Is Attendance Enough?

 

At the outset, I need to tell you that I received much of the inspiration for this thought from something written by Joshua Hartswigsen, minister of the 151^st Street Church of Christ in Olathe, Kansas.  On this the last day of 2020, many of us in Christian ministry look back on the year with frustration, and look ahead to 2021 with concern.  Why frustration?  Why concern? 

The frustration comes from being unable, due to safety and health restrictions, to have normal congregate worship services, classes, fellowships, small groups, and so on.  These kinds of activities are planned specifically to provide opportunity for the church family to gather together, renew friendships, develop relationships, and strengthen each other. 

The concern comes from the fact that when meeting restrictions are lifted, we know we will lose a good percentage of those who had been regular participants in these activities.  There will be many who will have found something else to occupy their time and energy during the times that normally had been set aside for group meetings of the church family. 

Barna research did a study on this very issue.  I won’t go into a lot of the detail on how they conducted the research.  The results were that about 30% of those who consider themselves to be practicing Christians and who agree strongly that faith is very important in their lives, did not attend services if their church continued to hold services, and furthermore did not take advantage of any church services that were on the Internet, either from their own congregation or from another.  They essentially “dropped out” of church during the time of COVID in 2020.  Now, what Barna did not know was whether or not these families conducted their own worship services at home or with other families.  It’s entirely possible that some did. 

But is attendance or viewing services on line a good measure of the faithfulness of a Christian?  We know the Bible has a clear message about the importance of corporate worship and meeting together.  I wonder, though, if we need to take a better look at the assumptions and beliefs we have about what it means to be a Christian. 

Does being a Christian consist of regular church attendance, participation in Bible classes and small groups, and the occasional fellowship meal?  Have we reduced what it means to be a Christian to a set of activities or boxes to be checked off? 

Being a Christian is much more than checking off attendance and participation boxes.  To be a Christian is to commit oneself to a lifestyle that mirrors the life of Jesus Christ.  To be a Christian is to first love the Lord God with all of one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Further, Christian living embraces discipleship, humility, grace, forgiveness, patience, temperance, kindness, joy, hope, fellowship…in other words, puts to practice loving one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. 

Perhaps we as church leaders have failed to properly teach and lead by example those in our charge.  Perhaps all too often, we have emphasized checking off participation boxes rather than encouraging our members to emulate Jesus Christ.  After all, it’s easier to check things off of a list than it is to do the hard work of living as Jesus lived. 

While we in church leadership are rightly frustrated by the restrictions of the pandemic, and while we also are concerned about those who have dropped out of any church experience this year, we also need to take a good look at how we have presented the idea of “church” to our flocks.  Do we present attendance and participation as the end-all and be-all of what it means to be a Christian?  Or do we, without diminishing the importance of fellowship and participation, teach, practice, and exemplify love for God and love for one-another? 

2021, hopefully, will be a year of renewal for the church, and an encouragement for Christians everywhere to mirror the life of Jesus as we navigate the unknown future.  Yes, by all means attend services if you can.  Participate in classes, gatherings, and other activities once the restrictions are lifted.  But above all, be a man or woman of grace, humility, and kindness…one who loves the Lord God with all of your being and loves others as you love yourself.

Christmas Eve Thoughts

 

Today’s thought comes on Christmas Eve, 2020.  I don’t know what your situation is right now, and I don’t know how well you have fared during this extraordinary year.  Perhaps you have been pretty much untouched by the viral pandemic, still have your income, and all is well with you.  On the other hand, you may have had a loved one succumb to the virus, have lost your source of income, are six months behind on your rent, and are wondering whether you will have enough to eat tomorrow.  Or you could find yourself anywhere in between those two scenarios.

My words to you would be different, depending on where you fall on the lifeline.  However, one thing remains the same for everyone, regardless.

This holiday, different from all of the others we celebrate, offers us something that we all desperately need…hope.  Even if you are comfortable now with good health, good income, and good friends, just the fact that you’re human means you also long for some intangibles…things that you can’t see, buy, or touch.  Hope is one of those things.  Not hope in the sense of, “I hope it won’t snow tomorrow,” but hope in the sense of the perception of something greater than oneself that carries with it the promise of a better tomorrow.  For those of us who are Christians, that hope is found in Jesus the Christ.

Greater than ourselves…in fact the very God of the Universe, Jesus Christ embodies the hope that we all so desperately crave.  The promise of forgiveness…renewal…acceptance…love…belonging…assurance…inheritance.  Those things and more, all intangible, but very, very real, are part of the hope that we find in the one whose birth we celebrate during this holiday season.

So, as we gather together at this time in a kind of enforced, distanced way, our thoughts need to be pointed toward the hope of something better…something lasting…something eternally good.  Yes, let’s all hope that 2021 will be a far better year than 2020.  Yes, let’s all pray that healing will come quickly and that those who are in authority make good decisions.  Let’s all pray that civility, humility, and generosity will prevail.  But perhaps the best prayer of all is the one found in one of the last verses of the last book in the Bible…”Amen, come Lord Jesus.”

Successes and Limitations

 Good morning, and welcome to Thursday.  A couple of days ago, the morning at the office began with seeing news reports of the first person in Great Britain to receive the COVID virus vaccine, heralding the beginning of what hopefully will be a slowdown of the spread of this insidious illness.  The day then was punctuated by a shaking and jarring of the office by an earthquake…the epicenter of which was just a few miles away.  Now, I hesitate to make any kind of connection with these two events, and in any case, any connection I might make would be pretty much a figment of my imagination…but let’s pursue this for just a moment.

In what was surely a huge leap forward in the fight against Corona, the human race is beginning the vaccination process that will, in all probability, greatly reduce the chances of contracting this illness.  And even though multiple thousands of people have already received the vaccine, those have all been volunteers in clinical studies to determine the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.  The fact that someone in the general public received the vaccine outside of a clinical study, and that many more will be vaccinated just today, and even more in future days, bodes well for humanity.  It also is a shout-out to those scientists, doctors, and others who have worked tirelessly this past year to bring a safe and effective product to the human race.

On another front, there was an earthquake in the Wichita area a couple of days ago.  Tuesday, just a few minutes before 10am, there was a deep-throated rumbling, accompanied by just a few seconds of minor shaking.  It was over pretty much before anyone had time to process what had happened.  At first, I thought there was an accident at the intersection nearby, or maybe a truck, crane, or some other large equipment had done something unexpected.  But it didn’t take long to realize that it was really a minor earthquake.

Those things have been coming on a rather regular basis for the past few weeks in this area.  I’m not sure of the cause, but they always seem to be over in the eastern part of the county.  And although there was some minor shaking and rumbling, other than a sort of eerie feeling, things quickly got back to normal.

However, there is, I think, a lesson here, and it’s connected with the vaccination of the English lady.  There may be some things we as the human race do well in terms of making life better for us all.  The COVID vaccine, along with many other vaccines, have made it possible to live longer lives in better health than at any time in history.  We have conquered smallpox.  We are working to eradicate other diseases, and our children no longer have to go through the childhood illnesses of mumps, measles, and the like.  Iron lungs are history.

Yet, there are some things over which we have no control, and which remind us of our limitations and inability to control every aspect of life and living.  The earthquake, although minor in nature, was that reminder.  We cannot yet forecast them with any kind of accuracy.  We cannot make them less destructive when they do occur, except to harden our buildings and structures against them.  We have no way to generally prevent them, although we have found that we can reduce their occurrence by limiting our injection of wastes into the earth.  Each earthquake is a sobering reminder that humanity has a long way to go before it can claim to have tamed its environment.  And even if we do manage to learn how to forecast and prevent earthquakes, there will always be something over which we have no control and just have to live with and deal with as it comes.

So, while you are celebrating the coming of the COVID vaccine to the general population, don’t get the smug head thinking that humankind has conquered all.  The moving of the foundations of the earth itself should bring you back into the reality of the fragility of life and our dependence upon a God of mercy and grace…a God who told Job,

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?  Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!  Who stretched a measuring line across it?  On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—“Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb?  Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place,

“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have the gates of death been shown to you?  Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?  Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?  “What is the way to the abode of light?  And where does darkness reside?

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?  What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?   Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?  Can you loosen Orion’s belt?  Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?   Do you know the laws of the heavens?   Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?

So, as we cheer humanity’s successes, let us also understand humanity’s limitations, and give God the

Go your way today and be blessed in the knowledge of God’s providential love and grace.

 

Anne Lamott — Advent

 

Anne Lamott, an American novelist and non-fiction writer, posts an article on Facebook that she wrote several years ago regarding Advent.  She tells of her quest to find within herself the hope of renewal that Advent promises.  She talks of the belief that if we have enough hope and kindness, that will lead to a better world, one person at a time.  And that even though times may be tough and disappointing, in her words, “We stay awake and watch, holding to the belief that God is with us, is close and present, and that we will be healed.”

 She then says that she wants that kind of belief, hope, and patience to wait expectantly.  But that hasn't happened in her life.  She then says, only half-jokingly, “It’s not that I don’t have a lot of faith.  It’s just that I also have a lot of mental problems.  And I want to fix them all, and I want to do that now, or at least by tomorrow afternoon, right after lunch.”

 She says that she then called several pastors and religious people, asking them for the secret to that kind of hope, but found their answers unsatisfactory, to say the least.  Then, somewhat in desperation, she called a Jesuit alcoholic friend of hers, sober now for over 30 years, and said to him, “Tell me a story about Advent. Tell me about people getting well.”  Her friend, Tom, agreed, and told her this story from his early sobriety period that she recounts here.  There are a couple of places in the story where the language is a bit rough, but bear with me and take it all in.  Here's the story.

 In 1976, when he first got sober, Tom was living in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, California, going to the very hip AA meetings there, where there were no fluorescent lights and not too much clapping — or that yahoo-cowboy-hat-in-the-air enthusiasm that you get in L.A., according to sober friends.  And everything was more or less all right in early sobriety, except that Tom felt utterly insane all the time, filled with hostility and fear and self-contempt.  But other than that everything was OK.  Then he got transferred to Los Angeles in the winter, and he did not know a soul.  “It was a nightmare,” he says.  “I was afraid to go into entire areas of L.A., because the only places I knew were the bars.  So I called the cardinal and asked him for the name of anyone he knew in town who was in AA.  And he told me to call this guy Terry.”

Terry, as it turned out, had been sober for five years at that point, so Tom thought he was God.  They made arrangements to go to a place Terry knew of where alcoholic men gathered that night in the back of the Episcopal Cathedral, right in the heart of downtown L.A. It was Terry’s favorite gathering, full of low-bottom drunks and junkies — people from nearby halfway houses, bikers, jazz musicians. “Plus it’s a men’s stag meeting,” says Tom. “So already I’ve got issues.”

“There I am on my first date with this new friend Terry, who turns out to not be real chatty. He’s clumsy and ill at ease, an introvert with no social skills, but the cardinal has heard that he’s also good with newly sober people.  He asks me how I am, and after a long moment, I say, ‘I’m just scared,’ and he nods and says gently, ‘That’s right.’

“I don’t know a thing about him, Tom says.  I don’t what sort of things he thinks about or who he votes for, but he takes me to this place near skid row, where all these awful looking alkies are hanging out in the yard, waiting for something to start.  I’m tense, I’m just staring.  It’s a whole bunch of strangers, all of them clearly very damaged — working their way back slowly, but not yet real attractive.  The sober people I've met back in Berkeley all seem like David Niven in comparison, and I’m thinking, Who are these people?  Why am I here?  All my scanners are out. It’s all I can do not to bolt.

“Ten minutes before we began, Terry directs me to a long flight of stairs heading up to a windowless, airless room.  I started walking up the stairs, with my jaws clenched, muttering to myself tensely just like the guy in front of me, this guy my own age who was stumbling and numb and maybe not yet quite on his first day of sobriety.

“The only things getting me up the stairs are Terry, behind me, pushing me forward every so often, and this conviction I have that this is as bad as it’s ever going to be — that if I can get through this, I can get through anything.  Well.  All of a sudden, the man in front of me soils himself.  I guess his sphincter just relaxes.  Feces runs down onto his shoes, but he keeps walking.  He doesn’t seem to notice.

However, I do.

I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose, and my eyes bugged out but I couldn’t get out of line because of the crush behind me.  And so, holding my breath, I walk into the windowless, airless room.

“Now, this meeting has a person who stands at the door saying hello.  And this one is a biker with a shaved head, a huge gut and a Volga boatman mustache.  He gets one whiff of the man with feces on his shoes and throws up all over everything.

“You’ve seen the Edvard Munch painting of the guy on the bridge screaming, right?  That’s me.  That’s what I look like.  But Terry enters the room right behind me.  And there’s total pandemonium, no one knows what to do.  The man who had soiled himself stumbles forward and plops down in a chair.  A fan blows the terrible smells of feces and vomit around the windowless room,  and people start smoking just to fill in the spaces in the air.  Finally Terry reaches out to the greeter, who had thrown up.  He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Wow,” he says. “Looks like you got caught by surprise.”  And they both laugh.  Right?  Terry asks a couple of guys to go with him down the hall to the men’s room, and help this guy get cleaned up.  There are towels there, and kitty litter, to absorb various effluvia, because this is a meeting where people show up routinely in pretty bad shape.  So while they’re helping the greeter get cleaned up, other people start cleaning up the meeting room. Then Terry approaches the other man.

“My friend,” he says gently, “it looks like you have trouble here.”

The man just nods.

“We’re going to give you a hand,” says Terry.

“So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower.  They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits.  They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect.  I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there.  Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them.  No one was pretending he wasn’t covered with feces, but there was a real sense of kinship.  And that is what we mean when we talk about grace.

“Back at the meeting at the Episcopal Cathedral, Tom said, I was just totally amazed by what I had seen.  And I had a little shred of hope.  I couldn’t have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken.  And that this would happen quickly and efficiently.  But I was wrong.  So I’ll tell you, Anne, what the promise of Advent is:  It is that God has set up a tent among us and will help us work together on our stuff. And this will only happen over time.

This is Jay again.  In the Advent story, WE are the ones who have thrown up all over ourselves.  WE are the stumbling ones covered in feces.  And God is the one who, like Terry, reaches out to us, loves us, touches us, cleans us up, and adopts us into His family.

 And, according to Linus of the Peanuts gang, "That's what Christmas is all about."