I wonder how many of our churches look like the DMV? I’d bet that if you walked into the average church in our area there are a lot of people who look alike, talk alike, and think alike. Maybe our churches should look a little more like the DMV.

From Eugene Peterson’s, The Contemplative Pastor

The practice of manipulating conversation was widely used among people I respected in my college and seminary years, and I was much influenced by them. Their conviction was that every conversation could be turned, if we were sharp enough, into witness. A casual conversation on an airplane could be turned into an eternity-fraught conversation on the soul. A brief interchange with a filling-station attendant could yield the opening for “a word for Christ.”

Such approaches to conversation left no room for small talk– all small talk was manipulated into big talk: of Jesus, of salvation, of the soul’s condition.

But however appropriate such verbal strategies are for certain instances of witness (and I think there are such instances), as habitual practice they are wrong. If we bully people into talking on our terms, if we manipulate them into responding to our agenda, we do not take them seriously where they are in the ordinary and the everyday.

Nor are we likely to become aware of the tiny shoots of green grace that the Lord is allowing to grow in the back yards of their lives. If we avoid small talk, we abandon the very field in which we have been assigned to work. Most of people’s lives is not spent in crisis, not lived at the cutting edge of crucial issues. Most of us, most of the time, are engaged in simple, routine tasks, and small talk is the natural language. If pastors belittle it, we belittle what most people are doing most of the time, and the gospel is misrepresented.

I do not want to be misunderstood: pastoral conversation should not be bound along mindless clichés like gutter water. What I intend is that we simply be present and attentive to what is there conversationally, as respectful of the ordinary as we are of the critical. Some insights are only accessible while laughing. Others arrive only by indirection.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with customer support for any computer company you know that it can be boring at best and painful at worst.  The individual I was working with was very good at his job and we spent alot of time on the phone waiting for the computer to reboot.  During one of these lulls I had this urge to start talking to him about the WVU Mountaineer Basketball team.  If you didn’t know I’m a huge WVU fan and this year the basketball team made a historic run to the final four.  For a while WVU basketball consumed my thoughts, and while I was on the phone I wanted to talk to this ASUS customer support guy about WVU basketball.  Keep in mind this guy had given me no indication that he was a basketball fan, it’s just something that I wanted to talk about.

I had a couple of different thoughts at this moment.

1. Why should I assume this guy is even remotely interested in WVU Basketball, I don’t know anything about him.
2. I wonder if I should have thought about telling this guy about Jesus before I thought about talking about WVU basketball.

For me I think both of these thoughts can sum up how Christians approach evangelism.  For me I’ve always heard church folks say ‘if you really love God then your love for God will work its way into any conversation.’ I’ve always carried a little bit of guilt about sharing my faith and loving God enough to work him into every conversation I have with people.

I don’t feel that guilt anymore and here’s why.  The fundamental flaw in the whole ‘if you love God enough you’ll talk about him every chance you get’ is that you assume that you know the person you’re talking to is genuinely interested in what you’re talking about.  Like the customer support guy and basketball.

For example, I know someone who has talked at length about how much he will talk to people about God, his faith, the bible, etc.  I’ve always wondered if the people are ever really interested in what he was talking about.  Often times conversations I have had with this person would go something like this:

Him: “So what have you been studying/reading lately?”

Me: “Well I’ve been reading alot from Amos.”

Him: “That’s interesting, let me tell you all about what I’ve been reading Mark.”

I always got the impression that he was never actually interested in hearing what I was learning, but was just looking for a way to make me listen to what he was learning at the time.  I always felt manipulated. It makes me wonder if other people have felt the same way.

I think there has to be a better way to tell the most compelling story every.  How about you?  How do we share our faith without manipulating people?  Ever had a bad experience with sharing your faith, or someone sharing their faith with you?

I have a few other thoughts about this topic and I’ll post them here over the next couple of days so stay tuned and feel free to comment.

I was probably about 11-12 years old and was at my Grandma’s house with my family. I don’t remember why we were there, but it wasn’t unusual for us to visiting or for my Dad to be fixing something. I was walking from the living room to the kitchen, probably to get a Coke out of the fridge when the incident occurred.

Before I go any further I feel like I should give you a little back ground information on my Grandma. She’s maybe about 5’3″ and not very big, but man is she tough.  She tells a story about how when she was a girl her parents couldn’t afford a mule to plow their garden. Instead her Dad would have her and her sisters pull the plow so they could get the garden ready for spring planting. When she was older, maybe in her late 60′s, she just had a heart catheterization and her doctor told her that she needed to walk every day.  She was walking about a mile from her house when she fell and broke her kneecap.  She then decided to walk home and when the her knee didn’t stop hurting drove herself to the hospital without calling anyone.  When my Dad asked her why she didn’t call she said “Oh, I didn’t want to bother you.”  She’s small and tough, you get the picture right?

Back to the incident.  I’m walking through the kitchen and my Grandma is walking towards the living room going in the opposite direction.  With absolutely no provocation from me, my Grandma grabs me and does some jujitsu move on me and before I know what to think my feet are in the air and I land flat on my back with my Grandma smiling down at me.  I remember being in total shock.  I mean what do you do when your Grandma pulls a Chuck Norris move on you?  You can’t fight her, your only choice is really to just lay there and reflect on how you ended up in this position in the first place.  As she was smiling down at me she said in a coy voice, “You didn’t think I could do that did you?”

To this day I have no idea why she decided to prove to me that she could throw me on my back.  When I was visiting with her last week she reminded me of it again.  She loves to ask me if I remember the time she knocked me on my back.  I always tell her I’ll never forget it while taking a few cautious steps backwards.  I learned a valuable lesson that day, always be on your guard when my Grandma’s around.  Who knows what she might be capable of.

These are two of my favorite pictures I’ve taken with my phone. One is my Grandpa on my Mom’s side and the other my Grandma on my Dad’s side. I love these candid shots.

This may sound strange to you, but sometimes I think about what my funeral will be like. I think about who will show up, what people will say about me, what kind of clothes will people feel obligated to wear, will there be food? Weird I know, but sometimes these thoughts pop into my mind.

When I was a kid and I visited people in the hospital I remember having similar thoughts. Thoughts like ‘if that was me in the hospital bed, who would come to see me?’   Would my room be packed with cards and people telling me to get well soon, or would I spend most of my day watch People’s Court reruns. It’s kinda of depressing when I think back on it, because I think what my young mind was really asking was “who really cares about me?”

When I thought I was going to be deployed, in my mind I had this list of things I wanted to do before I left. I wrote them down. All but one that is. One thing I wanted to do was to plan my funeral.  I guess it’s because I was going away for a year and had fleeting thoughts about not coming back.  When I look back it seems a little mellow dramatic, I mean I am a finance guy.  I don’t think anyone has ever died of a paper cut and staplers are the most dangerous things I deal with on any given day.  Still I had this notion that I should lay out my funeral before I left.

I still want to plan my funeral but not because I have a need to know who cares about me, or because I think that my death is on the horizon, but because I don’t want a bunch of people to come cry over my casket and have pastor say a bunch of nice things about me because that’s what you do at funerals. I’ve gone to plenty of viewings and funerals and I don’t want mine to look like any of them.  Don’t put me in a casket, don’t bring my body to a church, please don’t put me in a suit.  That’s not how I want you to remember me.

My favorite memories come from sitting around a camp fire with friends and family. You know the type of fire I’m talking about. It’s late and you’re swapping stories. You can learn so much about people around a camp fire. Sometimes you hear the same story you’ve heard 100 times before and sometimes a some new story comes bubbling up. I’ve learned alot about my dad, my uncle, my grandpa by listening to them reminisce. I don’t know how many times I’ve told heard the story of  my Uncle Ralph pushing two feet of snow with his truck just to see my Great Grandma in Selbyville or about my Dad delivering papers on his bicycle when he was a kid and having some animal, whose howl sounded like a woman screaming, following him the entire way.  My brother loves to tell stories about his first car, a Nissan 200SX.  That’s what I want my funeral to be like, a bunch of people who knew me best swapping stories about me. The good and the bad. No need to candy coat anything, just tell the story. Here’s to hoping I give you plenty of stories to tell.