One day, a forgetful friend referred to my book as “Silly Church.” It was an instructive blunder. It got me thinking about the questions the actual name—Foolish Church—might raise.
- Does it mean “silly”? (“C’mon, church! Let’s pull out our kazoos!”)
- Does it mean “messy,” as in paints and scissors? (There actually is a Messy Church movement that includes those things; check it out.)
- Does it mean “funny,” as in The-Marvelous-Mrs.-Maisel-in-the-pulpit?
- It could mean uninformed or misguided. Ridiculous. Goofy? Ugh!
If you go down this path very far, you might ask what kind of a fool would write “foolish” into her title in the first place!
Foolish Church begins with this epigraph, from 1 Corinthians 1.25:
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (p. xii)
That’s a pretty good starting point for a book that isn’t built on traditional church-building wisdom, but on the foolishness that turns our worldly strategies and approaches inside out. A kind of foolishness you might find in a church born inside a prison. Foolishness lived out by women who aren’t trying to hide, and who come with their defenses down and their hearts open.
Maybe this is too much foolishness to believe is possible, anywhere else. But it doesn’t seem so. I’ve seen a lot of eyes light up as we’ve talked about the book’s ideas, and the vision it casts.
In the companion The Fools’ Manual—in which I doubled down on this “foolish” theme—here’s how I described the appeal of this idea:
[These books] are written for people like you and churches like yours, who are realizing the way we’ve been doing church isn’t enough. You…wonder how we can focus less on sparkle and more on grit. You’ve sensed that the way we’ve packaged and sold our churches—and the gospel—has left a lot of people behind, disconnected, and marginalized. You see a certain wisdom in words like raw, real, and messy (even though they may scare you) and you’re foolish enough to imagine giving them a try. (p. vii)
We’ve all known something of this nature of foolishness. I can almost guarantee that if you’re reading this, there have been times when:
- you spoke up on behalf of someone else when it would have been “wiser” to keep your mouth shut.
- you made room for someone about whom conventional wisdom would have said, “don’t waste your time on them.”
- you made an investment in someone’s well-being with a gift that some would have described as “throwing good money after bad.”
- you stood by someone who made a mistake, believing they might be redeemable, long after other friends had deserted them.
We’ve all been that foolish, and more, at one time or another. (At least I hope so.) I believe the church needs to be even more foolish in these ways, and more. Hence the book, and its name.
I once worked for a law firm that said, “We take our work seriously. But we don’t take ourselves seriously.” In my seven years of employment there, I found that to be (mostly) true. People were (mostly) approachable and there was an ease in our midst. I appreciated the lightness reflected in that sentiment.
Come to think of it, an early partner at that firm had originated a saying that was memorialized in acronym form at the bottom of the blank memo paper that we used, in those days before ubiquitous e-mail. The acronym was K.L.A.S.A.T.T. Here’s what it stood for:
Keep Laughing and Singing All the Time.
That sounds pretty darned foolish, for a bunch of stodgy lawyers, now, doesn’t it?! I guess I’ve been on a foolish trajectory for some years now. In a good way, I think.
…and if you think we’re foolish now….
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