on this dry, desolate transitional period and praise God for how much deeper he’s drawn us into his heart. His way is one that will lead us into rest, and all we have to do is joyfully let him take the reins. 

I pray the same prayer for my church that Paul prayed centuries ago for the Ephesians: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love; may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17b–19). 

My prayer for my church is that we let go of our need for control and learn to root our identity fully in God. The love that we are called to live in is the same love that led Jesus to joyfully give up his very being for us—it is a love that surpasses knowledge, that welcomes strangers and changes, and a new way of worshipping. 

My church family loves so well. I pray that unique, tightly bonded love will carry over into our future. I hope that we will continue to offer what we have to our community and win hearts for Christ.

Aliya Ayers

Aliya Ayers is a sophomore English student at Biola University. She is from Kingsburg, California, and attends Hope Kingsburg MB, soon to be Neighborhood Church, Kingsburg campus.