What if a bubble over our head disclosed the burdens that each of us carry with us? This was poignantly illustrated in a video produced by the Cleveland Clinic. The video was meant to help their staff notice the invisible hurts and challenges that play a role in even the most simple of interactions within the hospital setting. “If you could stand in someone else’s shoes,” the video ends, “would you treat them differently?”
A New York Times writer asks this question similarly, from a flight in which he was bearing a fresh heaviness of grief. There are so many burdens.
#FoolishChurch notices that we have often let people know their burdens don’t have a place in church. I write, in chapter 1 of Foolish Church, that we ought to be able to bring our whole selves to church. But we must be aware–because it has been true for us!–that most people don’t. We hide the hurts that are heaviest on our hearts. Sometimes we aren’t ready to share them, and I don’t mean that we should have to. But too often, what we bring to church is a cleaned-up, sanitized version of who we are. Is it any wonder that church sometimes feels disconnected from the real challenges of our daily lives?
I heard Gordon MacDonald, a revered Christian leader, describe an imaginative (and make-believe) approach to the problem of how hidden our true burdens are, when we come to church. He had been playing with the idea of the TSA scanners that we’ve experienced in airports. What if there were a scanner, he said, at the front door of the church. and when each person walks through it,
the scanner examines their soul and spits out a printout that says, ‘This person today is wildly angry at his spouse. This person is terribly fearful about a doctor’s appointment that’s coming on Tuesday afternoon. This person fell into deep sin this week and is terrified that somebody’s going to find out.'”
Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast Episode #297, with Gordon MacDonald (10/16/2019)
My first reaction to this idea is that we’d all find a different door and sneak through it into church!
(It also occurred to me that many of us would want to see what the scanner says. We’re that disconnected, some of us, from our hurts and fears. We might be surprised at seeing in words what that scanner knows.)
But MacDonald is powerfully serious with this idea:
And so three minutes before the worship service starts, the head usher puts all of these printouts in the lap of the pastor. And I say to pastors, “If you knew that 18% of your people that morning were there seething in anger and 14% of the people were stone cold in their spiritual journey, and this person was unfaithful to his spouse, and this person was afraid of getting fired. If you knew all these people were sitting out there in those benches, how would that first affect the way you pray that morning? How would it affect the way you preached to people? How would it affect the words you use to formulate a benediction when you send these people out the door?” And by the way, when they come in the scan through the scanner, how do you want them to leave an hour and 15 minutes later? What do you want to have changed?”
Transcript, p. 22-23.
This is a #FoolishChurch vision if I ever saw one. It’s an impossibility, of course, but should we not pray and preach and bless as if we were aware that there are people present who are deeply hurting? What if we were to connect with each other in the pew as if we knew this is a staggeringly hard day for some of the people near us? What if we made room for them to share those burdens, when they’re ready, and for them to be met with unflinching openness and healthy relationship?
Go and be that foolish. And report back: How does it change how you interact with those burdened people, right next to you?
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