Interlude - Excerpt from "Seeing Jesus: Radical Hospitality and Healthy Churches"

From "Introduction" / Chapter 1

I’ll post a few excerpts from my collected work on the intentional practice and discipline of radical hospitality. I’ve chosen segments that speak directly to my experience of “doing church” at Fountain Street. These are echoes.
I won’t post them in order, the book is unpublished, and exists in its current from as roughly 600 pages of narrative experiences and another 600 pages of memories that may never escape my rapidly aging brain.

My writing shack in the woods, where I compose my important manifestos.

—
Introduction.

Cura te ipsum.

While this book is ostensibly concerned with strategies for growing healthy, vibrant churches, I am brutally aware of the irony of writing it during a pandemic lock-down from my home office.

Clearly, none of us are aware of what the church will look like post-pandemic. The changes being wrought upon the spiritual lives of Americans may amount to very little - or may be utterly transformational. We may find a restorative period of intense growth in worship attendance or worship may remain anemic and overly focused on “digital content production”. Finally, as the global climate crisis continues to expand and crises rise on multiple fronts it is also likely that “pandemic life” may become the new normal. Whether or not the institutional church can survive this “new normal” remains to be seen. Frankly, nobody knows and none of us should invest much currency in the predictions of soothsayers and future analysts.

Nevertheless, as I am a person committed to hope, I return again and again to the traditional model of the parish church because it is a consistent metanarrative within the project of Christianity in general.
Jesus preached to congregations. Paul wrote to congregations. The story of Christianity is the story of congregations. The separatists, both pilgrim and puritan, found new hope in congregations. And even the backbone of the Episcopal polity remains… the local congregation. It has been said by some that the “post-constantinian” [1. In my opinion the church in America has never been more constantinian] church will adopt a more rabinic posture, with clergy employed by like-minded communities and often depending on a separate vocation to pay the bills. I think this is a misreading of the economic reality confronting the church in America. There are plenty of faithful believers, moreso now than at any time in U.S. history, and talented clergy will always find a church home in which to labor.

But, you surely ask with a wry grin, you’ve found yourself adrift, haven’t you?

Indeed, I am. Like countless other clergy, the COVID-19 pandemic left me completely unmoored and fully at sea. It would be kinder to claim that God has put me in the refrigerator for a bit in order to have me write this book - however I think that a better description of my present condition has to do with the response of the American church to the crisis of the pandemic. My present freedom to reflect is both self-imposed and perhaps even healthy.

The ideas in this book are counter-intuitive. In some church settings they’re downright offensive. My position was as follows: “It matters not that these ideas or proposals are controversial or difficult to swallow - what matters is the outcome. Namely, dramatically increased levels of congregational giving, community engagement and support, and higher, more regular worship attendance. Staff retention levels that surpassed all previous records. I mean, look! It’s all there on paper.”
And so you can imagine my surprise when churches receive these strategies and reply, “yes this does all look quite appealing but we aren’t in a good spot for this kind of work, not right now.”
The cold truth is that during times of global or national crisis Christian churches (and most institutions in general) become more conservative, less tolerant of risk, and more unwilling to consider new ways of being in community together.
And so the pandemic has turned out to be an awful time to attempt great things in service to the Kingdom of God.
So much of the conversation I’m seeing about what the “future of the church” is going to look like is painting over this reality with unfounded hope. The church will likely contract, the people will desire to get back to business-as-usual, and so the traditional model of the local church will prevail. But there I go, offering predictions, just as soon as I’ve advised you to avoid anyone who comes offering predictions.

My point is this: Ultimately, whether or not any of these ideas or practices succeeds depends not on the condition of the church or community, not on the vitality of any particular congregation, and most certainly not on the general disposition of economy or culture.
They succeed because of the relationship between the church and their pastor.
That’s it, that’s the whole model, that’s the theory of change.

The ministries and experiences I’m writing about - from the most anodyne and inoffensive to the ones that will likely generate weeks or months of news media headlines - all of them will fail if they are not carried out through a process of open and honest communication between clergy and laity, and leadership and labor. It is time-intensive. It is rarely lean or efficient or nimble. It can be glacially slow work. We’re talking about bending full-grown trees into new shapes using the conviction of a few bits of twine and some wooden stakes set in the ground. We’re talking about changing the soil composition of a field over the course of a decade in order to grow new crops. We are rivers cutting canyons. But remember this: it is the river that directs the course of the riverbank and not the other way ‘round. [2. I was once asked to bless a farmer’s field. Following the ritual I walked the property and observed a stand of young pecan trees that had obviously and carefully been planted. I delicately referred to the young trees and the assumed age of the farmer - he couldn’t have been less than 80 years old. “Those are for my grandchildren,” he mentioned casually. Such is the foresight of Southern farmers. Would that clergy could muster a fraction of such patience.]

I’ll give an example and then we’ll get to the business of the rest of the book. But it is so critical that we have this process in mind before we continue. I will also refer back to this process several times throughout this book.

Following the election of 2016 my office was inundated with requests for predictions about the future. I can’t effectively put into words how shook up folks really were. That election was absolutely bananas and a lot of ink will be spilled about the how and why for many years to come. I was not particularly concerned because, well, I serve an organization that has existed for 2,000 years and the outcome of one weird election in one ostensibly democratic empire probably wouldn’t blow the whole thing up.
But people who live in an empire naturally ascribe an undue level of power and authority to that empire and they wanted to know what was going to happen to their empire.
And they weren’t particularly soothed by my comforting platitudes about focusing on the work of ministry in order to take a larger vision of the present crisis. After all, we’re people of action, damnit.

Closest to our hearts was the plight of our members and families who were in legally-binding same-sex marriages. Would the new administration void those marriages? Would they be forcibly divorced by the state? Would they lose custody of their children? It’s natural that this was our primary fear because we’d spent the last few seasons relishing in weddings and adoptions that had, a few years prior, been distant dreams beyond the horizon.
We convened some attorneys to talk about safeguarding these families and began to raise funds for a legal defense.
However, it quickly became clear that the target of all of this political power coupled with economic anxiety and rage wasn’t necessarily going to be the LGBTQIA+ community - in fact they had set their sights on immigrants. Figuratively and literally.

We were a bit baffled. Our church had a few dozen members who were immigrants but we were generally and basically homogeneously white American people.
We had basically zero outreach to the immigrant community.
This, we needed to fix. And so we created a Bible Study.

I know - earth-shattering, right? A bible study! Absolutely transformational ministry, here! I’m kidding, of course, but I firmly believe that a church that celebrates and studies the Word of God is a church that will carry out the will of God. So we did several group bible studies around the following question: “What is God’s position on immigration? What is Jesus’ position on immigration? What is the church’s position on immigration?”
And from these simple questions grew a dawning realization that God cares quite an awful lot about immigrants, that the story of the Bible is the story of immigrants, and that God is paying very close attention to how we treat immigrants - specifically.

Next, we reached out to the denomination for resources. We received a copy of our denomination's Resolution on Becoming an Immigrant Welcoming Church. We reached out to other, theologically proximate denominations. We learned about so-called “sanctuary churches.” We had many, many conversations. We resolved to write a congregational resolution about where we stood on the matter.

And this is when the fighting began in earnest! And by “fighting,” I mean the very hard conversation about who we were and what we ought to be expected to do.
Put this in your pocket: “Always have your fights before you have your fights.”
We asked ourselves these questions: “What would we do if there was an ICE raid in our city? What should our pastors do? What if we knew someone was going to be deported? What if it was someone who was a member of the community? What was our threshold of pain tolerance for these deportations? And, above all else, what is the faithful Christian response to these events?”
The fights were interesting, helpful, and revealing. What if they wanted to deport someone who had a violent criminal history? What if it was someone of a different faith? Well, what about a Jewish person? What about a Muslim person? What if the person being deported had no family or investment in our community? All of these questions had answers. We had to find the answers. It was time-intensive. And the entire time we were watching with horror as the policies of this new administration began to unfold. It was incredibly tempting to just slam our hand on the desk and shout, “Dammit we’re out of time! It’s time to ACT!”
We resisted the urge. Over the course of nine months we went from bible studies, to denominational resources, to stakeholder interviews (both immigrant and immigrant-adjacent organizations), to town-hall meetings (for both congregants and community members), to a draft of a written policy (that went through no less than six revisions), to a congregational vote on this policy.
Nine. Months.
And it is also critical that I include that I had already been their pastor for four years when we embarked on this journey! I was a known quantity. I had, in fact, earned their trust in small matters.
So the resolution passed.
We were to become an immigrant welcoming, public sanctuary church. At the time we were the largest congregation in America and the first in West Michigan to be designated as such.
And we didn’t even have a regional ICE office in our city.

Privately, when I was asked by church leadership about the likelihood of us actually activating the policy I’d respond, “probably not in a thousand years. Our city is very progressive, our local law enforcement supports our immigrants, and we don’t even have much agriculture - likely we are leading the way for churches out in the county to declare for sanctuary and we’ll probably end up supporting one of them.”

We committed to continuing to study the issue, advocating for local immigrant rights organizations, and we took field trips. We sent our youth delegates to BorderLinks. We visited other sanctuary churches. And then one day, four months after we’d taken the unanimous vote to embrace the congregational resolution, I got a phone call from an attorney in Detroit.
He had a client who was at risk of deportation. “It’s a million-to-one,” he said. “She’s never had so much as a parking ticket. She’s elderly. They’d never deport her. But just in case, I’d like you to meet her.” Her name was “Auntie” Saheeda Nadeem. She was known as “Auntie” because she had served as a stand-in mother for dozens of orphaned refugees in our community. She was intensely beloved. And if she was deported to Pakistan her life would be in tremendous danger.
So began my journey of getting to know Saheeda, riding with her to her ICE appointments, learning about her case, and meeting her delightful son, Samad. And so it happened that I was with her in person at the ICE office when she was informed that she needed to report to Chicago O’Hare Airport the following Monday to be deported to Pakistan. This was on a Friday.
When Monday arrived she was already living inside the walls of my church.

All of that hard work and planning we’d carried out? Everything from the bible studies to the field trips? All of that became “operational” during that weekend between Friday and Monday.
The clergy knew exactly what to do. The policy was already written. Nothing needed to be “voted on” or “approved.” No emergency committee meetings were called. Everything proceeded in an orderly fashion and nobody was caught off guard (well, except for ICE).
You see, we’d already had the fight before we had the fight. We’d already decided what specific actions we would take in which specific circumstances. This is how a ministry succeeds.

Another time I knew that we didn’t have enough time to have the fight before we’d had the fight. I asked if we could hash things out in 40 days, start to finish. I asked the congregation to vote on the 40-day timetable. I explicitly asked for permission to go fast. They knew going in that it was going to be an intense 40 days. It was. But we pulled it off.

And other times when I reflect on the lowest points in my career, the times when my hopeful ministries came to nothing, or nearly got me fired, or nearly hurt my church - at each of those intersections I see us fighting during the fight. I see us acting without the foresight and planning that helps a ministry to succeed.

You can be more nimble - but you can only do so by ceding the very authority that you need to inspire congregational growth and investment. You can, for example, delegate an “emergency team” to make decisions. But their victories will only be celebrated by the members of the team. You can cede responsibility to the elders, or even (God help you) to the clergy. But you will lose out on your investment - as your nimbleness will cost you a palpable sense of victory on behalf of the entire congregation.

Do it the slow way, Christian. Do it the hard way. Win the marathon. Take it slowly and do it right and you will see mountains picked up and thrown into the sea.
Do it the slow way and you’ll grow your church and your impact in your community. And then you, too, will have the impossible task of explaining to your next search committee how you “got that whole entire middle-of-the-road church to go along with such a radical ministry!” The secret is that we either get there all together, or we don’t get there at all.

Finally, don’t for one single second imagine that how someone voted in a particular election will shape their contributions to these ministries. You’re giving the empire too much power when you do this. People don’t vote with others in mind. Politics are fickle things. This disposition of their soul is not.

Ready? Good, at least one of us is. Here we go.

From Chapter 1: Seeing Jesus - Doing Church and the Disciplines of Christian Hospitality

Each morning as we trickled through the weekday, work-day doors of the old church we’d exchange jokes about “laboring in the Jesus mines.” For a congregation committed to living on the spiritual frontier of whatever corner of creation God had sown us, the actual, physical labor of hospitality had come to dominate the work of faith.
The reality is that hospitality is fuel for the lamps, it’s the well-worn knife that trims the wick of faith. Sometimes, it is the small spark that ignites a conflagration of hope, renewal, and boundless love. Other times it is simply a life preserver and a sturdy rope pulling the lost toward safe harbor.

The central commitment and premise of this work is not complicated. I’ll describe it in several ways - most of which are familiar to anyone who has sat through at least a dozen decent sermons.

Jesus is alive. Jesus is in the world and He is deeply concerned about the practice of Christian discipleship. And you can and will encounter Him if you are able to suspend the false illusions of scarcity and fear that plague the faithful mind in these terrible days.

Jesus is a stranger. He tells us that he is tired and that he has no home. He aches and groans that our cities would not receive him, indeed, if they would He would gladly gather us under the protection of his wings like a mother hen. Mother Jesus wants us to be safe and protected but we show hostility instead of hospitality. So She wears the face of the chronically unhoused, the so-called “bums” and “vagrants” of the world. The profoundly disabled and unloved. And so the first and simplest way to see Jesus is to believe with your heart and mind that the next “homeless” person you encounter is none other than the Savior of the World. How you treat this person is precisely how you would treat Jesus.
To take the next step - imagine that immediately after your interaction with this stranger you suddenly die. My God! You’re dead!
And there before you as you close your eyes on this world and open them onto eternity is the Son of God seated at the right hand of the Creator and they are none other than that self-same person you just interacted with. What will you say to them?

For those with a “lower” Christology, I only need to direct you toward the writings of St. Paul and Jesus’ own words that we are, in fact, each a part of the body of God. And that none of us can function in a healthy fashion if any of us are sick - we can’t even tell one another that we have no need of each other! How easy it is to forget that the poor and the outcast are included in such a body. What a bitter regret - to discover that our own salvation was bound up in the manner in which we treated those we considered disposable or burdensome. So the Christ in each of us suffers from our greed, graft, or even cowardice. Or, as I’ve heard it said elsewhere by better teachers than me - “when you die, the person you are will have an opportunity to meet the person you could have been.” In other words, when we are united by grace into the heavenly accord, we will be most satisfied having lived a life that builds up, rather than tears down, the Body of Christ.

Or we can accept with faith the teaching from scripture that guests and strangers are frequently “angels in disguise.” Examining this teaching through the lens of scripture demonstrates that they certainly don’t always look like angels. In fact, they almost never do! If you cannot accept that the stranger is, in fact, the Messiah gracing you with their presence, could you believe that the stranger is a messenger sent by the Creator? So, then, how different is it to show hostility to God’s own ambassador as it would be to Godself?

These are important questions. They get around the simple (and sometimes impractical) axiom, tattooed on so many hands and feet or engraved on cheap plastic jewelry: “What would Jesus do?” Instead, they ask the deeper and more practical question, “what will I do when I meet Jesus?” It’s unavoidable, in any case. The following work is my best effort at answering the “what do we actually do?” part of this question.

I’m not going to wander around in the numinous looking for angels dancing on pinheads. My goal is to create something that is very practical and practicable. These are actual things you can actually do. This isn’t “church 2.0” or “church 3.0” or whatever software release we’re supposedly in today. This isn’t even really “church” because if it were the entire project would tumble down into the brambles of denominationalism and find itself consigned to this same scandal. These are practices. They are practices that - when carried out faithfully - become simple and rote. And I can testify without a shred of doubt in my heart that if you chose this way of life - the way of open-handed hospitality toward strangers - you will inherit the better portion.

I apologize that I am not a theologian. I am barely a church pastor and hardly even a Christian. If the towering theologians be architects, and the towering preachers be their engineers, I think I probably rank somewhere around the stature of a pipe-fitter. But pipes, by nature, need to be fitted. And wiring run. And boards hewn and bricks stacked. All labor has dignity. I have always seen the labor of my hands as an immediate task set before me by God and so I am not, by nature, a reflective practitioner. I believe it is in the very simple application of the Way of Jesus Christ by which we do the very simple labor of building the Kingdom of God on Earth. This book will certainly deal with systems of sin and soteriology and the condition of the Christian soul and the limits of the legitimacy of authority and creativity - but I can rise no higher that my own station and so if and when these matters are discussed they will be uncovered from the perspective of the outsider kneeling in the ditch to lift a wounded stranger onto the back of his own donkey. Christ knows that if that’s all you’re able to do you’ll have done as fine a job as anyone else, myself included.

Focus and Discipline in hospitality

It has been observed by behavioral scientists that nearly all popular diet and exercise fads succeed in helping people become healthier. Doesn’t matter whether it’s counting calories, doing cardio before lifting weights, eating a diet that’s plant-based, intermittent fasting, or anything else. The reason they all seem to have a positive, correlative effect is much simpler than this. It’s because when people start actually paying attention to their diet and exercise they get healthier.
Likewise, in many parts of Appalachia people continue to “plant according to the signs.” “The signs” are a complicated astrological calendar that involves everything from moons and planets to the locations of various constellations and the numbers of the days of the month. An agriculture professor in a nearby university was asked why, in fact, it was that “planting by the signs” was so effective. If it weren’t effective, the impoverished and oft-overlooked sustenance farmers of Appalachia would have abandoned it generations ago! His answer was similar to the diet-and-exercise researchers. Planting by the signs forces people to pay more attention to their crops. It’s that simple. When you pay closer attention to how and when your seeds are sown in the ground and you are carefully monitoring them for proof of success you tend to water and fertilize them with greater care. You are more invested in the work. In a similar fashion, this book will seek to equip and empower you for the daily labor of hospitality.

In conclusion - I don’t honestly care what theological justification you demand in order to abide by these disciplines of hospitality. Be it your desire to see Jesus face-to-face, your commitment to living faithfully as a member of the Body of Christ, or simply because you don’t want to turn away a holy ambassador - the simple act of paying attention to this stuff will cause you to deepen in your discipleship. And I promise - no, in fact, I’ll wager a cash bet and my honor as a clergyperson - that if you practice these measures your faith will grow, your church will flourish, and you will see miracles exploding around you like the blossoms of heavenly flowers on an early spring morning. Best of all, you will see and know Jesus Christ.

hospitality and transitions

When a local church shuts its doors for the last time the surrounding community will typically respond in one of three fashions.
First is the disappointing response, “I didn’t even know they were still open.”
Next, and by far the most common response, it “that’s too bad. They were good people.”
Finally, in a few rare circumstances, the community may respond with alarm - “We can’t let this church close.”
The goal of this book is to assist your work in transitioning your congregation into a position in community where the community cannot envision itself without the presence of your church.

This is a profound challenge - because churches, unlike almost all other non-profits, duplicate services at an almost comical level. In the universe of non-profit development we center the problem of duplication of services. Grant money and individual donors are scarce; we can’t afford to duplicate the work of another agency. And, more fundamentally, it is unethical to do so - we’re simply adding chairs to the banquet table of justice without adding anything nutritional to the menu.

Churches, on the other hand, frequently duplicate services. They do so for a variety of purposes - some less unfortunate than others. We all tend to worship on Sunday morning. This is taken as a given - but considered objectively it’s a bit silly. Why not the Lutherans worship on Sunday morning, the Episcopalians on Tuesday evening, the Evangelicals on Saturday afternoon, and so on? Of course, Sunday morning is our traditional time for the work of worship so, aside from a few often ill-fated experiments, “Sunday morning is when we go to church.”

This thinking is too often applied to all other aspects of ministry. “We have a feeding ministry, a tutoring ministry, we have a sponsorship table at Pride, we distribute care packets to local houseless folks…” - every church creates ministry out of a sense of obligation to the gospel but frequently fails to consider first the needs of their community and second (and worse, in my opinion) fails to examine the current ministries already established on the ground in their setting.

This book is my humble attempt at providing a method for analyzing the needs of your community, the capacity of your unique Body, and some simple methods for translating your values into action. You can read this book in any order you like - I didn’t structure it so that each chapter “builds” on the next. Included are predominantly examples that I have seen work in the eight congregations I’ve served (and countless others I’ve had the privilege of consulting alongside) - but I’ll also include stories and fables and miracles I’ve picked up along the way. In the words of Rev. Sloan Coffin - “I’m simply a magpie, collecting things as I go.”

I want to be clear about something up front. In this book I’m going to share many stories of “churches behaving badly.” It would be easy to conclude that these congregations are amongst the so-called ‘problem churches’ filled with bullies and mean-spirited folks. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no interest in pillorying churches and every church I reference in this book is a marvelous faith community filled with good-hearted human beings doing their very best to emulate Jesus Christ. Naturally, every church (and every group of, say, twenty humans in any setting) will have its share of petty tyrants and gleeful bullies. But the churches in this book are fundamentally good churches. My work, my labor and ministry, was to help them become aware of their particular blind-spots. Likely you serve in a similar way and I want to celebrate your efforts at creating a church that is moving, perhaps, a bit closer to Jesus’ vision for the world. This book won’t fix a mis-matched call but it can give motivated leaders something new to consider and perhaps work toward, together. I will be anonymizing the details and settings of the churches I reference so don’t go bothering trying to figure out who’s who - I promise I’ll stymie you at every turn.

You will invariably read a few concepts in this book that will cause you to laugh and say - “Never in a million years would my people go along with that!” That’s absolutely fine. I give you this disclaimer - Every single church in Christendom is unique, made in the image of the Body of Christ but with various gifts and callings. Yours is no different. Whether you serve in a large, downtown congregation, a church plant, a traditional “church on the green,” or a small, rural town - your church has an identity and a mission that is utterly unique and is deeply precious to God. So whether or not these frameworks will function in your setting is entirely up to you. However - and I caution - don’t be too quick to assume that these ideas will be rejected by your members and leadership. Pastors frequently suffer from a kind of fragility of ego that interprets any and all reticence as an abject rejection of their ideas. Congregations are often slow-moving things - sometimes glacially so - and the most long-lived churches are often so because they consider all of the implications of an action. While this can lead to institutional paralysis and death - it can also serve in the fashion by which carbon becomes a diamond. It takes time.
My father once taught me that concrete which is allowed to set and harden underwater is the strongest concrete on earth. It’s counter-intuitive but it is true.
Some of the most life-saving and soul-healing ministry I’ve witnessed took so long to develop that by the time they were firing on all burners they’d already been relegated to the fascinating category of church activities that fall under the header, “We’ve always done things this way.” There are certain opportunities when congregations need to be limber and responsive - but these occasions still require a level of preparation ahead of time. Often it is the pastor who bemoans the “slow pace” at which their church is proceeding that has simply failed to present them with the necessary tools to respond more quickly.

Where possible I will include references to scripture - however it’s my position that the Bible itself maintains a posture of hospitality from cover to cover so I try to avoid proof-texting these ideas. If you read the Bible and come away with a notion that the Holy Word inspires xenophobia, exclusionism, and rigid application of the law, this book is probably going to be useless to you. Feel free to mail it back to the publisher for a full refund.

While it is currently quite unpopular to talk about church success in terms of “growth” (attendance, membership, and giving) I am going to use these metrics throughout the book. If you find this distasteful or find yourself shaking your head, if you think church growth is worldly or profane or whatever, you’re also probably not going to have a good time with this book. Again - these are simply strategies that I’ve seen work - and I find that along with horizontal growth comes new opportunities for communion with the Holy. I think we can have our cake and eat it, too. A growing church involves a measure of pain - but it’s the pain that brings strength and increased vulnerability. I hold that this is a good kind of pain.

Paul Nixon and Gordon MacDonald, amongst others, have pointed out that - whether or not they’d readily admit this - church members prefer a shrinking church. To paraphrase this work, in a growing church your long-term member is frustrated at every turn. Somebody new is sitting in “their” pew. They don’t know everyone’s name and it’s exhausting trying to meet all these newcomers. The pastor is spending more and more time with new members and less time with me. My money isn’t as important and it doesn’t command as much authority as it did when the church was shrinking - likewise with my volunteer leadership. I secretly enjoyed being the only person who knew where the advent candles were kept. These may all be subconscious products of a wounded ego - but the truth is that in a growing church there are growing pains.

At one fascinating intersection in my life with a growing church there was a critical congregational vote. This was a church that had a history of “taking the summer off,” - though none of the newer members knew this. The church was in a period of rapid growth. Attendance on the summer Sunday of the vote was high! Nevertheless, prior to the vote a long-time member raised their hand. Distressingly, they pleaded that we table the motion, “until more of the long-term members of the church return from vacation! Where is so-and-so? And so-and-so?” Comedically, the very members they reference were, in fact, in attendance that day and raised their voices in affirmation. Nevertheless, the next voices were those of the members who had joined in the past three years:
“Don’t our votes and voices count?” they asked, “or are we just ‘junior members?’”
I interceded with prayer - first! Always lead with prayer! - and then carefully reminded everyone that in a congregationalist polity the priesthood of all believers makes no distinctions based on attendance records. The measure passed. But leading a growing church is hard, doing the things in this book are hard, it’s all so damned hard - and any minister worth their salt knows they can simply phone it in, allow the church to decline and face inward, and blame it on the prevailing culture of the day. Come Friday, a paycheck is still a paycheck. This book is for clergy and church leaders who want to work harder than what is required to simply balance a budget and appease the long-term membership of a congregation.

SQ. Which of these three categories does your church currently occupy? Keep in mind it could be a mix of the three - certain areas of your life might carry more value for your surrounding community.
Can you think of an area in your church life where you are duplicating (or possibly) duplicating other church services?

A Posture of Welcome - Church Security vs. “Security Theater”

Security specialist and writer Bruce Schneier coined the phrase “security theater” in his 2003 work, “Beyond Fear.” It is broadly defined as practices that provide a feeling or sense of improved security while doing nothing to actually improve our safety. Churches practice security theater in spades. This isn’t because churches are “dumb” or “bad” at making people safe - it’s because church leaders tend to be honest, hard-working and ethical people - precisely the sort of people who are lousy at thinking about how to get away with hurting other people. In other words, they think like honest people and not like thieves and predators. And let’s be clear, here: I don’t want you to teach your leaders how to think like thieves and predators. That’s a bunch of toxic garbage that needn’t take up space in people’s heads. Nevertheless, there are circumstances where “security theater” actually gets in the way of keeping people safe - and this same security theater almost always gets between congregations and the community members they are called by God to welcome and serve.

Upon receiving a call at a congregation I was surprised to learn a few things about their Sunday morning worship practices.

First - while worship began at 10 a.m. sharp - I learned that they had a practice of locking the doors to the church at 10:15 a.m. I asked why they did this and I was told it was for “safety.”
This was a pretty progressive congregation - I think they were afraid that they’d be attacked by some gun-toting reactionary during worship.
I asked whether or not they thought would-be assailants were incapable of showing up to church on time.
The reality is that locking the doors to the church didn’t make them safer - it only turned away would-be worshippers who had a hard time finding parking spots downtown.
Instead, we enhanced our ministry of greeters and ushers and trained them in how to welcome people - asking their name, providing them with a nametag, etc. The greeters would need to “miss” a part of worship in order to be available to welcome folks into the building after worship began - however their reward was knowing that they played a critical role in increasing worship attendance.
Following every new member covenant during worship we would applaud the greeters - those ambassadors who sacrificed the occasional Sunday morning worship experience in order to help strangers find their way into our sanctuary.

Following a tragic string of shootings in our community, this same church became concerned, again, about a gunman in their midst. The deacons approached me about doing an ‘active shooter drill.’ I have a lot to say about this so please keep an open mind and bear with me.

The desire to run such a drill came from, I believe, two different philosophies. The first and most obvious answer is that some church leaders were genuinely terrified of the prospect of getting shot at church. The second, however, was an impression I got from some members that, “maybe if we start doing active shooter drills people will start taking the threat of gun violence more seriously.” It was, for better or worse, politically motivated.

To be clear - the plague of gun violence in America is an ongoing catastrophe. This madness is compounded by the very real fact that we could dramatically reduce or even nearly eliminate gun deaths if our elected leaders would make some very simple changes in legislation - changes that the overwhelming majority of Americans support. Every single mass shooting - and especially those that take place on the sacred grounds of our children’s schools - is an affront to God and represents a collective failure of will.

And. Your specific chances of even being present at a mass shooting during a worship service are vanishingly small. In fact, you are 428 times more likely to be struck by lightning than witness a church shooting. [your odds of being in a church service in which a shooting occurs are at most 1 in 6,552,000 or 0.00000015 percent. see gospel coalition data compilation]

Does this mean we completely ignore the threat of church shootings? Emphatically no! Does this mean that violence in a church isn’t a profound indictment of our culture? Again, absolutely not. But emerging research is demonstrating that the trauma of participating in a mass-shooting drill is also a very real form of psychological harm - especially when it involves children. These “trainings” are often offered by unscrupulous men who make their money stoking terror in the hearts of good people and they are often based on scenes from action movies rather than any kind of real science.
I will not allow my children to participate in mass shooting drills for a number of reasons - predominantly because I don’t want them to walk into school imagining that they’re going to do anything other than learn in a safe environment. Firearm related injuries are presently the second-leading cause of childhood mortality in the United States - but these wretched tragedies are occurring overwhelmingly in the home - not at school.
And the reality is that there are, in fact, real threats to my children and parishioner’s lives that we need to prepare for.

Consider this: the odds of a child being killed in a school shooting in America are approximately 1 in 3 million. The odds of a child being killed in a motor vehicle accident are 2,820 in 3 million. The reality is that we need to spend far more resources teaching children how to fasten their seatbelts, teaching parents how to properly install car seats, and keeping drunk drivers off of our roads. Similarly in the case of drownings. All things being equal we should spend magnitudes more resources teaching children to swim than we do teaching them to “shelter in place.”
What does this mean in the context of a local congregation?
It means that while we take seriously the security of our membership - we use rational, data-based approaches toward saving lives. Not “security theater.”
A cadre of well-trained greeters and ushers who approach guests amicably and ask for their names. A relationship with local first responders. Perhaps even a course for some members of the church regarding how to spot a potential violent individual (rather than forcing the entire congregation through a traumatizing drill).
But the real threat to our parishioners is emphatically not a random gunman. It’s heart-disease, it’s addiction, it’s cancer.

As an example, on a number of occasions I’ve reached out to a local vegan club to offer “Vegan Cooking 101” classes after worship for my churches.

Don’t laugh, I’m being serious.

“But Pastor Nathan, you’re a hunter! In fact you’re never even in the pulpit during the first week of deer season!” Yes, this is true. But I also preside over your funerals and I know what kills you.

Learning to cook and eat a healthy, predominantly plant-based diet will have several beneficial impacts.
1. You’ll be healthier in general and I’ll get to spend more time on this planet enjoying your company.
2. Our church potlucks will now include more vegetarian and vegan options - which will not only increase our hospitality toward folks who follow these practices for their own philosophical reasons, but also folks who cannot tolerate lactose, or who suffer from gout, diabetes, and other diseases.
3. Vegans will find out that our church is actually a welcoming place for them and they’ll start bringing their delicious vegan food through our doors. If you don’t believe that vegan food is delicious you are in for a surprise. Take meat and dairy out of the equation and humans start to get wildly creative with their cooking and the end result is some of the best food on the planet. And it’s even good for you!

Focus on the real threats. And be clear and transparent with your parishioners. Inform them about the realities of gun violence in America.
Tell them the truth. If you own a gun, the likeliest individual to be killed by that firearm is you. If your spouse owns a gun you are at significantly higher risk of becoming the victim of deadly domestic violence. Guns in the home do not make you safer. Statistically the opposite is the case. I own and shoot many guns and never in my wildest dreams would I rely on them to defend my family. They are disassembled and kept locked in a safe separate from the ammunition. After all - we don’t put our trust in horses and chariots.

Security Theater and Homeless Guests

I saw another confusing practice once when I was asked to visit and consult on a church’s soup-kitchen ministry. This was a very ordinary “Sunday night supper for the houseless” type event - thirty minutes of worship provided by round-robin worship teams followed by a meal served by a cadre of church volunteers. I spotted a distressing amount of security theater taking place.
First - let me confess that at this point in my career I had been living out of my car for a couple of years, working predominantly with folks who were either currently houseless or housing insecure - I was, in the words of my grandma, “looking kinda rough.”
I entered the church and was greeted by a friendly smile from a kind-looking woman who sat behind a table with a sign marked “volunteers.” I walked up to the table and asked whether I ought to sign-in - I figured it would be a typical experience, sign in, get an apron and some gloves, and get to work.
“No, no,” she said gently, “the sign-in for guests is over there,” and she indicated a different table.
I was momentarily confused until I realized that they had two tables - one for “volunteers” and one for the people they considered “guests.”
It was at approximately this moment when the church’s senior minister spotted me and hurried to my side.
I asked him shortly, “how does she know whether I’m a ‘guest’ or a ‘volunteer’?” He shushed me and pulled me off to the side. This was the beginning of my understanding of what lay at the foundation of this particular ministry.
The truth was that she had looked at me and made a decision that based on how I was dressed I was probably there for a free dinner.

Does this guy look “rough” to you? I think I cleaned up just fine.

There are countless problems with this style of thinking. I could begin at the top - namely, that if Jesus Christ himself showed up at church to bless a meal he might likely be shunted off into a corner because he “looked like a homeless person.”
But there were deeper issues at hand.

Once it was sorted out that I was neither a “guest” nor a “volunteer” but rather a consultant I was ‘allowed’ to move freely throughout the event. I went into the kitchen and saw before me a common catastrophe - a group of exhausted, middle-class Christians desperately doing their best to prepare food for a hundred people.
Soaked in sweat they labored at boiling simple pasta.

When I went into the fellowship hall I saw about a hundred “guests,” casually sitting at the tables, looking idly at their hands, waiting to be served. What a mess! The reality is this: the people at work in the kitchen had probably never worked in a commercial kitchen, or a diner, as line cooks or servers or anything of the sort. They were accountants and retirees and middle-school math teachers.
Amongst the “guests” on the other hand - were dozens of former line-cooks, servers, warehouse laborers, probably quite a few folks with years of experience in restaurant work. Sitting idly, wishing they had something to do.

I asked the head of the kitchen volunteers why, on God’s earth, they weren’t recruiting (or hiring!) help from the amply qualified folks sitting there in the fellowship hall. They mumbled something about “sanitation and cleanliness requirements.” (Despair creeps in at the edges of my heart - the poor are not dirty people.)
I asked why they weren’t asking the “guests” to help with managing volunteers, setting up and tearing down tables, and leading worship. “Safety concerns,” was the response.

Christians - please listen to me. Unhoused people - whether temporarily or chronically so - do not represent a threat to your church. People who are housing insecure commit violent crimes at less than one half the rate of the average population. They are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime. There is no crowd safer than a crowd of people who are currently houseless - save for the cloud of vultures and predators that often circle such crowds looking for victims amongst them.
Now would be as good a time as any to examine why we hold so many unjustified prejudices against the poor.
cont.