Parked or Pilgrim?

For evangelicals, it's been a tough year.  5 justices re-engineered marriage.  In the flames of racial strife, officers and citizens have been killed.  In Colorado they puff weed, and we can't understand Common Core.  The future doesn't look exactly promising either: by all polls and interviews, the rising Millennial generation have even less traditional values and morals than their parents.  In this rapidly post-modernizing, post-Christian culture, what are we to do?  How are we to maintain a relevant and received voice to a world that is only looking for the latest Tweet or Facebook update, and not the 10 a.m. weekly service?  One answer is to stop only singing about it, and get into true pilgrim mode.

Parked or in pilgrim?  This is the question I ask when surveying the Evangelical church landscape in our land.  For three decades I have had opportunity to travel to all of our 50 states, multiple times, and observe churches all over the spectrum.  While the gospel is preached, and many friendly, warm Christians exist, the predominant images are disturbing.  Many of us make six figures and live in plush environs.  We park in and rush out after the service, exchanging maybe a hello and goodbye before speeding back home to catch the Patriots game over a bucket of KFC and Coke.  Our waistlines are big as a slurpee machine, and the sale of our second vehicle could feed an African village for a year.  And let’s not get into the 450 cable channels, i-pads, pods, and phones, and every kind of web connection known to man.  (Except for the ones that got drowned during the last pool party.)  This world is not my home?  Well, for visitors we sure have a lot of souvenirs.

 

Perhaps this is one of the reasons they don’t listen to us much, when we pop up our heads from the KFC bucket to rattle off a rant against gay marriage, or abortion.  Maybe this is why they don’t take us too seriously when we say the country is going to hell in a handbasket, and the cities are the end of the earth, in between car seat DVDs.  They don’t take us very seriously, because it seems like rather than really caring about change, what we really want to preserve is the mortgage and the plasma television.

And yet, it doesn’t have to be this way.  If, instead of pampering our houses, we moved back into our tents, if instead of treating this world as the final destination we saw it as a war marked with flowers and occasional pools, Christianity in America might get its mojo back.  Doing community instead of just talking about it.  Giving sacrificially rather than skimpily.  Living next to the gays and lesbians and single moms, instead of just yelling at them.  Selling a car so a kid can go to school.  Putting the faith into actions, not just words.  Will they listen again?

I believe they will, if we get out of park and back into pilgrim.