My parents and younger sister were coming to visit me during my first term at college. A friend asked if I would be taking them into lunch with me. When I said ‘no’ he asked me, with a grin, “What’s the matter? Are you ashamed of your family?”
Maybe I was, a little. And perhaps I was slightly defensive of them. Either way, my friend had a point. And I still remember it all these years later (over 32 years later, to be exact).
Tony Morgan suggests in his article, 10 symptoms of an inwardly-focussed Church, that one reason Christians might not invite others to church is that, "your services and ministries are not designed to reach people outside the church". Allow me to be a little more blunt than Tony: some of us probably feel somewhat embarrassed by the church. After all, the singing is often flat, the music group sometimes malfunctions, the sermons don’t always hit the spot, some of our ways seem quaint, the building is old and, not to put too fine a point on it, some of our folks are ever so slightly …. odd. The pastor included.
And, so, we maintain that we’d be much more likely to invite our friends and colleagues along if we could be confident that, every week, the sermon would be powerful and engaging, the singing inspiring and the whole atmosphere welcoming and affirming. Since we don’t have that confidence, we’re reluctant to invite others. We would - honest - if the church was different.
Out of our family context, I probably was rather embarrassed by my family. After all, Dad could be over-friendly and Mam could (in her insecurity) say the most alarming things. But in their own home, their idiosyncrasies were lessened, simply because my friends would know without a shadow of a doubt that Dad was warm and funny and that Mam was caring and deeply interested in them. We didn’t live in a fashionable house; Mam aspired to more but had to make do with what we had. But what we had, and what friends discovered, was a caring home, in which Mam would gladly feed them - her cooking wan’t cordon bleu but we were well-fed all the same. And that’s what they remembered longest; the idiosyncrasies faded, the warmth remained.
The ever-helpful Emma Scrivener wrote recently of the church, encouraging us to ‘love the one you’re with’. Her article concluded with these challenging words:
If Jesus wasn’t too good for ‘local church’ then we’re not either. Of course there are things that can be improved: and it’s good to talk these through. But there’s a big difference between running something down and strengthening it from within. Our churches don’t need our wishlists, they need our willingness to plug in and serve.
The church will always have a slightly odd feel to it - how could it be otherwise when it is make-up of such a disparate group of needy people? It will struggle to feel cutting-edge. But what we can offer is genuine warmth for others and the steady, if unspectacular, ministry of God’s Word - the Word that can nourish and bring to salvation.
At the end of the day, there’s nothing embarrassing in that.
