Spiritual Hiccups - This Little Light of Mine

The other day, Diana Butler Bass posted a picture of a church sign on Facebook  It was one of those signs that had the church's name with a space below where messages could be written with black, plastic letters.  In this space it read:

TRADITIONAL WORSHIP

THE WAY

YOU REMEMBER IT

I'm not sure the sign itself requires much comment.  But it does make me ponder what we mean when we talk of letting our light shine, when we use terms such as "evangelism" and "witness." 

A church I served once held and "Bring a Friend" Sunday.  We had a big lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the worship service, and, in terms of numbers, the day was a big success.  But as we looked at the pew pads where people write in their names and, if they are so inclined, contact information, we made an interesting discovery.  Every single guest that Sunday left contact information was a member of another church.  People had indeed invited their friends, but it had not involved reaching out to anyone who was different from them.  If some of those guests were not happy at their current church, it might had been recruitment, but it surely wasn't evangelism.

We tried to rectify this when we later held another "Bring a Friend" event.  We made it clear that this was a chance to reach out to people who were not part of a church.  Our members heard us and complied.  They did not invite friends from other churches.  Unfortunately, this meant that, for the most part, they did not invite anyone.  From an attendance standpoint, our second "Bring a Friend" Sunday looked like any other.

I don't mean to be hard on the members of this church.  I suspect that many of them did not have many friends who were not Christian.  But they were also folks who had grown up in a very "churched," Southern culture.  They tended to view the community around them as Christian.  And so evangelism for them was mostly a matter of competition with other churches.  If you think that most everyone is Christian, then churches are like grocery stores, and the only real question is which one they will go to.

And so we seek to serve our niche market.  We hold "traditional worship the way you remember it" or some other version of church for folks with similar tastes to us.  But in a culture that is no longer Christian in almost any sense of the word, catering to folks with similar tastes looks more and more like hiding our light from any but those who know just where to look for it.

"This little light of mine; I'm gonna let it shine..."  for people who look like me, act like me, and like the same things I like.

Click here to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.