Every congregation has one. The person whose handshake lasts too long, whose prayer requests never end, whose theology is slightly off and whose volume is reliably high. You see them across the lobby and you adjust your route. We do not say it aloud, but we treat the gathered church as if it were a room we get to curate, and that person is the one we would edit out.
This instinct is worth examining, because it reveals what we secretly believe the church is for. We come, often, to be fed and encouraged among people we find agreeable. We want fellowship that flatters. But the New Testament keeps describing the church with a word that ruins this fantasy: family. And the thing about family is that you do not assemble it. It is given to you, complete with the relatives you would never have selected.
The person you dread is not an obstacle to the gathering. They may be the whole point of it. It is easy to love the people who are easy to love; the pagans manage that much. The gathered church exists, in part, to put you in a room with someone you cannot click away, and to teach you, slowly and against your preference, to call them brother.
Consider that you are almost certainly someone else’s difficult person. There is a pew that adjusts its route when it sees you coming. The same grace you want extended to your own oddities is the grace you are being asked to extend across the aisle. We are all the uncomfortable seatmate to somebody.
This is the unglamorous work that worship makes possible. You sing beside them, and the song does not check whether you find them agreeable. You take the bread from the same loaf, and the loaf does not sort the congregation into tolerable and intolerable. Communion is a quiet announcement that you belong to these particular people, the irritating ones included, because Christ chose to belong to all of you.
So this upcoming Sunday, do not adjust your route. Sit down next to the one you dread. You will not enjoy it, at first. But you may find that the kingdom is being built precisely there, in the small, costly decision to stay in the room with the family you did not choose, and to love them anyway.