“Whenever you enter a house, first say, ‘May peace be on this house.’ If anyone there shares God’s peace, then your peace will rest on that person. If not, your blessing will return to you. Remain in this house, eating and drinking whatever they set before you, for workers deserve their pay. Don’t move from house to house. Whenever you enter a city and its people welcome you, eat what they set before you. Heal the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘God’s kingdom has come upon you.’” (Luke 10:5-9, CEB translation)
I witnessed the biggest miracle I will ever see in my entire life on March 13, 2020. I am gonna go ahead and make that claim, because it is hard to fathom anything bigger, even with my active imagination. On that day, I watched the entire church get pulled from the 20th to the 21st century overnight. All of a sudden all of us were on board with online, while just the day before many, many churches were deeply resisting that innovation. In a minute, we made the change that we needed to make to meaningfully reach the generations of people who had either never known or completely given up on the church being relevant to their lives at all.
And that same miracle may have saved the United Methodist Church.
Why do I say that? Because we are notoriously bad evangelists. Don’t get me wrong. We are being true to our dear little Lukan selves. For those of you who follow Gospel Discipleship, Lukans are people who grow in and live out their discipleship through relationships. Methodists are predominantly Lukan. The passage above from the Gospel of Luke exhibits that kind of discipleship. It is discipleship that takes place in the comfort of homes. It takes place as people share meals together. It takes place as you spend long amounts of time in one place getting to know someone where they are. There is life lived together, including healing. And then, after all that has taken place, after you know someone really well and have lived with them, then you introduce God into the conversation.
This is so true to Lukan discipleship. Lukans will avoid talking about God, even with their closest friends, sometimes for years because Lukans fear disrupting the relationship by talking religion. Is it any wonder, then, that the average United Methodist invites someone to church once every 38 years!?!? So basically in an entire lifetime, a Methodist will invite 2-3 people to church.
Don’t get me wrong, when they do bring people to church they do it right – pick them up and bring them in on their arm, take them to Sunday school class and out to lunch. Anyone they do invite is much more likely to stay. It is why I also say that Lukans make the best evangelists. They just have to get around to inviting.
But that was going to take an extreme culture shift, one that I was not sure would be true to them. So this beautiful Wesleyan witness was going to just be tucked away in the corner. Fewer and fewer people would know anything about us. We were destined to die. You can’t propogate a denomination based on 2-3 invites in a lifetime.
And then March 13, 2020 happened. And we all went online. And when we did, we stumbled in front of a megaphone.
Our notoriously shy denomination suddenly could broadcast who we are. And people all around the world who had heard a very different narrative of what it meant to be a Christian suddenly heard about this people who followed a loving God of grace. They heard about a denomination that invited questioning, that didn’t just take the Bible at face value but wrestled with it. They heard about a church that was working hard at making space for everyone, even as that very effort was threatening to pull us apart. And hearing all of those things, people said, “Well, that’s the kind of Christian I would be.”
And I have seen the fruits of that reality. In both the churches I have served in the pandemic, I have encountered people who are new to church, but who have been joining us online, often for months before they come in our doors. But when they come in our doors, they already like what they see. We have already been living alongside one another for months. We are already family.
Maybe this can be a good lesson for Lukan Methodists. People are hungry to hear about God, and our witness is a very compelling story about God. We shouldn’t be so worried about sharing it. Most people will at least listen to a story of faith and feel closer to you because you shared it. But some people will want exactly what you have, and they will be excited to come alongside you in that journey. And you don’t really need a megaphone to get them to listen. They are already listening because they already know you love them.
Image by Patrick Fore at unsplash.com