| CROSSING
THE BAR - XVIII Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site.
Terri was still growing in her mother’s womb when her older brother Michael died. He was 3 years old. Because it was getting windy, Michael had been asked by his daddy, who was relaxing in the living room chair after a long day at work where he was head coach at a “Big 10” university, to please go close the screen door in the kitchen - the kind with the glass on the bottom that slid up or down (this time it was down). When Michael reached up for the handle of the screen door, a sudden gust of wind hit the door with a force sufficient to slam it right into Michael. The glass shattered, cutting him so badly that he bled to death despite any and all frantic attempts to save him. Terri’s dad never forgave himself for – in his mind – causing his little boy’s death by being too lazy to close the door himself. Neither did he forgive God, who “commands even the wind and the waves.” I do not know how their Lutheran congregation supported or did not support the family after the funeral, nor do I know whether they were at all active in that church, but I do know that, according to Terri, Michael’s death is the reason that she and her younger sister had never been baptized as Michael and her oldest brother had been. After all, why place your children in the hands of a God such as Michael’s God turned out to be? Michael’s death is also the reason that Terri believes her dad “self-medicated” with booze until he, too, died too young. ** Clee grew up on a ranch in eastern Montana that was pretty far away from everywhere that was anywhere and is, shall we say, a somewhat “odd character.” Though now in his mid-40s, the first time Clee came into the Bull’n Bear he looked so young that when he ordered a Crown and water, I carded him. I remember him saying “you’re kidding me” as he handed me his driver’s license. He was 42. Clee, I learned during his first time at the poker table, had served in the armed forces in the First Gulf War and had been wounded twice by the enemy’s bullets. He understands his experience there to have “cured him of any use for religion.” He also bums cigars during poker games, and then only smokes about half an inch of it and lays it down, which ticks me off since I’m the one from whom he bums. (I know of at least one reader who will understand this…). It was at the poker table that Clee told me he had been sent away to a Catholic parochial school when he was little, all the way through 8th grade, and obviously didn’t hold any love of the memory. It was also at the poker table – just before we sold the Bull’n Bear – that Clee asked me, “So what are you going to do after you sell the bar?” I told him, after some hesitation because I knew it would be foreign to him, that I used to make my living doing concerts in churches, and would now combine that with also doing some speaking and consulting. Clee looked at me with an incredulous look on his face and, with his signature twinkle in his eye, laughed right out loud as he said, “Just what would you [a bar owner] have to say to people in church?” After responding by saying something about the different perspective a preacher who for 15 years had owned and operated a saloon might have, Clee, looking more serious now, said, “You mean you’re going to go back to preaching against people.” Though I should know better by now, his response kind of caught me by surprise. “Preaching is supposed to be for people, not against them,” I said. “That’d be nice for a change,” he said, though it was clear that such a concept didn’t sink in very far. Just then another hand was dealt, and conversations moved on to other things. *** Still a stereotypical red-headed fireball in her mid-70s, Glory was in the Bull’n Bear Saloon for our “Old Friends Gathering” a few Sundays ago listening to Norrine “The Outlaw Queen” (now in her mid-80s) sing and play old country music with her 3 piece band, just as she had done with various musicians since Glory had been in her mid 20s. While I was there, leaning against the end of her “buddy bar” and visiting with her, she asked, “What have you been up to today?” I mentioned that I had sung in church that morning, to which she responded, “Oh. I don’t go to church anymore. I don’t believe in any organized religion.” “Well what kind do you believe in,” I stupidly replied, “un-organized religion?” I immediately knew it to be the wrong thing to say, but so it goes, and I braced myself for the worst. Her face “animated,” shall we say, as she said with an anger more than 5 decades old, “You don’t tend to go back to church when the pastor, using your name, accuses you personally of something right from the pulpit during the sermon Sunday morning.” She gathered herself a little and continued with an almost seething emphasis, the shame still hung over her like a dark thunder cloud. “I believe, I just don’t believe in Church!” **** If it is true, as a recent poll has reported, that the fastest growing religious group in the United States is made up of those who claim “no religious affiliation,” I would guess that a good number of them have stories in kind with those above. And if their stories are not ones of bad experiences either in life or with the church, then they are ones simply of the apparent irrelevance of the church in their work-a-day lives. This seems to be particularly true of those (like myself) who are proud of the “rugged individualism” of the American West in which I grew up and continue to live. Where this individualism intersects with matters of the Church, the clear attitude of many is “Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” If God is good and loving and just (meaning to them, “fair”), and if our “souls” live on after we die anyway, why would anyone want to waste a perfectly good Sunday morning going to hear a bunch of rules about how those in church think we should live? Or to put it even more bluntly, in a logic that makes us “church people” cringe; “If our salvation is free, as you say, why attach to it the ‘cost’ of the church?” That is, “Why buy the cow…?” with all the responsibility that “having cows” implies? **** I faced these issues regarding the Church in spades recently - in both my own latent attitudes as well as in the blatant attitudes of these, my friends - as I talked with Terri regarding her desire to finally be baptized. The conversation occurred while sitting around the campfire after one of our twice-yearly (Christmas and Easter) “campfire worship services.” (It was during that conversation that she told me about Michael and why she had never been baptized.) “I’ve believed in Jesus just about as long as I can remember, and I have always wanted to be baptized,” I remember Terri telling me. “It just never happened. First, because of what happened to Michael, and second, I suppose, because I just wasn’t very interested in the whole ‘church’ thing.” After more than a year had passed since her first expressing her desire to be baptized, we talked again and agreed that the following Easter, down by the river as part of our “campfire” Easter worship, would be a good time to finally have her baptism. It was shortly after this that I ran head-on into a “wall” that I had thus far seemed to avoid, a “wall” existing first because of my own latent attitudes regarding the church (I’ll talk about that some other time), and secondly because of those very blatant and pervasive attitudes which our culture seems to hold regarding “spiritual matters.” (Nearly every day I am able to see that my friends do indeed – as Church Innovations’ excellent research on this has shown – view our relationships with God as something personal and private. And if I may be so bold as to build a little on that, it is also, it seems to me, perceived as being future and not present, as if it were behind some sheet of glass for us to occasionally look at (for our comfort), but which glass was not to be broken “except in the case of emergency.”). The occasion for this head-on collision was my dear friend Pat (Keifert). After I told him about Terri’s baptism being planned for the next “Easter campfire,” Pat delivered to me with some emotion in his voice a very firm, pastoral word: “If you’re going to do that, you’d better finally get serious about starting a real community – a church – for her to be a part of, ‘cause you know that she won’t go to any of the other churches in town.” I knew that he was as right as he was clear. It would be a great disservice to Terri for me to allow her to treat her baptism as something only between her (the individual) and God, something in which she could take “personal and private” comfort. It is that, of course, but it is also much, much more. I knew that as well. In baptism – just as Paul said – we are joined to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the Church is his body. “…you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.” Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. I’ve always believed that he meant it. I just haven’t always acted like it, and now it was showing. So it was, after we finished talking, that I found myself filled, not with joy at Terri’s baptism, but with stress. Where I had been experiencing gospel joy, I now felt the sting of the law that had revealed how 1) my own feelings and frustrations regarding the church of my experience, combined with 2) my immersion in a culture (both within and outside of the church) that views things spiritual as things personal, private and mostly for the future, had seriously skewed my work-a-day understanding of what baptism into Christ really is. Pat was right; Right in what he said, and right to say it. Just as it is deeply true that having a savior is not a theological point or simply a “doctrine of atonement” but a desperate need, so also is it true that we would never know that – OR experience any of the other gifts we receive in the body of Christ – if it weren’t for the church. The “milk” that we get for free is not only our salvation; it is also the wonderful privilege of being joined with others in living out of that free gift right now, a gift that is wrapped in the relationships for which we were created – with God, and with the entire company of saints who have been redeemed – and sent – by God. To ask, then, “Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” in regard to our life with God is finally just as stupid as asking: “Why waste time with that one with whom you want to spend your every day, whom you trust and with whom you are in love, when you can just have sex?” They are questions ill-conceived at best. The problem for the Church, however, is that when we who are the church speak about the church, it all too often comes out only as [cheap] law and [trite] demand, rather than as gospel and promise; hence the “cow and milk” questions. And the reason that that is true comes not from the pervasive attitudes of our culture, but also from us. For when the truth is told right out loud, it must be said that we do indeed present ourselves most often as an organization of like-minded people – dare I say as religious “clubs?” - rather than as the living body of Jesus, doing in our world now what He did during the days of his incarnation. In spite of our good motives and the legitimate need for “organization,” we are most often seen as ones who vote on stuff about our neighbors or try to influence – or even regulate! – how they live their lives, rather than as ones who actively love our neighbors because Jesus has first loved us. It is not entirely surprising then, that when you couple 1) the ways in which we often present ourselves to our culture with 2) the “personal and private…future and not present” attitudes regarding things spiritual that our culture already holds, that we find ourselves looking people who cannot see what the church really is. What they see is “organized religion” that is simply, well, boring. What it is is the body of Christ still active in our everyday world; not something we “go to,” but something we are by God’s good grace. * When Terri told her fiancé Richard that I wanted to talk with her more about her being baptized and all that it means (this after my conversation with Pat), Richard’s joking response was “Yeah, he’ll probably tell you to start going to church or something…” I have since told them that Richard was right. After our Easter evening worship, where Terri was baptized down by the river, when all of us gathered there were sitting around the campfire as we are wont to do, we talked together about being church together, and after all was said and done, agreed to “get serious” about doing so regularly (not just Christmas and Easter), which we are now doing every other week. After all, why settle for just the milk, when you can have the whole cow for free? Jim Johnson is a Church Innovations consultant, a former pastor and the former owner of the Bull ‘n Bear Saloon in Red Lodge, Montana. |
|