Kobayashi Maru

This has been an interesting weekend for sure. Drama everywhere I turned. Drama in Texas, drama in the Virtual Office, drama in the movies I rented. Very exciting to say the least. But of all of these things I choose to write about….

The wee little church I spoke at this weekend. It is a Free Methodist Church. Which at first I thought was some kind of protest…I wondered who the Methodist was that was in captivity and why he had been (what I can only assume is unjustly) held. I pictured a bunch of Christians holding placards and chanting cool slogans. Like if the guy’s name was William we could have chanted “Free Methodist Willy”! Or for those who like the occasional double entendre, “Hell. No, we won’t go.”

Alas, this was not the case. That is simply their denomination, not even their name. (sigh) They, like so many others, have jumped on the “community” bandwagon. You know, how every church now feels some obligation to find a way to insert “community” into their name. Think I’m kidding? I googled “community church” and here was the results: Results 1 - 10 of about 82,600,000 for community church. (0.38 seconds)

82 million hits. NICE. This was one of them.

Remember when you didn’t have to say community in reference to a church cause it was understood? Ahh the good old days. Funny how that stating the obvious trend hasn’t caught on in like banking. Then we’d have Royal Money Bank of Canada or Money Bank of America. ANYWAYS…

I showed up to so my little dog and pony show about homelessness and poverty and such, and the place was packed with an amazing 18 people. Now, to be fair, there were 4 kids and a teenager doing sunday school - so 23 in total. I don’t want to use hyperbole on this, so that’s the actual amount of people. I was told that one family was on vacation, so normally there would have been another 5. (Don’t laugh, that’s like a 20% increase in numbers.) So with a fifth of the congregation gone, I was left to infotain the remnant.

They were technologically savvy. I had a cordless mike (one that goes over the ear and makes you feel like a motivational speaker) put on me AND they had powerpoint. This was made all the more impressive by the fact that my attendance brought the median age in the place down to about 65. The best part of the powerpoint and projector unit though, was the fact that they used it to show the words to the hymns they were singing. And yes, we once again established that God hates the 3rd verse of hymns. If anyone could tell me why this is, I would be eternally grateful. Ok, not eternally, cause eventually I could just ask God face to face and then you giving me your opinion of His reasoning will mean less. But still, I would appreciate it now for sure. We did Amazing Grace, Old Rugged Cross and Count Your Blessings. AND WE ENDED BY SINGING THE DOXOLOGY!! It was surreal. I was back in the early 70’s and looking for my Mom, so I could sit next to her and not have to sit by my dad who would sing at the top of his lungs completely unaffected by his own tone-deafness that was the first church-based bane of my life. These guys were not missing a beat though. You could have given everyone there a baseball bat and they wouldn’t have hit the right note once. God bless ‘em, they couldn’t have carried a tune if they all held onto the bucket. But they, like my father 30 plus years ago, made joyful noises to the Lord. To stay in character from my childhood (which I have to assume that this was all about me and allowing me to relive those days if only for one Sunday morning) they had an organ player as well as a piano player (both lovely old women as stereotypes demand that they should be). The “choir” was made up of three people who after leading the singing came back down to sit in the pews so that I really could “preach to the choir”. They took up an offering as well, which was only funny because 4 people got up to do that - effectively shrinking the pool of potential tithers by 20% (and this with said pool already being down 20%). Jesus fed 5000 by tearing up fish…I wonder if these guys take the bills, bless them and then begin to tear them into little pieces so they have enough money to cover all their bills. That would be a creative way to see if we could reenact that miracle in modern day culture. HEY…we could have 12 baskets of money left over!!! Wow. Somebody try that and let me know how it goes.

So back to the story at hand…

I did indeed “preach” a bit and I walked around the place. I made a joke or two which went over like turds in punch bowls, until I realized that I was in 1976 and they didn’t do humor from the pulpit back then. So I assured the people that I was not a pastor and therefore it was okay for me to make jokes - I wasn’t held to the same standard as a paid pastor. That actually got a laugh and they lightened up a bit. Which is good, because I am somewhat sure that they actually have a stoning pit somewhere on the property and an innate willingness to use it if they see fit. (The good old days when getting stoned was something you could only do once…)

Here’s the very cool thing though. This place was everything to these people. It was their family. Their meeting house. The hub of all their social interactions. Their place. They loved it and would do anything for it. When they said they were doing a little “work day” everyone in the room said they would be there. They ALL did. I almost felt compelled to say I’d be there. Everyone was doing it after all. And I asked someone afterwards if they thought everyone really would show up, and he smiled at me with something in between the humor of the aged amused at the naivety youth of today and the derision of the elderly at the lack of commitment in the later generations, and said “of course” with that little lilt at the end that almost turns it into a question like “Why the hell wouldn’t they??”

Here’s the thing. I miss that about church. The “it” being the central hub of relationships and community. The understood familial commitment to it that everyone just has. I don’t mean that I miss it since my last church closed down. I mean I MISS IT from years ago when I saw it last, you know back when we sang the doxology (yep…some of my readers will simply not know what the doxology is now-a-days). I have no illusions though. If every church started singing the doxology, I don’t think that the whole community thing would just start back up again. Least I don’t think so. Again, feel free to try it and get back to me.

Maybe I am just feeling a little nostalgic. Maybe I am full of crap here. Maybe nothing has changed except me in all these years. (well, and the not singing the doxology thing, oh, and the worship choruses instead of hymns thing, and the full band instead of pianos and organs - otherwise, maybe nothing has changed). Maybe the good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems. Maybe that’s a line from a Billy Joel song…

So, Ill sign off now…and just in case it works:

Doxology