Sad Commentary

I was taken to lunch yesterday by a colleague and friend, to say good bye after a too short friendship. We have kidded back and forth over my love of dark roast coffee for all the time we have counted each other friends, in what some would find abusive language, but it's always followed by a grin and probably a laugh.

So yesterday we are sitting in the restaurant, and my friend comments that our denomination, the United Church of Christ, will probably be destroyed because people have forgotten that we, like our United States of America, was founded on the proposition that in diversity we can find unity - in fact in that diversity is our strength.

Now, I don't know if he's reading the situation correctly or not as to the end result, but I can tell you he is dead on when it comes to the most difficult aspect of churches today! We do NOT want different or changed or new! We want comfortable, familiar, feel-good theology and hymns and liturgy. The fact that Jesus spent his entire career upsetting that apple cart in his time has no impact on the way people live today!

Another comment related to that was a question, "How many of your young people rush right out after church and put on church organ music to listen to?" And we wonder why they don't like church any more? Or how about the comment I heard a pastor shared with a parishoner complaining about change - "Oh, so you still go down to the river to do laundry? Still fire up the wood stove to cook on? Still drive around in a horse-drawn buggy?"

It's truly sad that the church has forgotten that Jesus said he came to bring life and abundantly! Life is change! Life is upsetting! Life is running into things we disagree with in people we like or need to get along with - and we do! So why can't we do it in church?

We complain about the medical community resorting to specialists on everything, but that is exactly what the church is trying to do - the pastor is the specialist regarding "church work" and that lets all the rest off the hook. The church staff are the specialists that allow the members to coast! WRONG!!!!

When that attitude becomes the life-view of a congregation, it will change or they will die! It is that simple, that stark, that harsh! A church needs to be like a lake - with fresh water coming in and old water flowing out - or like a pond with no such ingress and egress, it will become stagnant, nasty, unpleasant to be around, and eventually simply a stinking hole that is avoided.

That can also be said of the once great nation. All of it. We have the potential to be the greatest nation history has ever known, the shining example for all the world. But when we try to force people through a cookie cutter mold, try to make everyone exactly alike, refuse to live up to our grand heritage - "Give me your tired and huddled masses . . . " - we start to die like that pond, and, as we have seen, our image worldwide suffers!

'Tis time, my friends and my detractors, for us to start paying attention to life, to our faith, to the reality of need to change in order to live. Live? Die? That's each person's choice! What's yours?

Peace!