I was reading through an article on church marketing today and it discussed the topic of gay-friendly churches.  It noted that there were various lists and collections of churches who are gay-friendly, and that the gay and lesbian community tends to gravitate towards brands and labels.  Although this is definitely true of this group and I do recognize the vagueness of the term ‘gay-friendly,’ I am stuck with one question:  Shouldn’t all churches be gay-friendly?  I mean, shouldn’t church be the place where they are most welcomed?  Shouldn’t all churches be liar-friendly? Gossip-friendly? Adulterer-friendly?  Sinner-friendly? By gosh, Me-friendly?  I realize conviction may play a part in diverting the connection, but that didn’t stop the woman at the well from being in the presence of Jesus, not to mention compelled by his compassion, right?

I want to be a part of a church overflowing with grace and unrelenting in its pursuit of costly discipleship.

Monsters under the bed. Scary movies. Things in our closets. Shadows. Fear is an essential part of who we are in our human experience. It is what we do with the unknown, particularly the unknown that we are not curious about. As a child, we wrapped ourselves in our shield of blankets, covering our heads, clinching our stuffed animals in our white knuckles, as if these measures of security would help us. We find ways to work out our fears, but often never confront them head on. As adults, we no longer rely on toy soldiers or safety blankets, but replace these things with new and improved methods of battling through our emotions. We replace a fear of failure by taking less risks. We replace our fear of intimacy by having superficial friends who do not truly know us. We replace a fear of commitments by always keeping one foot out of the door. We replace the fear of dying by seeking every way to medically prolong our life. Never do we conquer these fears, but instead find ways to avoid.

M. Night Shyamalan defines the captive nature of fear well in his film “The Village.” The Village starts off intriguingly enough, in late-nineteenth-century Covington Woods, a small settlement in the countryside of — we later learn — Pennsylvania. The villagers are isolated from “the towns” by the surrounding woods, in which some sort of deadly creatures live — we hear their howls and the crunch of their footsteps on the dry autumnal underbrush. Adventurous teenage boys play chicken with their fears, standing near the well-marked village perimeter with their backs to the woods to see how long they can endure the terror of wondering if they’re going to be eaten, but a longtime truce between the villagers and the creatures seems to holding, though they speak an awful lot about “Those We Don’t Speak Of.” If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I will ruin the ending for you now. The creatures that keep the Villagers from ever leaving are lies when one character leaves the village and finds modern day America beyond the walls. There’s not a crevice in our culture that does not seep with this sort of fear. Our advertising, our politics, our business, and our churches. I will get a little more into how fear and faith interact in another blog entry, but this is very serious in how we make decisions.

I think the one thing that Christians have learned to do better than anyone else in the world is to be fakes. We have perfected the art of con-ing people. Derek Webb, a well known musician, stated that he thinks in America, we have reduced the Christian life to becoming how well we are able to hide our sin. He also states that the best thing that could ever happen to us is that our sin be broadcast on the 5 o’clock news. That our deepest and darkest sin be televised for all to see. It has become so unbelievable cliche now for us to say, “Yes… I am a sinner.” We are finally to the point where we do recognize that we are not perfect as Christians. But, yet, it is still not ok to actually sin. Sinner is okay, but adulterer, theif, liar… these things are not okay. Jesus already knows our deepest and darkest sin. So who are we hiding from? Our sins are real, but our savior is also real. When we think our sin is small, we make our savior our to be small. Its high time we quit hiding because our culture tells us to. Let us confess and repent, and do like Alcoholics Anonymous or other groups do… “Hello, my name is Chris, and I am an adulterer.” “Hello, my name is Heather, and I am a liar.”

“Close your eyes, friend, and imagine. You’re high up in the air, in an aisle seat, looking past your neighbor and out the windo. Down below you is a mass of cloud cover looking like fresh snow, marbled, marked with divots and craggy monuments of white. Imagine that your understanding of reality is defined by this view: what you see out the window and what’s proximate to you there in the plane’s cabin. The airplane and its passengers are what you might call a small, unique closed system moving inside what appears to be a vast space with a visible boundary of white mass below.”

“Many well-meaning Christians, gathered together in various sects, present Christianity in this way. They invite you to view reality from a very small window, and they are quite certain they’re providing you with an absolutely objective view of reality. If you join them, you are expected to see as the sect sees. Failure to embrace their view of reality is sometimes commensurate with failure to be a follower of Jesus. And when people say you’re not a follower and you are, it is very hurtful - and very troubling. For sects such as these, “anything other than absolute, unqualified, mathematically certifiable certainty betrayed a soul adrift.”

“Let’s imagine some more. Get out of your seat, reach into the compartment above, and carry the yellow package to the rest room. It’s a parachute. Strap it on. Now go to the big door with the red sign, open it, and jump. When you pass through the white stuff, pull the cord.”

“As you pass through the clouds, down below, previously hidden from your view, is a world of wonder and wickedness, joy and pain, sex, truth and lies. It’s a place of story upon story where words are as plentiful as stars in the sky. And there’s land and promise. Land where God walked. Land belonging to him, promise belonging to him. It’s a place where men and women, boys and girls, either serve themsevles or serve the God of the land and the sky and all that ever was and is. This land and sea, this earth and water, is the jazz of God and humanity: order and improvisation, beauty and ashes, boundary and freedom, choice and counterchoice, mistakes and all. It is a place of storytelling and storied living.”

“When your feet touch the ground, look up. Do you see the plane? No? But it’s there, isn’t it? You know it exists; you’ve just come from there. Remember this: You know about the little sect’s story, but they don’t know about the one you just dropped into, do they? At least they don’t act like it.”

- Excerpt from New Way to Be Human by Charlie Peacock

Each month 1500 pastors a month leave because of moral reasons, burnout or contention in the church.
85% of pastors and 84% of spouses feel like they are unprepared for their position in ministry.
90% said their seminary or bible school did a fair to poor job of preparing them for ministry.
50% are so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could but have no other way of living.
70% of pastors do not have a close friend or a confidant or a mentor.
80% spend less than 15 minutes a day in prayer.
95% do not regularly pray with their spouse.
70% say the only time they are studying the word is preparing for their own sermons.
80% of pastor’s spouses feel their spouse is overworked.
40% say that they had had an extramarital affair since beginning their ministry.
50% of pastor marriages will end in divorse.
80% of Pastor’s Kids ended up having to seek profession help for depression.

Pretty scary stats. Maybe that should say something about the intimacy (or more importantly, the lack of) between a pastor and the congregation.