“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