All Jumbled Up

The thing about being away from my blog for so many days is that there has been a whole bunch of stuff I'd like to write, but couldn't get to. And now some of it is no longer timely. (Like my thoughts on Valentine's day, for instance. The world has commented on it and moved on.)

So I've got this whole jumble of stuff that I could write about. (I typed "writhe" just now and had to correct it. Wonder if that means anything?) Its all clogged up in the writing orifice and in need of a plunger. So I'm going to plunge in as it were, and just see what happens.

First, I want to point out that the writers I mentioned in my last post are not my fellow bloggers. They are a group of far flung free-lancers I manage at work. (I use that word very loosely, since I'm not much of manager.) Those folks contribute technical articles to the two magazines I edit. We pay them pretty well, so we're supposed to get stuff we can print. But I spend a great deal of time rewriting what some of them submit these days, and I find it very frustrating. Its one of several reasons why I haven't had time to pursue my own writing, here.

Second, we had the largest group that we've had in a long time at our Thursday night unHome Group, on one of the wintery-est evenings in quite a while (two Weeks ago, now). There was a warm fire in the fireplace, and everyone was bundled up in sweaters, laughing, wise-cracking and horsing around. I took a place next to Keith in front of the fireplace and let the heat radiate into every inch of me. It was just so Norman Rockwell, I finally began to relax. I had been in a minor panic not a half-an-hour before, trying, for the nth time that week to come up with something for the group to do. It was my turn to lead and I had scoured the Bible, looking for an appropriate passage to for us to discuss. Nothing had jumped out. I had been reading in Hosea, but that seemed a bit bleak. Several times during the week I had seized upon a passage, briefly, then thought better of it.

All that was totally unnecessary, of course. No one in the unHome Group would care even if I showed up and said, "Sorry guys. Just couldn't come up with anything. Let's just do whatever." It's been done. And this group can do "whatever" till dawn like a symphony. But I wanted to find something. I wanted us to grasp some more of this thing we call the Christian life.

The reason? I think we've stumbled on to something, this crazy unHome Group. We began as an official Home Group at a local church five or six years ago. A number of people have come and gone over the years (one year we gathered to help someone move in or move out about once a month!) but there's a core group that has been together for the entire time.

We're no longer an "official" group at that church. It's a long story, but ultimately we got to the point where no one in the group wanted to have the job of the Official Home Group Leader and attend the Home Group Leaders Meetings at the church as our official representatives. So our status is now unofficial: Our little leaflet was taken off the church "Welcome" rack. No one is given a map to our place of meeting. We are no longer mentioned in the announcements or the bulletin on Sunday morning. In fact, less than half of us still attend there. Several of us have moved on to other churches or are looking, and some of us are, at least for now, what has come to be called post-congregational. Lest you think we're some kind of fringe group, let me just say that we count among us some of the most dedicated, hard-working church leaders and church members I've met in a lifetime of experience with the church. Several have sat on church boards multiple times. Two led a church for over a year as unpaid, lay leaders when the paid guy had to leave, handling all the "stuff," including preaching and counseling. Several helped lead a healing mission to the U.K. and have taught on healing for years. Most of us have led small groups and been on various core leadership teams of one kind or another. Several work for mission-sending agencies. Several others have recently returned from long-term missions work. All of them, without exception, love God and seriously want to follow Jesus. But in the sense that the institutional church tends to think about it, we're now officially leader-less.

No, we haven't quite gone the way of the Shakers and Quakers. We don't just sit and wait. Although, sitting silently and waiting is an important part of what we sometimes do. We have some rudimentary organization: Each week, someone has the task of leading our worship time, and someone else leads a discussion -- or rather, reads a passage of scripture and asks a provocative question or two. And then we dive in. And someone else brings some sort of snack. Rick keeps our calendar, so we know who's volunteered for what. Sometimes we don't get it right (see "whatever" above.) But if we don't, we don't freak out or wonder if we've Missed God's Will or we're Backsliding.

We've all been there and done that. Along the way, we've seen it all and got caught up in or dabbled in most of the Movements that have swept through The Church, including the stuff that's currently debated: Church Growth, Seeker Sensitive, Church-as-a-Business, Emergent. Truth is, that most of us are ... well, just a little tired of it all at the moment. Phyllis probably said it best. We're submergent. Off the map. Unplugged. Underground. We think we like it that way.

We're a church of refugees. We've accepted our status as strangers and sojourners on the earth. We're in recovery. Recovery from Churchianity: We still struggle with Getting it Right. We still worry that we're Not Good Enough. But less so. Grace is beginning to penetrate all that. The Holy Spirit still shows up. Healing is happening. And there is that camaraderie that one sees in soldiers who have been to war and know that it is hell. And know that what they fight for is each other.

In fact we were joking Thursday night about whether we were now a "cult." We can joke about it because, of all the groups any of us has ever been a part, I'll wager this one is the most unlikely to become a cult. Cults are all about defining you through conformity. Rules, written and (often) unwritten determine your beliefs and set the standard for your behavior. There are "ins" and "outs." About the only rule we've got is that one sacred commitment that now characterizes American Armed Forces units: "No one gets left behind."

We're fiercely committed to that idea precisely because The Church has left so many bodies in its wake. When you've been a church leader as long as some of us have, you know that's true. You see behind the veil. Phyllis the other day called it Collateral Damage. It's that high-sounding euphemism highly placed officials use when civilians get killed or maimed because they got caught in the cross-hairs as the guns are aimed at The Enemy. But its the wrong term, actually. What the Church has done for centuries is shoot its own soldiers.

That's not my opinion. It's an undeniable fact: Many of what some segments of The Church call "saints" were not martyred by the Roman Legions, or Emperors or mobs of pagan unbelievers. They were killed by the Church itself, while it was acting in its official capacity. Take for instance the folks who printed the Tyndale Bible in England -- the mighty prophetic visionaries who took the first steps to secure for us the right to have our own copy of the Scriptures in our own tongue? The Church executed them as heretics.

Yes, I know. The rack, garotte, burning stake and drowning stool are no longer part of the ecclesiastical tool set (thank the separation-of-church-and-state folks for that), but for every acknowledged martyr celebrated now for his or her holiness, there are thousands of ordinary folks in the pews, to this day, who suffer a silent death of the soul, unsung, unfed, uncared for, regaled with scripturally adorned admonitions that basically add up to "get healed by getting with it and getting to work," traded as commodities by pastors whose job has unfortunately become the building of the more attractive pens in which to corral the other guy's lost sheep. Success comes to him who invents or at least jumps in front of the newest fad (Prayer of Jabez, anyone? Health and Wealth Gospel? "Dream Teams" ... sorry folks, I just gotta be honest, here) or manages to wring the biggest building out of his parishioner's pocketbooks, or has the musicians with the hottest CD, or hosts the most spectacular trips to the Holy Land, or the biggest Prophecy Conference or Leadership Seminar or whatever it is that becomes a substitute for sitting and listening and crying with and helping and healing and nurturing, and praying for, and loving and laughing with INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE who need someone to be WITH THEM and NOT DESERT THEM and WALK WITH THEM and ENCOURAGE THEM and meet their practical needs if they can't, day after day after day, without giving up, and without all the fanfare and hoopla. Somewhere, somehow, that essential task so easily gets lost, all jumbled up in the mad dash to reach The Goal, to get in line with the New Teaching, to top the last Big Event.

What people really need from a church is as simple as one, two, three:

1) Pick me up.
2) Don't drop me.
3) Get me to my destination.

Something our little unsung unpublicized unHome Group is learning to do very well -- without programs, buildings, sound equipment, big budgets and, frankly, without paid staff.

Church is wherever you find it. More about the three next post.