SURVIVAL IN A HANDBASKET [M, 10-14-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man--SURVIVAL IN A HANDBASKET [M, 10-14-24]

 

Alan Walker [1911-2003] was a well-known evangelist when I was a young preacher, even though he was from Australia. In pre-internet days, that was almost like a different world. At a conference, I heard him tell this story…

He was asked to be the preacher at a big downtown church. Fifty years before, maybe even twenty, it would have been a plum appointment, but the neighborhood had changed, and the church had declined. There was a huge building, but only a handful of people. [1]

He said that he would take the appointment only on one condition: the first month, everything that came into the church through the offering plates—the only way donations were collected then—had to be given to missions. The church could spend nothing on itself.

Years later, as he spoke to us, the church was full and vibrant again. He had reminded them of why they were a church. Survival wasn’t an adequate reason.

If you’re working only to survive, you’re going to fail. Even if you survive.

Right now, we are focused on survival, because the environment, democracy, the church…maybe human existence, all are faced with extinction.

There is a caveat embedded in Alan Walker’s story. It is tempting to think that his experiment worked because it worked. Not so, in Christian terms. It would have worked even if it hadn’t worked. The proof was not in the church being full again, but because they had done the Jesus thing. That’s always the only reason for the existence of the church—to do the Jesus thing.

In the wing of the church called “progressive,” we are so focused on service that we forget about God, who is the reason we serve the world. If we don’t serve God, we can’t serve the world. In the midst of the Reformation, Martin Luther wrote, “I am so busy right now that if I did not spend four hours each day in prayer, I would not survive.” I would say, “No, you’ve got to use those hours in work.” Don’t listen to me; Luther had it right.

Neither survival nor service is the right reason to survive. The right reason is to love. God is love. The Jesus thing is love.

We shall survive only if we do the right things for the right reasons, not if we do them so that we can survive. The right reasons are the God reasons. God did not create us for survival, but for love.

John Robert McFarland

1] I was fascinated, for it sounded just like the Halsted Street Institutional Methodist Church in Chicago, where I preached when I was a summer social worker at Howell Neighborhood House, in the Pilsen neighborhood. Its neighborhood had been eliminated in favor of a new interstate highway. Only a handful of people were left.

The Poplar neighborhood of London on the Call the Midwife TV show on PBS reminds me greatly of Pilsen. 

I assume that you are old enough to know the phrase “going to hell in a handbasket.”