A NEEDLESS WORRY

One of the greatest worries that church people have about church growth is that we will no longer be a family; we will no longer know “everybody” as we like to put it. The fact is we never did. We never did know everybody in the church if that church had a full-time rector. Early on in my ministry when I served two small missions, there were people in each mission who knew everyone in their little congregation. But not everybody knew everybody. When I moved to a small parish, no one knew everyone. And yet the fear was voiced that we would lose that family atmosphere if the church grew. It was a needless worry and not because we didn’t grow. We did.

Josh Hunt in his book Let Us Grow says this: “Research has demonstrated that in a small church the average person knows about 65 people. In the larger church, also, the average person knows the same number. In other words, the size of the congregation has nothing to do with how many people one knows. The real issue is allowing the gospel to spread wider that any particular circle of friends.”

Isn’t that freeing! We no longer have to be afraid of how big we become. We no longer have to worry about not knowing everyone. We can even admit that we never knew everyone anyway and not feel guilty about it. We did before, didn’t we? We always thought it was somehow a failure on our part if we did not know everyone in the church. We thought it was a flaw of the church if the 8:00 churchgoers did not know the 10:00 churchgoers when, in truth, the 8:00ers did not even know all of the other 8:00ers. The only way that would happen is if the church grows too small and we don’t want that!

The other issuer, as Hunt notes, is that we somehow believe that everyone in church should be a personal friend. That, too, is impossible. What is important is not who we know or how well we know them, but what we have in common. And that which we have in common is our faith in Jesus Christ. That is why we come together each week: to share our faith. If, in the process, we also share family stores and problems, all well and good. But that is not why we gather as a church family. We are a circle of faith, not a circle of friends – first. Faith first; friendship second. That is not to say that we should not invite or friends to join our circle of faith. We should, if they are truly our friends.

Friendship can grow or diminish. Friends can come and go. But faith remains. If Jesus were to inquire about our church family, he would not ask about how friendly we are but how faithful we are. That’s the true test of any parish. We may not know everyone in the directory, only about 65 or so. But we need to know if we are a faithful and faith-filled group of people, even a group of friends as well. We need not worry about the largeness of our congregation but about the largeness of our faith. The more we live out our faith, the more we will grow. It goes with the territory, as they might say. Faith begets faith. It also begets true friendship. That is something for any congregation to truly rejoice in and not worry about, is it not?

IT’S NOT A PROBLEM UNTIL IT’S MY PROBLEM

Ever since Adam and Eve got the boot from paradise (heaven-on-earth), it seems that the world has been going to hell in a handcart. The world has certainly not been all that heavenly for as long as anyone can remember: problems, problems and more problems. And for the moment it’s not from where or whence the problems have arisen. Suffice it to say that problems are usually the result of one or two reasons: selfishness or dumb luck. Either we deliberately do that which will eventually – or immediately – cause us and others or are the result if being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What does matter are the problems that confront us now and not the reasons for them in the first place. For one of the main problems with problems is that we spent so much time trying to figure out what went wrong or why it went wrong or whom to blame that we never have the time or energy to deal with the problem itself, whatever the problem.

The other problem with problems is that it is not a problem until it is my problem: until it confronts me head on, until I can no longer avoid it, escape it or try to justify it. Until then the problem is someone else’s problem. But once it is my problem, then I have no choice nut to confront it, deal with it, try to solve or understand it, live with it.

And where do we confront these problems most especially? In our family. When a problem becomes a family problem, my family’s problem (however we define problem), then it is now my problem. G. K. Chesterton once observed: “The common defense of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant and at one. But there is another defense of the family, and to me evident: its defense is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not one.” In other words, it is full of problems. In other words, we have to work at it inside the family.

Philip Yancey: “It is safe to say that I have learned more abut grace, forgiveness, diversity – and, yes, original sin – from my family than from all the theology books I have read…so troublesome issues like divorce and homosexuality [problems to some/many] take on a different cast when you confront them not in a state legislature [or a church gathering/convention] but in a family reunion.”

It is also safe to say that when problems are confronted on a very personal basis, when they are family problems – and the church is a family, is it not? – then we can begin to se those “problems” from a personal perspective and begin to deal with them with compassion and understanding, something we are unlikely to do when the problems are someone else’s problems.

We will never make earth heavenly, but we can make it a little less hellish. What we need to do is understand that every problem, is really a family problem, and thus, ours, and deal with it as best we can and not find an excuse why we should not.

THEY JUST DON’T GET IT

A while back I saw a t-shirt with this delightful observation on the back: “Heaven is where the police are British, where the chefs are Italian, where the mechanics are German, where the lovers are French and it I all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, where the chefs are British, where the mechanics are French, where the lovers are Swiss and it is all organized by the Italians.”

I suspect most of us would agree and with a smile on our face. But there would be those who would say the T-shirt was stereotyping people. Well, of course! But I would assert that the observation is more typical than stereo. Italian cuisine over British? No contest. Swiss vs. Italian governing? No contest. Italy has averaged two parliaments a year since WWII. Rather the point of the observation is that we are all different, that it takes all kinds and types of people to make up this world, this country, this church of ours. But there are those who just don’t get it.

I love the Olympics. Athletes from all over the world come together to test their skills against one another. Fierce but friendly competition because each knows the work it took to just get to the Games let alone winning a medal. I always root for the athletes from the USA but truly enjoy the side-stories of other athletes from around the world and the work and hardships they went through to make it to the Games. Every athlete deserves a medal just for making it that far.

Some would say that the tongue-in-cheek T-shirt philosophy or that behind the Olympic Games is all hokum, a pipe dream, even wrong. They would say that those of us who believe we are all equal even though we are all different, of different types and cultures, that we just don’t get it. It is they who just don’t get it. It is precisely our diversity that makes this world, and especially this country of ours, such a wonderful place to live in, even with that which is not so wonderful – and there is a lot of that to be sure.

Diversity is what makes for growth. If we all looked, thought, believed alike, it would be the most boring world to live in. If that were the case, my guess is that there would be rebels who would somehow rise up to challenge our thinking, acting and believing. The truth is we have too many rebels or rebels who rise up for the wrong reason: they want everyone to be and think and believe and act as they do. And, sadly, they often use violent means to try to force and enforce their beliefs. They will never succeed in spite of their efforts. We are just too diverse as a people.

If blame is to be found why Italians, by and large, are better cooks than the British and the Swiss are better than governing that the Italians and Norwegians are better in Winter Olympics than Summer, then that blame rests entirely on God’s shoulders. God created us different. If God wanted us to be all alike, that is the way God would have created us. Those who think otherwise just don’t get it.

WHERE HAS ALL THE SILENCE GONE?

Many, many years ago when I was in seminary, the time between when the lights went out until after breakfast was called The Grand Silence. We were not permitted to talk save only to God during that time. That does not mean that we always obeyed that rule, but it was enforced in the breach. There were others periods of silence throughout the day back then. Two or three days a week all meals were eaten in silence, the only sound being the clinking of the silverware on the plates and the voice of the one reading from a book.

The Grand Silence was a rule, but it was more than that. It was meant to be a spiritual discipline because the authorities knew that it was truly only in silence that we could orient ourselves to grow in our spiritual life. I suspect we all realized that truth even as we often rebelled against it simply because we wanted to perceive it more as a rule that had to be kept than a discipline that needed to be cultivated.

Perhaps it was because of those enforced periods of silence that, paradoxically I suppose, I came not to resent them but to appreciate them especially now as I wonder where has all the silence gone. Now it seems that there is more noise than silence, where silence is avoided, actively avoided. We seem to be quite uncomfortable with it. And so we have to have some noise in the background just to keep going.

Granted, some of what we play in the background to drown out the silence would never be considered noise but are in fact musical masterpieces. Nevertheless, Mozart and Beethoven notwithstanding, silence is still silence.  And in order to both appreciate the joy and the necessity of silence we not only have to be silent, we also have to be still.

What is so ironic about all this is that the place where silence is the most helpful to our spiritual lives is the one where it seems to be the most uncomfortable for us: worship. There are various places in our worship where we are encouraged to remain silent in order to reflect upon what we have just heard – after each of the readings, after the sermon, between prayers.

The difficulty in making periods of silence available is that we do not know how to take advantage of them. Thirty seconds of silence seems like an hour; a minute seems like an eternity. The truth is that it takes much longer than that to even get into the mode and the mood. It takes discipline, which is what my seminary was trying to get through our thick and reluctant skulls.

Lent is a special time in our spiritual lives, a time to become more disciplined in our spiritual lives. Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to ourselves this Lent is to make some time each day just to be still and be silent in order to be alone with ourselves and our God. We need both quality time and quantity time – fifteen minutes minimum.

It will take time to get into taking time, to enjoy and then relish the silence, to discover how important it is. Just making the time may be the most difficult part of it all. But if we do, in the end we will be most thankful and better for it.