New ways of approaching religious life
Gordy and his family came rumbling into the church campgrounds in their tan station wagon around noon, just as people from the church were stoking the fires for the big wiener roast.
Everyone was happy to see them because they had moved away from the home territory when Gordy got a better job a couple of years before. Most of the people in the congregation I was serving hadn't seen the family for months, so they eagerly gathered around the station wagon as the family came tumbling out and there was much hugging and hand-shaking. That was no surprise. The surprise was under the hood of the station wagon.
After all the greetings were exchanged, Gordy went around to the front of the station wagon and unlatched the hood. "Gotta get lunch on the table", he said with a smile.
Now the men in the group were interested. Its amazing how raising the hood of a car will draw men in droves. Gordy walked to the side of the automobile, and ducked under for a couple of minutes. We could see he was working around the manifold and prying an aluminum wrapped package away from the hot engine.
Carrying the large bundle, Gordy walked to the nearest picnic table and dropped the load in the center. Everyone gathered around, especially Gordy's children, who knew what was about to appear.
The package was unwrapped, layer after layer of aluminum foil, until the days lunch was exposed, about a 6-pound beef roast cooked to perfection by the heat from the cars manifold during their four-hour trip. Surrounding the roasted beef were carrots, potatoes and a few chunks of onion. It smelled like a feast fit for royalty, and Gordy was the king.
I tell you this parable not as a lesson on camping but rather to encourage you to think in new ways about tasks you must perform.
Gordy knew he would be arriving just at the lunch hour and that there would be no time to prepare for a good family meal. Hanging a roast from the manifold of his car's engine was a decent solution for a time management problem.
It's too bad we dont think as creatively about how to go about doing our
religious duty. I remember writing about a congregations worship service and barely mentioning the fact that the entire ritual, from opening prayer to benediction, took exactly 45 minutes. The next week the congregation and pastor were busy answering telephones as neighboring churches wondered how they kept the service under an hour.
They accomplished that tiny miracle, of course, by thinking creatively about their worship. They cut in half the length of the sermon, sang only two verses of each hymn, edited the prescribed prayers and asked choir directors to precisely limit the musical offerings to three minutes.
I wonder what would happen if we took seriously an ancient truth a sermon doesnt have to be long to be good. What if the pastor preached a seven- or eight-minute sermon at the beginning of the service, just after the opening hymn and prayer sort of an introduction to the biblical theme of the service?
Then toward the end of worship, the preacher could climb into the pulpit once again to deliver a three-minute meditation about how the Bible has intersected life during the past week.
New ways of approaching religious life have to be tested with each new generation. For instance, preaching was once the epitome of communication science. Kings and noblemen reveled in a good preacher's technique and scholarship. That was before television, movies and computers. Today it is a largely unstudied and unpolished necessity.
We don't need to eliminate preaching. We need to reinvent the medium, not the message. The heart of your religions message will stand by itself. What needs a creative approach is how your preachers carry the message to the people. Two thousand years of sameness may indicate a need for change.
Clark D. Morphew
10-4-97
