© 2013 Oatsy40

I heard Nadia Bolz-Weber speak during our United Methodist Campus Ministry Association conference in Denver last week.  I am not a tattooed person, mainly because I can’t imagine picking something I would still like in 20 years.  (I change glasses frames every couple of years!)  Nadia, who is amply tattooed, is the kind of fierce, attractive, solid person who makes you take notice.  She even made me sort of want a tattoo.

But that’s not what this post is about.  It’s about desperation. 

Nadia made an observation that was so spot on, I laughed out loud and I’m still thinking about it.  She pointed out that just because people are cynical about institutions does not mean they don’t want what the institutions have promised.  So, though folks may be hesitant about and suspicious of church as an institution, they may also be hungry for community, God-space, ritual, sacrament…. 

She also observed that it’s near impossible these days to find a phone booth and that one could conclude from this evidence that people are no longer interested in communicating by phone.  Clearly, the wrong conclusion to draw.

© 2006 Ben Tesch

Because she pastors a church with many young people in it, she often gets questions from other pastors about how to get young people to come to their churches.  Many of these questions have the air of desperation about them, anxious people asking her how to redecorate their phone booths so that people will use them again.

Well now, preach it, sister.

© 2012 Peter Mooney

What a refreshing (though hilarious and sad) image.  What a helpful breath of fresh air in the circular church conversations going on these days.  The takeaway from her observation is that if we are more concerned about the phone booth than the people we hope will use it, we have missed the point.  The phone booth served its purpose in its time.  But why would we keep using resources to clean and repair them on every street corner while every person who walks by is already talking on her own mobile phone? 

People do want to communicate by phone and they do long for real and intimate and holy connection, with one another and with God.  They just don’t look for a phone booth – no matter how beautifully renovated and decorated – to do so. 

Our phone booth days are over but that’s no cause for desperation or despair.  What’s next?  What is the phone booth you need to retire?  What does your faith community offer to a hungry world?  Is it still sitting in a phone booth waiting for them to show up and find it?  How do the people who peer into your church doors find their way in to what you can offer?  How do you change the way you speak and offer so they can hear and partake?  How do you change the way you listen to who and where people are right now?  How do you receive the gifts they bring?

© 2013 Jim Pennucci

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