Car/Church Shopping
Becky and I shopped for cars last week. Two different dealerships provided customers opposite experiences.. One dealer is only a couple blocks from our house. Our experience has been the same both times we have stopped in within the last year. They don’t seem to be interested in selling cars. Not offering to let us sit inside or encourage us to go for a test drive made it easy to leave. I really did want to drive a Ford Flex. Those are the crossovers that remind me of a juke box. Having owned two PT Cruisers, a Honda Element, and Honda Fit, I have a taste for funky cars. I could have pressed the issue, but I was the customer. Did I have to do all the work? Becky really isn’t interested in taking test drives. We intended to go to a Ford dealership further down Lindberg, but never made it because on the way we stopped in at a Buick/GMC store on a whim.
Well there, we couldn’t get away. They welcomed us, and introduced to people. That evening the owner of this large network of dealerships personally called us, no recorded message. So we stopped in again the next day. You already know the result. We now have a GMC Acadia, having traded in the Fit. We think we got a good deal. Of course, no matter what deal we think we got, I assume the dealership got a better one.
At home, I described the experience to Becky, “It’s like they have a huge spider web over the door.” Becky happened to be standing in the bedroom door and asked, “Where?” “No, no,” I said, “At the door of the dealership it’s like ‘Come into my kitchen,’ said the spider to the fly.
Often churches act as differently toward “customers” (sinners/saints) as these two dealerships on Lindberg Road. One church completely ignores the visitor. Oh, sure, if you want to join, “we’d love to have you,” but you have to do most of the heavy lifting. Another church, Styrofoam cups containing the “third Lutheran sacrament,” welcomes you and surrounds you with a community who would love to have you among them. There is no guarantee that the friendly church is going to be a better fit than the one who leaves you on your own. Just as there is no guarantee that the Acadia will be a better vehicle than the Flex and maybe we should have went with a Honda Odyssey, but we owned enough station wagons when the kids were growing up that a minivan just doesn’t appeal.
Now I’m not trying to make joining a church a matter of consumer choice alone. I don’t mean to disparage the work of the Holy Spirit. However, the Holy Spirit does work through physical means and it won’t hurt a church to cooperate with those means and give the Spirit an opportunity. For that matter, worship that is well done and preaching that not only divides Law and Gospel but is also interesting surely can be used by the Holy Spirit as well as sloppy worship and ill-prepared sermons. Maybe even better?
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