Jesus is Alive and I'm Wide Awake!

Counterpoint:

I am disheartened by the number of clergy people and church staff members publically lamenting how tired they are on Monday morning after Easter.

Having said that, I realize it won’t be the most popular opinion among my peers. I mean no offense to anyone in particular. Don’t be a hater. Please let me explain …

First of all, everybody works hard. Everybody. Yes of course, we work hard during Holy Week and Easter. But we do not work harder than anyone else. And most people work harder ALL THE TIME, just to make ends meet. Our complaints about how sleepy we are on the Monday after Easter are belittling and disrespectful to people who do not have the privilege and luxury to take a day and a half off after a particularly rough few days of work.

Secondly, theologically speaking, if you are not energized into action by what happens on Easter morning, you did it wrong. I cannot WAIT to get up and get going on the Monday after Easter! There’s so much energy in resurrection, and I am totally charged up by it. “Christ is risen!” is more than just a liturgical greeting or a pithy internet meme, it is a profound spiritual truth that should inspire us to be someone brand new, especially on the Monday right after Easter.

Thirdly, what is it about us that creates the need to point out publicly how hard we’ve been working? What are we looking for from these public pronouncements? It is as if we need approval, someone to say, “Yes, I noticed you working. Good job.” Now to be sure, it is really, really nice when that actually happens. It’s always good to receive affirmation and gratitude. It’s very cool to know that someone heard you. But I guess I just do not understand the need to fish for it on social media.

And finally, if your congregation is typical, chances are you just worshiped with at least twice as many people as on a normal Sunday morning. You saw people you haven’t seen in weeks, you had guests there for the very first time, you had people there who really didn’t want to be, and on and on. It was packed out! Now, build from that momentum, keep it going! Don’t take a break at this point, bringing it all to a screeching halt. Take that energy created by all those people there to encounter the living God and go somewhere with it!

Yes, I know all about Sabbath rest and self-care and all that jazz. I had an hour long nap yesterday afternoon. What I’m talking about is using social media and other public venues to intentionally mention how tired we are on Monday, how sleepy Easter made us. No, no, no! Easter doesn’t put us to sleep – it wakes us up! Easter is the beginning of new life, new energy, new focus, new purpose.

Churches should view Easter Sunday as a launching pad, not an arrival point. The Church needs to get up with Peter and run to the risen Christ. Churches ought to blast off from Easter into a brand new season of mission and ministry We ought to stop telling everyone how tired we are, and start telling everybody how alive Jesus is!

A United Methodist "Buffet Effect"?

So what would it be like if “the Buffet effect” swept through the church?

Wouldn’t the clergy equivalent of Betty White be a hoot in the pulpit every week?

Who is the Paul McCartney of pastors, still innovating as he approaches age 70?

The United Methodist Church, like so much of culture, has become youth-obsessed. In our panic to save the denomination, we have objectified young people as a “target demographic” that, if sufficiently engaged, will swoop into our churches and save us from oblivion.

I understand all the stats - our congregations are decades older than the communities around them; we’re just a couple generations away from extinction; the structures, styles, and systems we utilize are archaic - I understand the reasons for the panic. I respect the work that Lovett Weems and others have done about the age trends in our denomination.

But we have overcompensated, I think. We have negated much of what is good about being Methodist, while doing very little that actually means anything to younger people. In fact, the church’s sudden discovery of young people and subsequent obsession with them is kind of freaking people out.

Kenda Creasy Dean says it better than anyone: “To treat adolescents as a separate species instead of as less experienced members of our own was one of the twentieth century’s largest category errors. Teenagers, obviously, are people too, and youth ministry is as much about being the church as it is about working with adolescents.” (Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church - p. 24)

And a sorry side effect of treating young people as separate from “us” is the perception that older people just don’t matter any more. Ministry is “about being the church” for youth, young adults, middling adults, and the really old ones, as well. And if there’s a place to point in order to explain the decline of the church it is at our ineptitude at “being the church” - period.

As Diana Butler Bass puts it, “Between business-as-usual church, internal stresses, external scandals, and rank hypocrisy, finally compounded by economic crisis, American Christianity is in a mess.” (Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening - p. 83)

The point is, of course the situation is driving young people away. That’s because it is driving everyone away.

You want to get young people to come back to church? Be a better church.

Which brings me back to my initial thought - Where are our pastoral Warren Buffets, Betty Whites, and Paul McCartneys? What are they doing? Are we relegating them to museum display identities that we smile at and applaud, but don’t really listen to?

Or are we engaging the wisdom, passion, and experience of such as these to provide vision, purpose, and integrity so that we can be as good a church as we possibly can?

Obviously, there is a lot of room for mulling over these questions. I am still in mid-mull myself. But I read two articles almost back to back this morning that started this mull, and I encourage you to give them a read also.

This one was a business piece in Newsweek. (Where the term "Buffet Effect" came from.)

This one was a column on the UMPortal.

I’m eager to read your mulling ... let's mull together!