chain restaurants and church people: a decades-old alliance
I pretty much haven’t gone to church all summer, such has been my frame of mind. But the thing is, I may not be up for church or any Christianing, but I still care about a lot of people who happen to be Christians and church-goers, and I want to spend time with them. Just not in the pew. Y’know.
Today I skipped the service but did join the crew for a trip to Boston Pizza for lunch. I got to catch up with Elf, who just finished her first week as a full-fledged grade one teacher, give GoodFaith a welcome-home hug (she summers in Australia) and make fun of G-Knit.
I think I’m going to attend the weekly bible studies; we’ll see how they go. The book we’re doing (because, in our culture, small groups must always “do” a book) is Blue Like Jazz, a tome which I read (what seems like) long ago and which I didn’t find terribly revolutionary; that said, its effect on others less ornery than I may be quite different.
Steev is now the de-facto “leader” of the college/career-age group at First Church of Suburbia, and he mentioned that existing C&Cers should seek out any other members of our age group (currently, 18-25) and invite them to events. He meant eligible members within the church, but someone thought he meant people from outside the church. Thus began a semi-comedic riff on recruiting, with Steev saying he expects us to bring five new people to each event and Matty K laughing at that, and then Steve saying, Why are you laughing? You don’t think I’m serious? and then me saying, We knew you weren’t serious because five is too small a number, we’ll be bringing TEN each! And then Steev said maybe we could get points for bringing people.
And then I said, well, you would have to give point values to certain types of people.
First example: someone who already goes to church - 1 point. Someone who was raised in the church - 2 points.
Naturally, it goes on from there.
Virgin - 1 point
Non-virgin - 3 points
Catholic - 3 points
Anglican - 2 points
Agnostic - 5 points
Athiest - 10 points (highest value)
Someone who’s served prison time - 9 points
This is such a great idea, I’m sure that some denominations already do it.
Back in the day when I was all devout and shit, I was always terrible at recruiting. I’m probably masking deep psychological scars by making light of the whole thing now but that’s my way, what can I say?
September 11th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
i dunno i’d be surprised if scars form. seems to me that the commodification of our faith is one of the great travesties of NA churches [not just evangelicals, lotsa mainstream churches are into the church growth cult as well] - to do it, we are always dumbing down the gospel, turning away from our own call to a deeper spirituality. . . I am curious though, how many points for a United Church person. I figure it’s gotta beat out the athiest. if we turn the church into walmarts it’s no wonder our spirits get restless and bored and angry.
September 13th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
i love this post…i stumbled on here from stupidchurchpeople.com. i actually was at a pastors’ convention when i heard a colleague of mine refer to people who were integrated into his church’s systed as “wins.” sounds like you are onto something that is far beyond joking in the megachurch world…