THE CONEY ISLAND FACTOR (7/4/10)

I write this on an Amtrak train returning from a 4th of July weekend with my young adult son in New York City.  We are headed to DC for fireworks tonight before he flies home tomorrow.  He and I had great fun in New York.  I had never seen Times Square at 2 am, but when you travel with a 21-year old, you shift into a slightly different time zone.

Yesterday, after we watched the Yankees toast the Toronto Blue Jays (in about 97 degrees), we noticed that our subway train back to Manhattan was headed ultimately to Coney Island.  Neither he nor I had ever been to Coney Island, but we had read all kinds of stories and seen movies about it - so we said, “Let’s just stay on the train all the way to the beach.”

About ninety minutes later (we were riding the local) we arrived in this large railway terminal on the lower coast of Brooklyn, with thousands of people pouring out of trains onto the beach and into the amusement parks of Coney Island. 

I recall my father commenting, in my childhood, how he found the people-watching so good at Six Flags and Disneyland.  Well, Six Flags can just move over!  If there is better people watching anywhere on this planet than at Coney Island on Fourth of July weekend, I want to know about such a place!

Trying to describe Coney Island without pictures and sounds and smells is beyond my word-skill.  The costumes.  The occasional lack of costuming where more was urgently needed.  The wrinkled Muslim grandmother wrapped head to toe, on the sand alongside her grand-daughters in bikinis. The food, the beer, the carnival games, the freak show where you pay a few dollars to see the two headed snake and the world’s shortest woman (we passed on that), the hundreds of Puerto Ricans on the boardwalk, with music blaring, all waving the PR flag in a patriotic celebration a bit different than what you get in small-town Ohio.  Fat people.  Skinny people.  Every race of people (after all this is Brooklyn!), and almost no place left to sit on the beach or even walk to the water - so many people. 

I found myself playing a mental game that I sometimes play in airports when I am delayed.  The game: Find people whom you can imagine sitting next to you in church next Sunday.  I had thousands and thousands of folks around me, and I could not find many whom I could imagine at my church with me.  When we got back to Soho, I could fit just about everyone around me imaginatively into my church.  But Jesus didn’t tell us to stop at the East River.  Jesus’ parable of the banquet invitations and his Great Commission are but two of the reasons that we have to take seriously the task creating a place within his Church for all the people out there on Coney Island.  (Most of them are a lot easier to reach than the monied crowd in Soho anyway.)

I spend all my professional time now either helping to create new churches or to revision existing churches so that we can create a welcome spot where all the folks on Coney Island can hear Jesus’ Good News in terms that engage them and touch their hearts. 

The next time you are in a conversation with church people about why we start new churches or new worship services when the ones we have are not full, tell them about Coney Island.  Or better yet, catch the D Train and take them to see for themselves!

The Coney Island factor is what will keep me in this work until the day I die.  Jesus died for all the folks on Coney Island. And we who are the leaders of Jesus’ movement are clearly not keeping up with the challenge of making space for them all.  Work to be done!