Call to Conversion
If you enter our sanctuary and look up to observe the beams overhead and the decking between the beams, it is not hard to envision the same sight while peering down from the deck of a ship to view the construction of its hull below. Throughout the years, many have made the nautical connection of each congregation as a single crew working together on a journey through time to share the Good News of Christ.
In the book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard shares a gentle challenge to church members concerning our purpose and call in the “congregational boat.” In a playful way, she asks each of us to explore the question of why we are on the boat and what our responsibilities are as while sailing through life. Enjoy her playful insight and wit:
“Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, watching the radar screen, noting weather reports radioed in from shore. No one would dream of asking the tourists to do these things. Alas, among the tourists of Deck C, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, we find the captain, and all the ship’s officers, and all the ship’s crew. The officers chat; they swear; they wink a bit at slightly raw jokes, just like the regular people. the new members have funny accents. The wind seems to be picking up.
On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”
Rocking the Boat
For Christians “outside of the catacombs,” as Dillard describes us, the power of God to heal, reconcile and make new is more immense than we know. The nearness of the Holy Spirit to empower us is more intimate than we realize. And willingness to be a “crew member for Christ” is a decision of the mind and an inclination of the heart.
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