Philip K. Brockett

I’m in my post-Easter musing mode. Easter is the high point of the Christian year! On Easter we celebrate the power of life to defeat death, the triumph of love over hate, and pledge ourselves to have an undying love for God in the same way that Jesus did, no matter the cost.

This year I had a team of people working together with the goal of making this, “Our Best Easter Ever.” I’m happy to say that we did have a great Easter. We had an increase in attendance, beautiful music, (Thank you choir, musicians and soloists!) a call to action to do something for the homeless people in our community, and incredible refreshments with mimosas no less! Whoopee!  It was a great day “our best Easter ever in our five years as Central St. Matthew United Church of Christ!”

Of course, what comes next is “the Sunday after Easter” or “Low Sunday” as it’s known. And this year it really was low for us, because it was the first weekend of New Orleans Jazz Fest and it was a beautiful day. I’ve been at this “ministry thing” long enough that I know that’s the way it goes, and I take it in stride but the fluctuations in church attendance frustrate some clergy and laypeople alike. I heard of a pastor who one year on the Sunday after Easter preached a humdinger of a sermon reaming out those folks who only come to church on Christmas and Easter. At the door afterwards a parishioner shook the pastor’s hand and said, “Reverend, there was a lot of truth to what you were saying today, the only problem was that the people who needed to hear it weren’t here!”

The reality is that preaching sermons like that aren’t going to get anybody to come to church. These days there is something afoot in our culture when it comes to church attendance. I am just old enough to remember the era when church attendance awards were given in Sunday school and church. People received pins for not missing a Sunday for a whole year and some people had a chest full of pins and wouldn’t miss church for anything.

Nowadays that’s changed I recently saw the statistic that said regular church attendees go to church on average 2.6 times per month. In other words, now perfect attendance is attending church approximately 31 times a year!  Let me be perfectly clear about something I’m not interested in bemoaning these changes. No amount of tongue-clucking or appealing to the good old days is going to make people return to the church to achieve perfect attendance pins. I am, however, concerned because while every Easter we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, it seems that the church is getting buried!

That is why I am interested in making the church, “the community of faith,” more meaningful in the lives of people.

• I’m interested in finding the key to making the church so vital in people’s lives that they can’t stay away.
• What I’m interested in is finding ways to change church so that it serves the needs of people rather than trying to change people to serve the needs of the church.

And I need your help. What are your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions about how this can be done?

So, answering for yourself and only for yourself and nobody else; refraining from all criticism of how “other people” ought to do this or that, or that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. (I’ve heard it all before and so have you and it doesn’t do anybody any good.)

Answer these two questions.

1. Why do you go to church? If you do that is. Or if you don’t, explain why you don’t go to church.
2. What would make being part of church more meaningful to you?

I am interested to hear your thoughts and feelings, let the conversation begin.

EXTEEEEENDED FAMILY

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a fiercely independent people. We celebrate our nation’s birth, its very existence, on Independence Day. That’s what my Father called it. However, my father didn’t just speak about independence, he lived by the idea that you take care of yourself and your own. In his words, he wasn’t a joiner. He didn’t belong to the Kiwanis or the Rotary club, instead, he worked and I guess I am the same way. I’m not much of a joiner. I have very few friends and I work hard to take care of myself and my own.

That’s why I was so taken by an acquaintance who recently told me that every weekday morning her sister, who is a single mom, drops off her young niece at 6:00 a.m. My friend babysits her niece, feeds her breakfast and then drives her to school before coming to work herself. Wow! I thought to myself, that is a commitment. That is really being family. Without Aunties help her sister couldn’t work and if her sister couldn’t work then that little girl wouldn’t have the basic necessities of life. As I talked more about this with my friend I learned that this is the way her family functions. My friend herself was partially raised by her grandmother, and her grandmother continues to raise generations of children.

Of course, there are reasons for this different way of being between my family and my friends family. There are socio-economic differences, there are cultural differences and there are racial differences too. But there is another difference also I live under the illusion that I can be independent and my friend does not. She knows from observation and experience that in this world that nobody purely makes it on their own. It takes a web of people supporting us and us supporting them for any of us to succeed. It takes a gaggle of voices cheering us on when we do well and chiding us when we are slacking off to keep us moving forward in life. We can live under the illusion of independence for just so long, but eventually life has a way of breaking us down to the point that we need, really NEED somebody else’s help or else we won’t survive.

Maybe this is why I am so drawn to the church because the church at its best is a family. Its a bigger family than my biological family. Its a more diverse family than my biological family. The church affords me to rub shoulders with people like my friend who have different experiences and different expectations than I do. I can hardly imagine asking someone to babysit my daughter at 6 am in the morning but now I know someone whom I could ask to do just that if I needed to because now I know that for my friend babysitting at 6 am is what being family is all about. And conversely, I probably have experience and skills which I could share with my friend which are outside the realm of her nuclear family. This is the benefit of the larger, more diverse, more inclusive family of the church. It is interesting to me that social scientists tell us that one of the greatest predictors of our future life is who we surround ourselves with today. So find yourself a church that is filled with people who are positive and encouraging. Find yourself a church with people in it who have accomplished some of the same things that you want to accomplish in life and don’t be shy about expressing your needs because the church is intended to be the family that God intends for us to have.