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I have one of those flip calendars that sits on the desk in my office at church. Do you know the ones I’m talking about? They stand upright and have a spiral binding at the top. So, all you have to do each day is flip to the next page, and you’ll come to the next date in the calendar. Most of them have funny pictures or inspirational sayings or verses from Scripture.

Mine has Peanuts comic strips, which—if you know me—is kind of perfect. It was given to me this past Christmas by some friends of mine from church after they heard me mention how much I love “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in my sermon on Christmas Eve. They thought I would appreciate it, which I did very much!

Several weeks ago, I came across a comic strip featuring two characters—Charlie Brown and his sister, Sally. In the first frame of the comic, Sally walks up to Charlie Brown and asks him, “What is it you wanted to show me?”

Charlie Brown holds up his hands in front of Sally, with fingers clasped together, and says, “Just watch my hands.” Then, he shares with her a familiar nursery rhyme that many of us probably learned when we were children in Sunday school, along with the hand motions that go with it.

“Here’s the church,” Charlie Brown says, “and here’s the steeple. Open the door, and here’s all the people!”

Sally smiles at Charlie Brown and says, “That’s very clever…” And, as she begins to walk away from her brother, she starts doing the same thing he did, clasping her fingers together and practicing the rhyme. Then, she turns back and says to Charlie Brown, “I appreciate having a smart big brother who can teach me all these things.”

Then, in the last frame of the comic, Charlie Brown turns and looks at Snoopy and asks, “Do you think maybe you could help me get my fingers apart?”

It brought a smile to my face reading that comic strip. Because I, too, learned that same rhyme when I was much younger. And, to be honest, it was a good example of what I always thought church was as a young child—a group of people who get together once (or maybe twice) a week to pray with each other and worship God.

Now that I’m older (and maybe a little wiser), I’ve come to understand that church is so much more than just getting together for an hour or two on Sunday mornings once a week (as if it’s just another thing to mark off on our to-do list). Church is the body of the faithful, who are called together for the purpose of carrying out God’s mission in the world.

Part of what we do—a very important part—is gather for worship to offer our prayers and praise to the God who creates, redeems, and sustains us. In our worship, we are comforted in knowing that God is always with us and that God loves us more than we can possibly imagine. But, worship is not about us. It’s about God and what God is doing in us and through us so that we may carry the love of God in Christ with us back out into the world.

As the Church—the Body of Christ—we are called to be faithful in our worship, but we aren’t called to stay inside the walls of the church forever. The place to which we are called as followers of Jesus is beyond the walls of the church building. We are a people who are continuously being sent forth to proclaim—through our words and actions—the Good News of God in Christ so that others may come to know the power of God’s redeeming love at work in their own lives.

The children’s nursery rhyme many of us learned when we were young still rings true. “Here’s the church…and here’s the steeple. Open the door, and here’s all the people!”

But, if I could add one more line, it would be this—words of dismissal we often use in our worship at St. Mary’s—“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

— Rev. Eric Mancil is the rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. He can be reached at rector@stmarysandalusia.org.