From the days when togas were worn by real, not girlie, men and gods of stone were beautifully hand-crafted and worshiped in temples as numerous as fast-food joints comes the tale of the town suffering through a severe drought and verging on famine.  Day after day they gathered in the Temple of Aqua Velvet, the god of soft waters, and offered their prostrations and oblations and pleading, but to no avail.  Aqua Velvet remained silent.  They became desperate.  So one day they stormed that temple, knocked that god down, carried him into the field, stood him up and said, “Let’s see how long you can go without water, you big drip,” and left him there.

I heard the story while traveling with pastor buds on the ancient stones tour through Turkey and Greece, seeing the remnants of gods and temples.  Then I left the pastors to meet up with folks from my congregation who’d traveled to Nepal to spend a couple of weeks working at the Mendeis Children’s Haven.  “Mummy” Mendeis, the founder and director who is now being praised in the Church Triumphant, showed me around Kathmandu, a place of amazing and utter squalor.  And I was astonished that the ancient toppled stone gods of Greece were were alive and well and vibrantly painted in this place, sprinkled with flower petals and danced around by the begging priest of the site.  Gods, goddesses, demons,and dragons were all over–and they were real here.  They smile and welcome and promise and snarl and threaten and hint at unsuspected horrors and unimagined delights.  Buddhist monks in robes chanted and prayed in beautifully ornamented arbors.  The darling, on her trip before mine, had reported telephone booth-size temples with large stone phalluses upon which women could sit and pray for fertility; I was relieved when she told me she had not entered.   The peasant below our compound whose family subsisted on a tiny mud hole of rice arose early every morning and you could hear the dings of his bells and the moans of his chants to whatever Hindu stone god he was praying.  Then the family scattered, scouring for piles of water buffalo shit to form into balls and dry on the walls of their shack to use as cooking fuel; they must hurry to beat everybody else doing the same thing.  Good thing cows are holy over there; plenty of shit all over the place–fields, roads, ‘lawns’, sidewalks.

Back on the home front, David and his young family joined our congregation.  He and his wife had immigrated from China before they were married; their kids were coming into confirmation age.  He’d converted to Christianity from Buddhism.  I know the importance of family and ancestors in that culture; I figured he experienced a bit more internal stress over his decision than the Catholic man trying to tell his ancient mother he’d become Lutheran.  I asked him why he changed.  He said, “Because in the Buddhism I knew, it was nothing but threats of hell.  There were demons and devils all over the place; literally–they hung on every wall of the house.  The whole point of it was to watch out for yourself.  The story of Jesus tells about a god of love, and that the purpose of living is to care for others.  It makes you noble.”  Upon inquiry, he told me stories of encounters at various churches as they moved about the country:  some refused them entrance; some told them after the service, “You don’t really belong here.”  Others welcomed them.  It was fun to welcome him.  Being an accountant, we rewarded him for his conversion by electing him treasurer, where he encountered demons and devils of a different sort.  We had to talk through some cultural issues around his daughter and son and the confirmation retreat and such and make accommodations for that.  After about a half dozen years he told me they were joining a Chinese church because he wanted his kids to be more familiar with their culture.  Seemed reasonable since, after all, we weren’t exactly being overwhelmed by the oriental hoards; but I also suspected that he was glad to be free of his most recent demons and the devils of the eternal deficit of a mission congregation.

Last week I had dinner with our bishop–Mike the manic extrovert–and his gadgets.  It was like trying to eat with a near-sighted octopus, what with a computer, cell phone, and blackberry all firing at once.  I don’t do multitasking.  A few days earlier on one of my solo trips along I-10 I’d cut short a phone conversation with him after nearly taking out four other 80 mphers saying ‘I can’t drive and talk’.  Octo Bish teaches, ‘Larry, just pretend you’re talking to passengers in your car.’  ‘Dude, I don’t talk to them, either.  Ask my wife.’  But it was nice to have a chance to visit before going into the evening service at which he was for the second night out of three preaching  for the “Thirty-Ninth Annual Lenten Preaching Series” among the old mainline churches of downtown B’mont.  It’s a terrific ecumenical program of worship and meals together over three days, this year hosted by the duffers at Bethlehem:  a youth gathering; a preachers’ meal; a men’s breakfast, ladies’ luncheon, and a church staff luncheon.  Octo Bish had knocked their socks off with a fine sermon on Matthew 25 the night before.  Currently, he was slathering a baked potato and swooning about the urgency of evangelism.

One of the few positives of disability is that having no career future to worry about/hope for, I can pretty much say what I want to whom I want; it’s easier to be ‘authentic’ when you have nothing to lose.  Hence, ‘Evangelism stinks; it elicits nothing but sulfurous fumes.  You ought to give up on the topic.  It works against the very thing you’re preaching.’  Even the gadgets fell silent to his edgy follow-up question.  So, knowing that he knew–or at least was familiar with the fact–that I had ‘grown a congregation’ from 350 to 1300 before the peter principle stepped in and led me to authenticity, I laid out keene’s notion of the distorted futility of the church’s notion of evangelism, beginning with, of course, its self-serving nature as evidenced by the fact that the only time congregations get really excited about evangelism is during budget problems (though, incidentally, creating deficit budgets should not be overlooked as a mission pastor’s strategy–people are much more open to strangers when they’re thinking wallets).

Beyond that it’s oppressive.  I’ve been hearing about the urgency of evangelism for thirty years, and for thirty years the numbers have kept falling; there’s some saying about insanity and doing the same thing over and again.  And even beyond that the whole thing is imperialistic–gonna conquer the world for Jesus–and empires have no respect for strangers and outcasts.  People say Jesus commanded it, swell, but nobody bothers saying why he commanded it.  The strangers and outcasts of Matthew 25, they are the purpose of our salvation, not the way to it.

I was interrupted in my rapturous rant:  “Larry, better’n half of the 125 congregations in the synod don’t have any process to follow up on visitors.”

Are you kidding me?  That’s not even evangelism, it’s simple hospitality.  He looks at me:  “Right.”

A brief, reflective pause (geez, I’m glad I’m not in your seat, pal) then, well that’s another thing.  People always underestimate the work it takes to make a self-identified (Lutheran) Christian church member out of a true pagan.  They think shuffling the saints from one congregation to another is evangelism, or in extreme cases it’s the four spiritual laws of whuppety-whup salvation.  They think we still live in christendom, where everyone is at least nominally Christian.  Matter of fact, they don’t even recognize that we really live in a pagan society–Aqua Velvet never died, he just morphed.   So they don’t think so much about about how a born ‘n bred pagan comes in off the street and has to grow into an identification not only with Jesus, but especially with his people; so they don’t recognize the real work of evangelism they can do, because every time they hear the church hollering about evangelism all they hear is all this other stuff instead.  Matthew 25 is the command and the work of evangelism, and folks will hook into that, but you’re shootin’ yourself in the foot to call it evangelism; the word carries too much baggage to be useful.

Octo the optimist:  “We’re gonna redefine the word.”

Good luck with that, buddy.

Having read this far you will undoubtedly note that I have not used any of my favorite gutter words, especially around a topic that so richly deserves them.  That’s ’cause Octo Bish dared me to write about the topic without using my stylistic spices (the secret ingredients of a fine chef), explaining ‘I don’t like to cause offense unnecessarily’, to which I say good luck with that, too, and besides nor do I:  I only intentionally offend people when I’m convinced it’s absolutely, essentially necessary.  But the point here is to elicit some responses and comments about the whole evangelism thing from all you preachers, church people, and pagans who read this.  And because I’m trying to increase the pathetic statistics at my blogsite (it would be nice if somebody occasionally visited).  And because it would be interesting to see what kind of conversation might take place.

So, here we go, class, please respond to any or all of the questions by going to the site and clicking on ‘comments’.  First-timers gotta register with an email, I think.  http://keeneskwikies.wordpress.com/

1.  Evangelism:  why bother?

2.  What is a pagan?

3.  How does a pagan come to know him/her/itself as a Christian?

I won’t be responding to comments, just getting them out there for sharing.  I hope everybody joins in.