Welcome

Pentecost 3A, 6/29/14

Matthew 10:40-42

O Lord, we will sing of your faithfulness forever. Establish your kingdom among us. Amen.

Over the years, I’ve been a regular worshipper in at least eight different congregations. There is one word that almost every congregation uses to describe itself: “welcoming.”

We know that’s not true, though. Not all congregations do welcoming well.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus emphasizes the importance of welcoming. When someone truly welcomes guests into their midst, they are welcoming Jesus himself. And when we welcome Jesus, we welcome God the Father.

When we do welcoming well, Jesus promises us that God will be present among us. That’s a pretty great reward for something that we already know is important and we already want to do anyway.

Let’s explore a little bit about what welcoming looks like.

A few years ago, I was living in St Paul. I was only going to be there for one school year, about nine months. This was near the end of my ordination process – I knew that it wouldn’t be long until all my Sundays would be booked for the foreseeable future. I decided to take the opportunity to visit as many different churches as I could that year.

I had read somewhere that you have to attend worship five times before you really get a feel for a congregation. There are so many unexpected things that happen – baptisms, special celebrations, volunteers forgetting their job, bad sermons –you can never be sure that your first impression of a place is accurate. So once I started visiting churches, I tried to get to most of them at least twice, to get a better feel of what the congregation was like.

Sometimes I met a friend for worship. She is a pastor in the United Church of Christ, and she was living in Minneapolis and was in between calls. At one church, we got there a few minutes early for the second Sunday worship service. Some folks from the first service were still around having coffee, and one nice older woman came over and talked to us. She told us that she was thrilled to see younger people in the congregation – their church needed more young folks. She was excited that we were both pastors, and told us how great it was that women were able to be ordained now. She told us about her family, and how long she had been a member of the congregation, and how important it was to her and what an amazing place it was.

My friend and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. By the time we finally managed to pull ourselves away from this woman, the second worship service had already started… and there were no bulletins left. We had to try peeking over the shoulders of the people in the pew in front of us to follow along with worship.

A few weeks later, we decided to give this church another try. After all, you can’t judge a congregation based on one experience with it.

The same woman greeted us when we arrived. She remembered us from our previous visit and was excited to see us again. Even though we were a bit pushier in getting away from her and into worship, we still missed the beginning of the service on our second visit. And they had run out of bulletins again. Thankfully, this time, someone sitting near us saw that we didn’t have a bulletin, so they gave us one and shared with the person next to them.

Needless to say, that second visit was our last to that congregation.

These people believed that they were welcoming to guests.

This woman thought that she was being welcoming. 

What mistakes did they make?

On a practical level, not enough bulletins were made for worship. And even if that's understandable for one week, somehow the communication didn’t make it to whoever was in charge of printing the bulletins, telling them to make more because they had run out.

The ushers didn’t do their job either. They didn’t notice that there were sill people waiting to come in for worship, so they gave out the last bulletin – they didn’t try to find someone to make more copies. And once the service started, the ushers abandoned their posts. Any latecomers were left on their own. A welcoming usher could have stayed around, and if someone came in, they could have directed them to sit by a regular church member who could share, and help the guest find their way through the service.

What about the woman who greeted us? Do you think she had gifts for ministry? I certainly do. Someone who loves the church that much – get her set up with the new member class, talking to folks who are joining about the many ways they can get more involved. Sign her up to be a Confirmation mentor, so she can tell the kids all about how important it is to have a church community throughout your life. But don’t have her greet visitors on Sunday mornings. Find someone else, who is good as greeting and giving directions and helping with traffic flow, and post them by the doors before worship.

The biggest mistake that this church made, from my point of view, was that no one asked us why we were there. The only reason we went was to experience worship in community. And that was the only thing that we were prohibited from doing.

This congregation immediately assumed that any visitor who walked through the doors were potential members. Even when the woman found out that we were pastors, she didn’t change the direction of conversation. She kept trying to sell her church to us, rather than trying to get to know us. She didn’t listen when we said that we weren’t in the market to buy.

Think about walking into a car dealership and test-driving a new car.

Sometimes you’re actually in the market to purchase a car.

Sometimes you just want to try out something different or new.

Sometimes you’re shopping for someone else.

Sometimes you’re checking out the competition that your friend who owns another dealership is going to be up against.

Sometimes you just want the free giveaway that the dealership advertised for anyone who came in to test-drive a new car.

So you test-drove a car. And you didn’t buy anything.

Three years later, which dealership will you go to when you are ready to make a purchase?

Will you go back to the place where the salespeople hovered over you and didn’t even let you talk to your spouse about the car you tried, without butting in to the conversation? Will you give your business to the place that flooded you with junk mail and phone calls, pressuring you to return and buy something immediately?

Or will you return to the dealership that answered your questions but also respected your personal space? Will you return to the dealership that maybe made a follow-up phone call or sent a letter, but in a way that respected your independence and your ability to make your own decision about buying a car?

People attend worship at new congregations for a wide variety of reasons.

Some people are looking for a church home.

Some people are there to support a friend or family member.

Some people haven’t been to church for ages and they’re just dipping their toe in the water to see if God still shows up on Sunday morning.

Some people are in the middle of a life crisis and just need somewhere to go where they can spend an hour in prayer and not be interrupted.

Some people are hoping to be able to send their kids or grandkids to Sunday School, or are looking for a place in which to get married.

These people may or may not be potential members.

But they are all children of God.

And they all deserve to be welcomed as though they were Christ himself.

Some of the best efforts at welcoming end up going awry because people spend their energy focused on something that the guest doesn’t want.

I saw a cartoon last week that had a couple of old guys changing the lettering on the sign in front of a church. The caption had one of them saying to the other, “There! That ought to dispel the myth that we’re an elderly congregation that doesn’t know how to reach out to young people.”

The lettering on the church sign said, “Whippersnappers are welcomed.”

Another time I visited a church with one of my friends because they had a prominent theologian as their guest for the weekend. He had given a lecture the day before, and was preaching in worship on Sunday.

At the end of worship, this congregation practiced one of the most unfriendly traditions that churches ever invented. They asked all the guests to stand up and introduce themselves.

I know this is something that many of you have experienced. And I can tell you, based on every study done on church growth in the last 20 years, this is one of the quickest ways to ensure that a guest will never return to your congregation.

What if the guest had a speech impediment? And all of a sudden you’re asking him to stand up and speak aloud in front of a room full of strangers. Can you imagine the embarrassment?

This particular congregation also handed out loaves of homemade bread to guests. I guess it was something of a reward for standing up and speaking to strangers. But on this particular Sunday, they didn’t have enough loaves for all the visitors. You’d think they would have been prepared for a large number of guests, considering that they had advertised this event. Although my friend and I had made it clear in our introductions that we were classmates, not a couple, we had to share a loaf of bread. There wasn’t enough for one for each of us. It was awkward - we didn't live together, how were we going to share a loaf of bread?

Again, it was a nice gesture, but it failed. And what would have happened if one of us had been severely allergic to nuts, for example? Unless we knew that the bread had been carefully made with no ingredients that would put us at risk for anaphylactic shock, that bread would have gone straight into the garbage.

Sometimes in the church, we try so hard to be welcoming, that we end up scaring people away.

According to the Gospel lesson today, it shouldn’t have to be that hard.

Treat others as if they are Christ.

Put their needs first.

And God will be present in our community.

The Gospel passage actually sets the bar pretty low. If you even give a cold cup of water to someone as an act of faith, you will be rewarded.

Giving someone a drink of water. It seems pretty simple.

Is that something that we can do here?

At our church, if my sister came here to worship and wanted a drink of water because her throat was sore from singing so enthusiastically with the congregation – she wouldn’t be able to have one. My sister has a son who is three months old, and he is still breastfeeding.

The water in our well has a level of nitrates that is unhealthy for pregnant women & infants. 

Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about nitrates in the groundwater.

But we could keep bottled water on hand.

We could install filters on our faucets.

We could buy one of those fancy water cooler thingies.

My sister is exactly the demographic that we say that we want in our congregation.

We claim that we want young families at our church.

But if they actually came, would we even be able to offer them a cold cup of water?

Today’s Gospel lesson reminds us that welcoming is important.

And in welcoming guests, we have to remember a few important things.

Their needs come first. A guest isn’t here to serve us, to keep us in business, or help us avoid closing our doors. Our job is to serve the guest, to discover their needs, and to help them have their needs fulfilled.

When we welcome a new person to our community, Jesus asks us to treat them in the way that we would treat him.

We have work to do, folks. Jesus expects us to be a welcoming community. We can’t just say that we are, like every single church does, we actually have to put our words into action.

I hope that, when a visitor leaves this congregation, they don’t go away with stories like the ones I’ve told you today.

And I’m sure those congregations I told you about today would be appalled to know how unwelcomed I felt when I visited.

So let’s do better. Let’s focus our energy on making our church be a welcoming place, where everyone who comes in the door is welcomed as if they are Christ.

And may God help and guide us as we do so.

Amen.