The Elevator Speech

August 31, 2008 by RevLurch.

The Elevator Speech

From Bill Cosby sketch about Noah

Narrator:  I just wondering, what would be the effect of an Ark on the average neighbor?

Now, here’s a guy going to work, 7 o’clock in the morning Noah’s next door neighbor and he sees the Ark.

Neighbor:  Hey! You up there!

Noah:  What you want?

Neighbor:  What is this?

Noah:  It’s an Ark

Neighbor:  Aha.  You wanna get it outta my driveway?  I gotta get to work.  Listen, what this thing for anyway?

Noah:  I can’t tell you.  Hahahahaha!

Neighbor:  Well, I mean can’t you give me a little hint?

Noah:  You wanna a hint?

Neighbor:  Yes, please

Noah:  How long can you tread water?  Hahahah!

 
It loses something in print but the idea comes through I think.  Noah has a call from God that’s got to look really strange to those who are not privy to Noah’s conversation with God.  He’s building this big old boat in the middle of a driveway with no water to be found.  I imagine he got a lot of questions and probably had enough of them.  Bill Cosby portrays Noah as sarcastic with his comment, “How long can you tread water?” 

Fast forward to the 21^st century and a call from God still looks pretty strange.  None of us are building Arks in our driveways but we are asking strange things of people like getting up early on Sunday morning instead of sleeping in and studying centuries old writings and claiming they have importance for today.  We are celebrating a sacrament that makes the claim that we are eating and drinking the body and blood of our God.  We claim that somehow water and Word makes a difference in our life, even if that event happened before we can remember.  We are a strange people.

It’s tempting to get a little sarcastic like Noah and just blow people off.  A colleague suggested asking the question to folks outside the faith, “How’s that [life] working for you?”  I’ll bet the answer most times is “Just fine, thank you.”  Just like I can imagine Noah’s neighbor answering, “I can tread water just fine and for long enough.”  Those answers come because the folks answering don’t realize what they are missing.

They don’t know what their missing because we haven’t shared it with them.  Oh, we may have shared the annoying stuff that happens at church:  the sermons that go too long because the pastor missed one, the council meetings that are boring, the new hymn that I just didn’t like.  We forget to share the challenge of living a life of faith, the leadership of those who have shown us the way and the support from the community when life spirals out of control.

Kiwanis members are encouraged to work on an “elevator speech.”  This is a quick synopsis of what your club does in the community and why you are in Kiwanis that can be shared in an elevator when someone asks.  Do you have an elevator speech about your faith?  It doesn’t have to be complicated.  It does have to be short and to the point.  When people ask, they are not looking for the whole story, they just want the highlights.  Here’s my elevator speech:

I became a Christian because my parents and my community led me to faith through their words and deeds.  I remain a Christian because over and over God proves himself to be faithful.  When I am lost, he leads me to where I need to be.  When I am found, God leads me to bigger and better then I could ever be on my own.  In the community of faith I find evidence of God’s power and wisdom that sustains me and challenges me to things that are greater than me.

 

What’s your elevator speech?

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I can tell my grandkids…

August 13, 2008 by RevLurch.

I got to see this guy do this.  I confess I’ve never really followed swimming but I happened to turn on the Olympics the other day and saw this guy swim with his teammates in one of the relays.  He is something special as an athlete.  Mitch Albom has a great article in the August 13, 2008 Detroit Free Press.  One paragraph that caught my attention was Mitch’s description of Phelps on the medal stand between races the morning before.

How does he stay that calm? Wouldn’t you want to race into the locker room? Wouldn’t you be speeding off at the last mention of “home of the brave …”? This after all is your history, your legacy, your chance. You’ve waited a lifetime.

So what’s a few more minutes, I guess? Phelps, rather than running off, circled around the deck, threw flowers to his mother, posed for photos with the other swimmers. Eleven minutes to his race. Ten minutes. Plates falling here. Plates falling there.

 If you get a chance read the whole article.  It made my morning.

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Update on EMT-B

August 12, 2008 by RevLurch.

Forgot to post about my National Registry results.  I passed the first time through the test and received my license from the state June 27, 2008.  I’ve been voted as a probationary member of Troy Township EMS and have been practicing as an EMT-B for the past month.  I still have a lot to learn but if feels good to have accomplished this goal and now it is on to more learning and serving in this vocation.

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This is a pretty cool video

August 12, 2008 by RevLurch.

Thanks to Daisy for emailing this link to me and to Crystal for sharing it on her blog.

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A Spiritual Re-awakening

August 5, 2008 by RevLurch.

I’ve made it a point over the last couple weeks to begin re-reading some books that I have found thought provoking and helpful in parish ministry. I am re-reading because I want to refresh why these books were so helpful. One of the reasons is that they challenge me in my call as a leader in a congregation. The first book I picked up was Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. Real quickly, on page 26, David strikes right at the heart of where I have let myself fall short. In the section titled “Too Much Masculine Spirit or Feminine Spirit Leads to Spiritual Abuse he writes:

A church with too much masculine spirit succumbs to legalism. It’s all about performance–what you do for God. There’s often a pastor who rules the congregation with an iron fist. There are silly rules, frustrating rituals, and simplistic black and white answers that don’t work in the real world. It’s about fear, not grace. Salvation is a free gift but everything else must be earned.

A legalistic church can foster horrific abuse. I have a friend who was being physically and verbally abused by her husband. She went to the elders of the church for help. These men read her Scriptures and accused her of “being under the influence of a spirit of rebelliousness.” They told her to “go home and submit to your husband.” They did not rebuke the man; he continued to enjoy his position in the church.

Since too much masculine spirit has the potential to create this kind of abuse, one might think the solution is to reject the masculine in favor of the feminine spirit. Yet this leads to another kind of abuse I call “Velvet Coffin Christianity:” show up on Sunday, participate in comforting rituals, listen to a pabulum sermon of familiar truths; then go home and forget all about your faith until next Sunday. Velvet Coffin Christianity is rampant in America today. After Cynthia Woolever and Deborah Bruce surveyed more than one million churchgoers, they reported that “half of all worshippers say they are not growing in their faith.” I suspect the true figure is 75 to 80 percent; after all, would you admit to a pollster that you were not growing in your faith?

Legalism makes the headlines, but Velvet Coffin Christianity is the real cancer in the church today. Its key characteristic is comfort. Everyone is so nice to each other. And we choose a church based on how comfortable it makes us feel. I wish I had a dollar for every conversation I’ve heard like this one:

Corrine: Why did you choose First Church, Mary?

Mary: I’m so comfortable here. Everyone is so nice to me and the kids. The pastor is so nice.

Men gag on this kind of religion. It’s angel food cake, soft, spongy, and unsatisfying. It does not reflect the wildness of Jesus. Everywhere Christ went, He created an uproar and discomfort. He made it a point to insult people (Matt. 23:13-39). He even called his best friend “Satan” (Mark 8:33). (That was a horrendous insult, akin to calling a Holocaust survivor “Hitler.”) Although He comforted the needy, an encounter with Jesus was often an uncomfortable experience, especially for religious people.

Is Velvet Coffin Christianity really abuse? Yes, just as legalism is abuse. People don’t see it as such because it’s not sensational or salacious. It doesn’t make good gossip. It feels so nice. But it’s abuse nonetheless. Churches are comforting Christians to death, because the feminine spirit has taken over and the masculine spirit has withdrawn. In time, so do men.

I included that rather long quote because that gets to the heart of what has been gnawing at me now that I am three years into parish ministry. My wife calls my Fire/EMS work my “guy time.” Why is that work “guy time” and the church not? Murrow puts it well “the feminine spirit has taken over.”

We are so afraid of “abuse” that we in the church abuse with a “Velvet Coffin.” Christian churches aren’t dying because the Gospel is irrelevant to today’s society, the Church has become abusive. We “proclaim” a message that asks everything, and then say “O never mind, not really for you, just go about your business.” We don’t expect anything of anybody except to be “comfortable.”

When Dr. Kent Hunter visited our congregation, he said much the same thing. If we’re about making people comfortable, we will not reach the unchurched. We have to be willing to make people uncomfortable and do some out of the box kind of stuff. In other words, take risks.

A few months ago I used this video as a sermon illustration:

 

I went on to say that we need to be squirrels. It’s the same idea really. We spend so much time making ourselves comfortable in church that we forget that there’s a mission to do that calls us to be uncomfortable. Because it isn’t about us. It’s about making sure that others hear the message of Jesus Christ. It’s about us fulfilling His call for us to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

I recommend David Murrow’s book to you. He has lots of good stuff in there, encouragement as well as challenge. I’m looking forward to continuing my reading and “re-finding” insights for fulfilling Christ’s call for our ministry both here in our neighborhood, and the world over.

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