After enjoying a late-night drink and walk across downtown
San Antonio with retired United Methodist bishop Will Willimon during the 2017
Festival of Homiletics, I made myself get out of bed to hear him preach the
next morning. (I would have otherwise skipped an 8:30 am service or lecture.)
The place was packed... with people sitting in the aisles and windowsills; but
I found myself a little space on the balcony floor. I couldn't see anything,
but I could hear.
At the close of the sermon, Willimon shared a story, the
kind he loves to tell. He told us he wanted his local congregation in Durham,
NC to get better connected with its neighborhood. So he asked a few of the
locals where the action was in the neighborhood. Where might he go to get the local pulse?
The answer: the bar with Drag Queen Bingo, one block from the Methodist church.
According to his source it was all the rage, and everybody went there. So one
Saturday night, Bishop Will went to bingo. He wore a tie, which made him stand
out a bit in a gay club on a Saturday night - but he was comfortable enough in
his skin to be who he was, and to mingle around with a few folks. "Hey,
I'm in the religion business, and with the church down the street." And
then he would ask folks: "What is God doing in your life?" He
heard sad stories of disappointment in
organized religion, as well as hopeful stories. More importantly, he had a lot
of fun. At the end of the evening, a
drag queen with long red velvet gloves came close to him and said, "I
respect you so much." Willimon replied, "You respect me? Why? For
being clergy?" "No," she said. "For showing up here ... and
in a tie that is 15 years out of date." In reflecting on his night at Drag
Queen Bingo, he said simply, "It was the best night I have had in my human
adventure." [1]
As I walked back to my hotel pondering this, my mind carried
me to the late 1980s to the little gulch of a town where I was appointed as
pastor in my twenties, the only church I ever served where it just didn't
really go well. I had not thought about that place in a long while. Lots of
reasons for the ministry struggles there: It was a cultural mismatch of a
pastoral appointment, and a third of the houses in town were abandoned due to a
Texas oil recession. It perhaps was not
the best idea to throw a young nerdy intellectual kind of guy into a redneck
town where most men fished or bet on their battling roosters on a Sunday
morning rather than go to a church. But someone had to serve that little
congregation.
In the few blocks between the parsonage and the church,
there was a VFW saloon: it was, according to those in the know, the social
nerve center our town. I heard that great debauchery went on there, not that I
ever walked inside to find out or even just to say hello. I doubt that any other pastor in that town
did either. As I thought about Bishop
Will dragging himself to Drag Bingo, I realized thirty years after the fact,
that I had missed the key that could have changed the ministry narrative in
that town. I should have gone down to the VFW. That would have been the game
changer there. Some years after I left
that sad little town, the church I served closed. Now I begin to wonder, "If I had simply
dared to walk in that place, and to get to know the people inside, what might
have happened next? What thing might have led to the next thing, and to the
thing after that, and to the influx of precious riffraff into the church, along
with its renewal?"
No church has much of a future, nor has it really much of a
present - if its people, and especially its leaders, aren't willing to stick
their noses into the local places of gathering that form the hub of community.
If you are a pastor, I ask you: Where is the VFW Hall or the Gay Bar in the
community where you serve? In other words, where is the hopping place where
Jesus would find the best party? Wherever it is: they could likely use a
chaplain, and certainly use a friend of Jesus.
Pastors: You are invited to find a sidekick,
and the two of you crash that place. You are correct in your suspicion that God
will surprise you there with some of the gentlest souls you ever met. So go. Be
surprised. It might just be the therapy you need after your next Council
meeting at the church.
If you are a supervisor of pastors, or you coach pastors: I
ask you, "What's the point in revitalizing a religious institution if it
is hell-bent on staying aloof from its neighborhood?＂ True
Pentecost sends Christ's people into the streets to every place where human
community converges.
Is there anyone at XYZ Church willing to get out into the
neighborhood to engage new friends and to partner with them in good things?
That is a good triage question to ask as you decide which churches and which
pastors to invest in. If the answer is no, there is really not much else we can
do for them.
At Epicenter Group, our newest associate, the Rev Paul Moon
of New York City. has developed processes for helping church people get out of
the building and build relationships in the neighborhood. If you would like to
learn more about this, we'd love to chat with you further 1:1
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[1] Story taken from my notes, scribbled furiously as he
told it. I might have corrupted a detail, but this is true to the spirit of the
telling.
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