A Vision Captured in a T-shirt

A couple of years ago I discovered a t-shirt on the web. I must confess that I stole the design and we had numerous shirts made. It usually stirred controversy. Often we were stopped by people who were doing double takes. The shirt read, “Don’t Go to Church”. The next line explained why a church would say this as it challenged, “Be the Church!”

Not only did it draw attention in the community but within our church as well. My challenge to be an outward focused church continues to this very day. It is not something that seems to come naturally, especially to the folks in our church that have a strong church background. Fortunately or maybe unfortunately, depending on how you look at things, most of our folks are homegrown and eat this up. Despite the struggle to keep this in the forefront we seem to be successful. We have had events that drew as many as a thousand people even though we are a small church. In all this “success” as far as I am aware of, we have yet to have the first person join our church from the community because of an event. But then again that isn’t the reason we do it (despite the pastor’s desire to grow the church numerically).

More interesting though is the back of the t-shirt. My wife came up with a comical saying that was as much a description of who we were as it was of who our target outreach was for. It read, “slightY irregulaR folkS”. This seems to have become our calling as a church. Many are proud of this title. A few, I believe are offended or at least embarrassed by it. One long time Christian who has recently joined us pronounced rather disgustedly, “This isn’t a church. It is a mission!” Our sending organization, the Vineyard has declared us (by our size) a mission church. I really don’t see us being anything but that, and my statement may be a prophetic pronouncement. We have about a hundred people as regularly part of our church but our attendance swings wildly between 25 and 75 folks on a Sunday morning. As common, I will have another 10 to 20 folks as part of weekly meetings or pastoral contacts but they often don’t seem to be able to overcome the barrier they face at 9:30 AM on a Sunday morning. The same dear Christian is quite verbal about our outreach focus saying, “What do we think we are, a government agency handing out food?” or “Do we think we are a counseling center trying to help people we aren’t qualified to help?” Yet we continue to follow our t-shirts.

Ironically, we don’t seem to get any criticism from other churches, especially concerning us stealing their people. The pastors association does wonder if I am saved, but not only are we not “stealing” their folks, we are getting calls all the time to either take in someone they don’t want (usually from members of these churches, not the pastors) or someone who is in distress because of the rejection by Christians. It usually comes to us in the form, “We have someone who I think would do really well in your church.” Refer to the back of our t-shirt for a more detailed description of this type of person.

I really am not sure how a couple of upper middle aged people ended up with a rock band, sloppy casual, take anyone type church but that is what we have and we love it. We are a family, a people of God, a body of Christ, or as Mother Teresa would say, “You can touch the sick and believe, or you can touch the leper and believe, that is the body of Christ you are touching, but it is more difficult when these people are drunk or shouting to think that this is Jesus in that distressing disguise.” In our case, we too are the sick, the leper (outcasts of the traditional church) as we touch these folks.