She stumbled into the church after a night of binge drinking. It was across the street from where she lived. She says it was the singing that drew her in. And that's where Anne Lamott's faith journey began.
Her story reminds me of the song Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood wrote together called "Can't Find My Way Home." Their supergroup was named--(Ready for some irony?)--"Blind Faith." It's a beautifully haunting song about someone who admits/confesses the following blunt line, "And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home."
Sometimes we lose our way.
I must sound like a broken record. My passion these days is focused on reaching those burned out on organized Christianity. I have come to realize, however, that at times I have been a part of the problem, not the solution. Whether that is true on the level of perpetuating organized structural religion, or making people mad with some of my preaching, I regret the times when I most likely contributed to the fastest growing religious group in America: "The Nothings."
Sometimes we lose our way.
I started hanging out with a pretty rough crowd when I was 13 called "The Churches of Christ." I did not know at the time that they prefer using a lower-case "c" on the name "church," nor did I realize how they treated women and social outcasts and preachers. In many ways I have spent the last 25 years repeating the line, "Wait, what?"
When I was 18 I led a Spring Break campaign from ACU. We went to a state university campus and ministered to students. We returned to ACU on a spiritual high after working with a small struggling church in Salt Lake City. But when one of the professors called me into his office and gave me a "talking to" for using a piano to sing "Peaceful Easy Feeling" at the student center at the University of Utah, my "Wait, what?" reflex went into high gear. I realized right then and there that Churches of Christ are uniquely gifted at answering questions no one is asking. Or to put it more gently, we often focus our attention on the wrong things.
I thought about leaving. Some people say I did. Went to that dang liberal church in Houston. But for some reason I cannot leave, kind of like Al Pacino in The Godfather III when he says, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." And I think I know why: Because I absolutely love the original restoration plea.
Back in 1809, after years of inner turmoil, two guys named Campbell, a father and son, both came to the conclusion on separate sides of the pond that the church had bogged down in tradition and insider language. They thought the answer was to start over. They looked at the status quo of the church and said, "I can't find my way home."
But this was not an original idea. In fact, ever since Christians started gathering, the occasional gadfly looks around and notices the disparity between cultivating holiness as a simple body of believers vs. maintaining and perpetuating a religious structure. If memory serves me correctly, someone else in the past looked at religious structures and said they needed simplifying. Who was that? Oh yeah. Jesus.
Thankfully, I am neither daft nor arrogant enough to believe that any of what I am saying about the current state of "church" is original. My friend Dwain Evans led a group of Christians in 1963 to West Islip, New York on a journey that began out of the same impulse. Let's just go be Christians gathered in such a way that welcomes everyone into the holiness of God, rather than maintaining an institution. In Churches of Christ, people have been saying for at least the last fifty years, "Wait, what?"
Maybe we could use Anne Lamott as a test for our church. If she wandered in drunk and sat on the back pew, would we engage her in a way that would begin her faith in God, or would we call the cops?
Sometimes we lose our way.
Back to that whole restoration plea business: The churches described in Scripture did not have a brand name. They were just Christians, gathered in the name of Jesus, celebrating God's grace, and mostly trying to stay alive. We have to find a way to simplify this mess. I sense a great urgency for those of us in Churches of Christ, especially since our children leave home and wind up going somewhere else.
Centuries ago, long before me or Dwain or Alexander Campbell or Martin Luther, a writer named Ikkyu wrote a poem:
Many paths lead from
The foot of the mountain,
But at the peak
We all gaze at the
Single bright moon.
Christians need to spend more time at the peak of the mountain than we do at the foot.
