“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We would like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that it may take a very long time.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (hat tip: Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals)
“I hope we never become a nice church.” One of our people told me during a class one Wednesday evening.
“Why do you say that?” I responded.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t like nice churches.”
“Oh really?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why not?”
“Nice seems so superficial. Nice people ask ‘How are you doing?’, but don’t want to know the answer. Nice people will say, ‘I hope you feel better,’ but won’t offer to help. You can’t swear in nice churches. You can’t cry in nice churches. You can’t be screwed up in nice churches. I don’t want us to be a nice church.”
“Yeah”, I said, jokingly, “We should put that up on a billboard. The Vine: We Are Not a Nice Church!”
“Yeah!” he said, with unselfconscious enthusiasm, “We should!”
(We didn’t put up that billboard. Maybe we should have.)
It became one of our unoffical slogans for the next couple years.
The Vine: We Are Not A Nice Church.
We’ve made a cult out of nice in the church.
We’ve come to believe that following Jesus means being a nice person.
The problem is that Jesus was not a nice person.
Seriously. Read the Gospels. The guy could come across as a real asshole.
He turned over tables in the temple when he didn’t like what the merchants were selling.
He called the good church people of his days a bunch of whitewashed tombs.
He said that his generation was a group of spoiled children who just wanted a nice religious song and dance.
He realized that the world did not need another nice person.
Our world doesn’t need more nice churches.
Often, behind the often kitschy, sometimes cute, proper niceness of our communities lies nothing that is particularly interesting or life changing.
What the world does need is more loving churches.
Churches that will speak up against injustice, especially the injustice that they practice in their own lives, before they point fingers at anyone else.
Churches that will accept horribly messed up, broken people, just as they are, and then treat them like brothers and sisters.
Churches that will speak honestly about the doubt, disappointment, and messiness that is life.
Churches that will stop worrying more about their carpets than the people who walk on them.
Churches that will care more about feeding the hungry than what hymns they sing.
Churches that will be more concerned with loving people first than fixing their theology first.
Say, for instance, a formerly homeless man walks into a typical church one Sunday. He talks about how much he loves Jesus. He talks a lot about how much he loves Jesus. Not like a little ‘a lot’, but a lot ‘a lot’, flooding the whole group with Jesus-themed, conversational sewage that leaves everyone else gasping for space like a bunch of flopping fish.
What do nice churches do? They listen to him. Generally impatiently. They let him hijack conversations with his bazooka made of words, they let him destroy their well made small groups, kidnap prayer time (your joys and concerns will only be returned to you if you’re willing to listen to my story about this person I met on the street this last week and also applaud my newly composed rap about Jesus, which is so new I’m only now making it up on the spot!), and hijack sermons with long-form answers to unasked questions. Finally, under a veneer of tremendous niceness, they will no longer be available to give him a ride to church, will stop going to the Bible Study that he has happily commandeered, and steer as far away from his conversational miasma as possible during coffee hour.
This is what I did for the first four months after John joined our community.
I tried every polite, demi-passive aggressive trick for moderating him. I would ask him small yes or no questions. I would ask people to raise their hands if they wanted to chime in and would not call on John unless I was scraping the bottom of the conversational barrel. I would wait, like a tiger in the grass, to spring upon the first pause in his conversation, so I could cut him off and call on someone else. (Much to my frustration, it always seemed like he could talk for minutes without taking a single breath.)
I used all my small group leader magic on the other members of the group. I talked about how good it was that we accepted pople like John. I talked about how good we were at welcoming everyone, no matter how screwed up they were, (or how much they screwed up our discussion). But, sometime after our conversation about loving-not-nice, I realized that not only was letting John run his mouth bad for the group, it was bad for him as well.
We were treating him like a nuisance rather than as a brother.
One January night, one of our members finally cut him off during one of his long responses, saying, “John, it’s my turn to talk now.”
Much to my surprise, he stopped talking.
And thus began a long (and still incomplete) process of transformation.
The group served as John’s personal moderator. They would tell him to be quiet when he talked too long. They would ask him follow up questions when it seemed like he was onto something important. They would pray for him when he was struggling. They would wake him up when he fell asleep in his chair after dinner (at least sometimes, at other points, the group decided that a little twenty minute John vacation would be best for everyone).
He became more real. Little bits of real talk – real questions – real experiences occasionally unearthed themselves in the midst of his conversation. And, if he still was not a model of group process, if he would occasionally burst out in a stream of language that sounded parroted from a particularly obnoxious religious pamphlet, if he would regularly very inappropriately invite people to the Vine when it was clear they were not interested, he was growing in a way that was meaningful for him.
He didn’t stick around forever. But I rather think that someone telling him to be quiet was, if not the nicest, then perhaps the most loving thing anyone had done for him in a long time
What Do You Think?
Where do you need to work on being loving-not-nice?
Next Week: Part Ten! Stumbling Into Success
This is part two of Sean’s story.
If you haven’t read the first part, click here first.
I wish it had lasted forever.
I wish that if you asked me “How’s Sean doing today?” that I could say, “He’s doing great. He’s back in school. He’s even dating someone.”
But when you’ve been as serially abused as Sean was and when the complications from that abuse result in a cascading set of mental and physical health problems, the story often doesn’t end the way that you wish it would.
Sean’s health declined badly over the next couple years.
I was walking by the coffee shop one morning, when his friend rushed outside.
“Something’s wrong with Sean! He can’t move and half of his face is drooping!”
We called the ambulance and I rode with him to the ER.
The doctor told him to go home and rest with a hot compress. I swear I could hear him quacking on the way out of the room.
Finally, we contacted his nurse practitioner, who prescribed him a set of medications before he went home.
It was Bell’s palsy.
Six months later, he suffered another stroke and was put into a nursing home to do rehab.
We cleaned his apartment top to bottom and threw him a welcome home party, stocking his refrigerator with two weeks worth of food, so he wouldn’t have to cook.
It cheered him up, at least for the day.
However, Sean never fully regained his ability to speak or to walk. He struggled badly with depression, triggered by his physical problems. His mood and health vacillated wildly, depending on whatever toxic set of poorly coordinated chemicals his often disengaged set of doctors and nurses had put him on next. He was in and out of the hospital a couple times, and by the time he was forty, he was walking with a walker or a cane, when he wasn’t hiding in his apartment.
We all worried about him.
One day, I got a call from a friend from the coffee shop where Sean had visited all those years.
She sounded panicked.
“Guys,” she said, “I heard that Sean is dead. Did you hear anything?”
I wasn’t particularly worried at first. This was not the first time that someone had called us, panicked because they heard someone was dead, only to call back a little later when they found the person remarkably alive and kicking, a little irritated at all the panic.
However, as we tracked down the rumors, as I visited his apartment and knocked on his door, as I talked to people at his apartment building. I started to get anxious.
Finally, we ended up in the apartment of one of Sean’s closest friends.
She had the number for Sean’s mother.
She called.
She began to cry.
And then we knew: Sean had died, of a heart attack, likely brought on by the combination of medications he was taking.
It was the first death in our community. Everyone came to our house that night. We ordered Chinese and other forms of culinary prozac. One lady, who, I think, was more there for the free food than for Sean, said, “Oh! Get sorbet! And coffee ice cream! I love coffee ice cream!” (I know that loving people means not punching them, but I still wish Jesus had made an exception for that one.)
We cried, we laughed, we shared stories, we were together, which is really all you can be when something like this happens.
When everyone had finally left, dishes and silverware scattered around the house like morbid mementos, I sat down, and I cried.
We waited to get the call to do Sean’s funeral. We were Sean’s pastors after all. Everyone knew that.
The call never came.
The funeral director had been instructed to give Sean a Catholic funeral, because he hadn’t been a part of a real church.
We found out the time of the funeral and we got there early.
The funeral director helped us carve out some time during the service for sharing about Sean’s life.
A lot of people said really positive, really hollow things about Sean’s life.
Then, Sean’s therapist got up.
I had never met his therapist before, but he had been part of Sean’s life for nearly a decade, meeting with him every week through both good and difficult times.
He spoke with passion about the truth of Sean’s life, about his real trials, about his real courage and determination.
As he finished, he said, “You saved Sean’s life everyday, his family, his friends, his social workers and – the glorious people of the Vine.”
This therapist, who had counseled Sean for a decade, who knew nothing about us except by the changes he saw in Sean, knew that we, the glorious people of the Vine, had saved his life.
There’s a lot that I mourn about my time at the Vine: relationships I screwed up, the wrong calls I made, the moments that my anxiety strangled my joy.
I’ve left a trail of mistakes behind me a mile long.
Sean is not one of them.
Sean was our brother and we saved his life. We saved it everyday.
That’s a moment I’m willing to hang my hat on.
Coming Saturday! Why I Talk About My Failures
Coming Tuesday! Part Seven: Quick Everyone! Act Normal!