Stuff I learned on Sunday

The informational meeting doesn’t work for me anymore. Send out an email a couple of weeks in advance inviting people to come hear about, say, the youth mission trip–how to sign up, where we’re going, what it costs–Sunday after worship, and nobody comes. Well, one person comes. And you share the information with three families before worship and two more after. Also, the email about the meeting had all the information in it.

As we get more prolific with our digital communication, are we losing something of the face-to-face assembly of people for sharing information? Emails and Facebook page and group announcements have all the information in them (or links to that information) that you’re going to hear at the meeting, so why come?

To be assured. To assess the leaders. To inquire: about sleeping arrangements, about provisions for allergies, about the color of the T-shirt. The great substance of the event is in things not on the flyer and not on the website, and you should come to ask about those things.

Also, you should come to connect with the other people who are going.

Are we at the point where leaders need to withhold information in digital form in order to coerce people into coming to the meeting? Probably not. No, surely not; more information=better, almost always.

Are we at a point, then, where leaders need to get better at these one-on-one conversations, the ones that are happening before and after the publicized meeting time? I think so. I’m planning a round of phone calls this week myself, to share all the information one more time with one person at a time.

Stuff I learned on Sunday

Some Sundays the foot you put forward got stepped on Saturday night and you limp all day.

Lean into that limp. Compensating for it won’t make it hurt less, and you’re likely to injure your good foot. Do the best work 1 and 1/2 will allow. Know that you can’t push off like you want to today. Something will have to give: grace, the groceries, that phone call, kindness.

You’re not making excuses. You’re injured. You’ll be better next Sunday.

Stuff I learned on Sunday

Hannah Montana was all about Total Depravity.

Near the end of our confirmation discussion of sin, I hit my mixed group of 9th graders and adults with Kim Fabricius:

There is no privileged no-go area that sin does not crash, and no human act that is altogether uncompromised by self interest.

I dropped the Confession of 1967 on ’em:

All human virtue, when seen in the light of God’s love in Jesus Christ, is found to be infected by self-interest and hostility.

I even pulled in Paul:

I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

That’s when one of the 9th graders pulled out her phone, and before I knew what was happening she was quoting Miley:

Nobody’s perfect/I gotta work it/again and again til’ I get it right/Nobody’s perfect/You live and you learn it/And if I mess it up sometimes/Nobody’s perfect.

Then she dropped her mic and walked out.

You could quibble that “nobody’s perfect” is not the same thing as “everything everybody does–even the best things–is imperfect.” But you’d kind of be a tool if you did that.

So we pulled up the video and watched it as our benediction.

Stuff I Learned on Sunday

It’s really hard to not think in programs. Whenever church folk talk about problems, we talk about programmatic solutions. Worship attendance is down; we need a program of phone calls and mailings. Tensions in the community over a contested bond issue; let’s host a program of discussions.

Maybe church folk aren’t unique in this, but we do it, do it, do it a lot.

It happened in the adult Sunday school yesterday. For the past three weeks we have been exploring race relations at our church’s, from its founding in 1955 to today, when we share our campus with Hispanic and Indonesian congregations. Still, we’re a mostly white church in a mostly white community (see slides below), so we’re exploring what might need to change.

Our solutions? Programs:

A pulpit exchange with non-anglo churches; a series of visits to local racial/ethnic congregations; invitations to those churches to worship with us.

My colleague said, “We need to build relationships, not start new programs,” and hands shot up all over the room to suggest . . . programs.

But what else is there, really? I mean as frustrating as it is to recognize the elements of a program in all of these suggestions (publicity, event planning, volunteer recruitment), how else does a group of committed people change something? Do they just take it upon themselves to visit those racial/ethnic churches and not tell anyone what they’re doing?

What is the alternative to programming? Relationships? But doesn’t building new relationships take some intention and some planning? Doesn’t that kind of make it a program?

Stuff I learned on Sunday

Teaching an adult class before worship and a youth class after worship=the perfect storm.

A Middle Eastern member of the church shared during the adult education class on race that he has to identify as “white” on the Census.

This Vox video on race works really well as a conversation starter:

When explaining the congregation’s 60th anniversary during the Children’s Time, be careful not to make 60 sound REALLY OLD.

When you ask children in church, “Guess who’s birthday it is next week,” one of them will most certainly answer, “Jesus?”

Taking the purple sparkle-eyed stuffed dolphin away from a child during the Children’s Time is not an effective way to draw attention to the story. Neither is giving it back.

You can safely stick your tongue out at members of the choir only once during the Anthem.

Most 9th graders think “predestination” has to do with GPS.

The Preschool Director works on Sunday.

The righteousness of ordering Subway for the youth Super Bowl party instead of pizza was always sure. Turns out it’s expedient too: the pre-game line in the pizza place is out the door, yet Subway is empty. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (with sandwiches).

In light of burger ads featuring naked women and a trailer for an S&M themed movie during the youth Super Bowl party, next year’s event will be redesigned as a four hour prayer vigil for the soul of a nation.

Sweating the morally bankrupt ads during the youth Super Bowl party is a waste of energy, because most of the youth are playing a first person shooter video game in another room anyway.

If you’re satisfied there’s no way an 11th grader will shoot that can of silly string at you in the middle of someone else’s house, your satisfaction will not be rewarded.

The youth’s mother who refers to Missy Elliot as “my girl” is more badass than you thought.

Trader Joe’s is empty in the hour immediately following the Super Bowl. So that’s when they wipe down the produce shelves.

Reading the penultimate chapter of a Harry Potter book and then abruptly stopping is exactly the wrong way to get a six year old to sleep.

Stuff I learned on Sunday

We sang a hymn in worship yesterday with this verse:

Proudly rise our modern cities,
stately buildings, row on row;
yet their windows, blank, unfeeling,
stare on canyoned streets below,
where the lonely drift unnoticed
in the city’s ebb and flow,
lost to purpose and to meaning,
scarcely caring where they go.

I’ve sung this hymn at least half a dozen times, but I didn’t notice until yesterday how far off its depiction of modern city life is from my experience. “Blank, unfeeling?” “Lost to purpose and to meaning?” “Scarcely caring where they go?”

Is there anything to be gained for our witness to the gospel by characterizing our neighbors like this? I don’t think so.

I decided early in my adulthood that the happiness of people who aren’t Christians did not pose a threat to my Christian faith. The stock portrayal I was fed in the conservative evangelical church of my childhood was of non-believers who were depressed or depraved. If they were happy, it was surely because they were doing drugs of having premarital sex and would be duly punished in the fires of Hell.

Yet lots of my adolescent peers were neither churchgoers nor oversexed druggies (some were–both), and yet were nonetheless happy. Then my Aunt married a jolly little Irish-Catholic-turned-honest-to-God-Buddhist, and I knew the Miserable Heathen was a fiction for sure.

The vast majority of people I interact with lead lives full of purpose and meaning, and only a few of them claim any kind of religious faith. And I know a lot of miserable Christians. Neither the former’s happiness nor the latter’s misery affect my trust in God, as if faith has happiness as its object. It doesn’t.

Stuff I learned on Sunday Saturday

“We were expecting you.”

A smiling woman with an “Usher” name tag is beaming at me and handing me a Visitor Information card and one of her church’s pens. She is warm and welcoming and all the things you want a church usher to be, and she tells me they were expecting me, which kind of delights me and kind of makes me nervous.

I’m at this Saturday night church service at a new worshiping community with an Elder from my church and my family because the Pastor is a friend and colleague who I have recruited to speak at a national conference I’m working on and who I interviewed for a magazine column I’m writing. During that interview I mentioned I would be coming to worship. Clearly, she took note.

“We were expecting you” is a rich thing to tell a guest. More than that you are welcome, “We were expecting you” says that you are anticipated. It’s gratifying and humbling, comforting and intensifying. “We were expecting you” says that we’re happy you’re here and also that we have invested something in your being here. It’s a greeting fit for a participant, not a spectator.

Suddenly “We were expecting you” is what I want everyone at my church to hear. I have a friend visiting on Sunday morning, and so I describe him to the Usher beforehand and ask her to make him feel welcome. “Tell him we were expecting him.”