vocational welcome.

i have a shelf of books in my office that all deal with the same subject. i’m sure that i could quite easily sum up all that these writers had to say in a brief, 5-page essay. but then, of course, the clever cover illustrators wouldn’t have made a dime, and the authors would have had oodles of free time (which they might have used to read the books they were essentially re-writing and marketing to the same audience).

[i should confess here that i'm a huge ecclesiastes fan. this influences much of my opinion on anything marketed as "new." but i digress.]

my vocational position demands that i spend significant time thinking on hospitality, welcome and connection to the local church. before i even came on staff, i was asked to read a book called “first impressions.” initially, i thought it was a joke, testing to see if i actually agreed with the form that their welcome functions celebrated (a function of the church would be to make people feel welcome, and a form might be smiling and saying, “hi” at the front doors). the forms that were celebrated in the book DID make me say, “wow!” as the cover promised. unfortunately, however, my “wow” left a little vomit in the mouth. i just can’t get with the idea of having volunteer valet attendants at church.

so i shared my honest feedback after reading the book, and they laughed, and they agreed, and they hired me.

but over a year later, i’m still being offered titles for my … i don’t know, edification? i’ve gotten “beyond the first visit: the complete guide to connecting guests to your church,” “fusion: turning first-time guests into fully-engaged members of your church,” and “serving as a church usher/greeter,” just to name a few. maybe i’m doing a bad job. but i don’t really think that’s it. i think it may have something more to do with the fact that i’m an emergent personality working within a non-emergent church.

so, for the time being, i’m fighting an itch to withdrawal from vocational ministry and immerse myself in some sort of community organizing (damn that barack obama for offering such cool opportunities at such inopportune times!). instead, i’m praying that God would make me a good learner, willing to set aside my judgments and listen to what others are doing.

it’s in that vein that i grudgingly picked up “beyond the first visit” and found something i really enjoyed: an invitation to consider the emergent church, this 18-34 year-old segment of the population who is turned off by mechanical processing at the doors to the church. yay! i’ve decided that it might be the second book on welcome & hospitality worth reading (the first is actually one of my all-time favorite books - christine pohl’s “making room: recovering hospitality as a christian tradition“).

of course, one of my pet peeves with ALL welcome books has to do with the fact that there is so much emphasis placed on attracting folks to our church building. correct me if i’m wrong, but i don’t remember jesus setting up shop and waiting for folks to drop by, neither do i remember him commanding, “therefore, invite people to your building and figure out how to assimilate them into your church.” but perhaps my translation has misguided me …

i guess all i’m really saying is that i’m struggling with feeling this desire to move outside the walls of this building, to challenge our entire church to welcome as if they were receiving Jesus himself in all realms of their lives, to quit making our church so building- and staff-dependent and to raise up leaders who will be obedient to the work that God is doing in them and through them. i dream of belonging to the kind of church that champions the ideas of its people, that … actually, this is all for tomorrow’s post. i’ll get to it then. thanks for sticking with me till now :)