We ended the summer of 2024 with two weeks in Italy and Croatia. It was a memorable trip in ways beyond what I can count here – including especially the moment when we missed the right exit off a traffic circle south of Florence and the Google woman took our rented Fiat on a goose chase up a hill into an ancient Tuscan village down a cobblestone alleyway so narrow that we had to fold down the rear view mirrors to fit through. At the top of the alley we met two young Italian men, whose truck had broken down headed in the opposite direction – and now we were both stuck. The Google woman sent them on the same route and they broke their clutch trying to get out. A local Florentine man with infinite Italian patience figured how to get us out of the bind. I fear, however the truck may have needed to be repaired onsite, and that the young men spent the night there. I am told by ranking persons in our household that I shall never again be allowed to rent a car and road trip across Italy.
But that is not really what I wanted to talk about. Half of the trip was not on land, but a cruise, from Rome to Venice. We decided to take a smaller ship this time, on the Azamara line, expecting only 700 passengers. In fact, the ship was only about 60 percent full – there were 450 passengers, about 8 percent of the mob we encountered on our last cruise out of Florida. It was a welcome respite from the crazy of large ship cruising with masses of people. All good, so far!
But this particular ship was a charter. Meaning that a particular travel company booked the whole ship. This company has been going for less than ten years, but they have accumulated an entourage of older persons who basically sign up for every trip they make, and pay large sums of money to do so. In short, a good core of the passengers knew each other very well – and they reminded me of a small church. When we were welcomed on the first evening, the owner of the travel company greeted these folks by first name like they were his family. They passed out special prizes to cruisers who had taken multiple trips with the company. They shared all sorts of good memories about riverboat journeys and safaris. Some of the families traveled multi-generationally, with Grandma in tow. They had developed inside jokes and shorthand for things. In the evenings they (we?) had parties. One night (near Venice) the evening party was a Masquerade theme. The 80 or so groupies were all dressed in their clever costumes, while the rest of us watched curiously.
About half the people on the ship just did their own thing, including us. We had not come on this journey to be inducted into a special society of travel fellows. Even though they evangelized us (seeking to sell future trips along the way), we were just looking to see some great cities in Europe. And honestly, we did not care whether or not we ever saw this group of people again. Don’t get me wrong – they seemed lovely. But we did not take this trip to join their fraternity.
All of this has caused me to reflect on the experience of people who are looking to enliven their spiritual journeys, and who decide to book a Sunday or two with a church in worship. Hopefully we take them on a robust journey, with relevant reflection on great biblical texts and soulful music and liturgy. Hopefully, they find thin space and discover God in fresh ways. All good, so far!
But then we seek to corral them into the Fellowship Hour. And I suspect they sometimes feel like I felt on the ship in Europe. The coffee is nice and a few people are friendly – but they may not have come in order to join a small community of characters who seem to know each other’s business. (There are plenty who visit churches more to discover a sense of neighborhood than to connect with the Eternal. But there are a lot of others!)
There are the people who refuse to fill out the contact card, the people who walked in the door because they have hit rough waters in life or because they are seeking to discern who God is and what God has to do with them… let’s remember, we exist for so much more than recruiting them to join our little fraternal organizations.
We exist to offer them Christ, to offer ways forward in life rooted in ancient spiritual wisdom. We exist to join with them, as they invite us, on their spiritual pilgrimage – and not to convince them to join ours!
Last New Years, my local church bought some ads on a radio station. I wrote the text of the ads. The radio man wrote the first draft, and he didn’t fully get us, so I updated what he wrote, and then I used Chat GPT to upgrade what I wrote – we ended up with some good ads. But the best line in the ads came from the AI – “You don’t have to do your spiritual journey solo – we would love to come with you!” I would not have come up with that in a hundred years. It isn’t about us. It isn’t about our cool little band of merry disciples and all our ministry committees. It is about Christ, and about being present to others who are seeking Christ.
And, holy community will form organically along the way, of course.
In fact, the cruise groupies were so happy to see one another, that the other 80 percent of us were essentially invisible. That is a problem.
But our bigger challenge is not hospitality or the lack thereof. It is a fundamental amnesia about the reason that churches exist. The majority of churches that I see are failing on both fronts – both in hospitality and in paradigm – acting as if their church is a fellowship group.
We missed church for a couple Sundays, but we learned a whole lot from the little “church group” on the Azamara Pursuit.
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