Wayne and Claudia had six children, ranging in age from eight to seventeen. This was a second marriage for both of them, each bringing three children into the marriage. A new job for Wayne at the Martin Marietta aircraft plant brought them to our town. They visited our congregation one Sunday and asked me to come over that week and get acquainted. We set Wednesday evening. They told me they wanted a place where their children could get a moral foundation built into their lives. They were both up front with me about their motivation—this wasn’t about them, but about the children. Wayne let me know that he was an atheist. “I don’t have anything against religion; I just don’t need it. But we will be with them on Sundays.” Claudia likewise made no pretence of being interested in God, but she was an organist and would be glad to help out with the music if we needed her.
That’s how it started. They were in church every Sunday with their children. Once in a while Claudia would play the organ if our regular organist was ill or away. But they were not easy people to like. Wayne was a physicist who knew a lot and talked a lot about the lot that he knew. And he had answers to everything. Claudia was sharp-tongued and didn’t endear herself to anyone. The children seemed nice enough but were awkward socially.
I welcomed them to our congregation. This was going to be a challenge.
When I became a pastor, I resolved on a double focus for keeping my vocation on track: worship and community. At this point in my “long obedience,” that resolve had been thoroughly tested and had developed an extensive root system. It had to if it were to survive. The religious culture of America that I was surrounded with dismayed me on both counts. Worship had been degraded into entertainment. And community had been depersonalized into programs.
By the time I arrived on the scene as a pastor, the American church had reinterpreted the worship of God as an activity for religious consumers. Entertainment, cheerleading, and manipulation were conspicuous in high places. American worship was conceived as a public-relations campaign for Jesus and the angels. Worship had been cheapened into a commodity marketed by using tried-and-true advertising techniques. If so-called worshippers didn’t “get anything out of it,” there had been no worship worth coming back for. Instead of calling people to worship God, pastors all over the country were inviting people to “have a worship experience.” Worship was evaluated on the “consumer satisfaction scale” of one to ten.
It struck me as a violation of the holy, a secularization of the sacred. Taking the Lord’s name in vain. I determined to reintroduce the rubric “Let us worship God” for my congregation, and then really do it. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. The entertainment model for worship in America was pervasive.
And community. The church as a community of faith formed by the Holy Spirit. Church in America was mostly understood by Christians and their pastors in terms of its function—what it did: build buildings, become “successful,” change the neighborhood, launch mission projects, and create programs that would organize and motivate people to do these things. Programs, mostly programs. Programs had developed into the dominant methodology of “doing church.” Far more attention was given to organizing and giving leadership to programs than anything else. But there is a problem here: a program is an abstraction and inherently nonpersonal. A program defines people in terms of what they do, not who they are. The more program, the less person. Church was understood not in terms of personal relationships and a personal God but in terms of “getting things done.”
This struck me as violation of the inherent personal dignity of souls. The abstraction of a programmatic approach to men and women, however well-meaning, atrophied the relational and replaced it with the pragmatic. Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit. I wanted to develop a congregation in which relationships were primary, a household of hospitality. A community in which men and women would be known primarily by name, not by function. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, and it wasn’t. The programmatic methodology as a way of developing community was epidemic in the American church.
When Wayne and Claudia arrived with their children, we were ready for them.
Early on, Jan and I decided to lay the groundwork for a life of congregational hospitality by beginning in our own home. Whenever we had six to ten people who were to become members of the congregation, we invited them to our home for an evening of conversation. Jan prepared light refreshments, and we would get acquainted. I had already been in their homes, getting acquainted with them on their home ground in conversation with them regarding their faith and the church of Christ. Now I wanted them to experience our home. We listened to one another’s stories—the places we had come from, the work we were doing, our children and interests.
We talked about our experience of church, pastors we had known, Christians we had admired, difficulties we had encountered through the years. I wanted to provide a setting and atmosphere in which we could get to know one another in personal ways that were not stereotyped by the work we did or the roles in which we functioned. I wanted to set a precedent for our life together by getting acquainted with one another by name, not by function, to understand our life as a worshipping congregation by what we would be receiving from one another and from God, not in terms of the responsibilities we were expected to fulfill. I wanted to provide a safe and congenial place for gathering to talk about faith and doubt and Jesus. And I wanted them to get acquainted with Jan and me, what our life consisted of when they didn’t see us in church, something of what the life of a pastor and family looked like.
Before the evening was over, I told them of the covenant groups that we had developed in the congregation, ten or so persons who met weekly or biweekly in homes for conversation and prayer. This was one of the major ways we had to develop personal relationships in the congregation—getting to know one another in the context of our homes. It was our way to continue the conversation that got started every Sunday in worship as we listened to God’s Word and God listened to our prayers. It was our way to get people into one another’s homes in settings where relationships could deepen naturally and spontaneously.
What I was hoping for was that the people would begin their life in our congregation in the hospitality of our home and the covenant groups and that gradually their homes would develop as local islands of hospitality in the suburban world of isolation and loneliness, the “lonely crowd” that was getting so much attention by sociologists.
The covenant groups worked pretty well in getting people together for conversation, but as such they never developed into anything that I could discern as a haven of hospitality that pervaded the congregation. The covenant groups provided seeds, but hospitality as a way of congregational life came in increments that, to begin with, took us by surprise. Like Wayne and Claudia.
In our worship the congregation gave witness each week to what we believed by reciting the Apostles’ Creed. An elder led the congregation: “Let us say what we believe…” Wayne always said the first two words, “I believe”—and then shut his mouth. Out of the corner of my eye I always watched him, intrigued—I wondered what he might be saying under his breath while the rest of us were confessing that we believed in God the Father and Jesus Christ, his Son, and the Holy Spirit. Six months or so after they began attending our church, I observed one Sunday that Wayne didn’t stop with “I believe” but continued: “…in God the Father Almighty…” I kept an eye on him. It continued on successive Sundays. What was going on here? And then in a couple months, I observed the addition of “Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord…” About ten months into this I saw Wayne complete his confession with “I believe in the Holy Spirit…”
Throughout this time I never had a conversation with Wayne regarding his professed atheism and this slowly “developing-by-increments” confession of belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Then a couple weeks after I had seen him complete his confession of faith, as he was leaving worship, he said, “Pastor, I want to be baptized. Can we talk about it?” We talked about it. He told me about his slow and cautious working his way into a believing life. I told him that I had been watching it happen. He was surprised that I had noticed. He didn’t know that he was being observed. The next week he was baptized, to the surprise of a number of those he had offended over the past year by his know-it-all atheism.
A couple years later Claudia was diagnosed with cancer. It was far advanced by the time it was discovered. Within six weeks she was dead. Six months later Wayne’s job was terminated. After several months of unemployment, the bank foreclosed on his mortgage. He and his six children were homeless.
Mark and Nancy, his neighbors, who were also members of our congregation, invited Wayne to move in with them until he could get his feet on the ground. Marcia, the oldest child, had just graduated from high school and joined the Air Force shortly after her mother died. Cheryl’s Spanish teacher, Henry, and his wife opened their home to her. Jan and I took the remaining four, Gloria, Scott, Steve, and Jerry, into our home. Our daughter, Karen, shared her room with Gloria. I converted our basement, the same basement that a few years before had been the church sanctuary, into a dormitory for the boys.
Acts of hospitality proliferated. First of all in relation to Jan and me. Meals brought in, thoughtfulness expressed, encouragement given. As the months continued, signs of it spread throughout the congregation. The months turned into years. Claudia’s death precipitated a hospitality sea change in the congregation that continues to this day, a robust hospitality.
I had been pastor of Christ Our King Church ten years when the Wayne and Claudia stories were lived out in our community. Ten years of nonmanipulated worship; ten years of nonprogrammed community. These ways of worship and community, so un-American, had been working themselves into the soul of the congregation and into my soul gradually, slowly, but also deeply.
Neither Wayne nor Claudia had been easy to affirm or care for or like. The conditions that provided for a confession of faith like his and hospitality like this had been in formation inconspicuously but pervasively for ten years: Wayne’s confession, slowly formed without anyone’s (except my) noticing, Sunday after Sunday; a community’s hospitality gathering sinew and intent quietly, mostly unnoticed, and then catalyzed by Claudia’s death into a way of life that would continue to shape the character of the congregation another forty years, flourishing still.
A way of worship that was nonmanipulative. A way of community that was nonprogrammatic. One of the things I relished about being a pastor was being immersed in these ambiguities, the not being in control that allowed for the slow emergence of insights and resolve that developed into confessions of faith, and the unplanned, spontaneous attentiveness “one to another” that over the years became a culture of hospitality.