outward focused thoughts: it’s cold in here
by dave workman

Some time back I was in a fast-food place that was freezing. People were eating with their coats on. I was waiting on my food and said to the woman at the cash register, “Hey, it’s pretty chilly in here.”

 

She smiled and said, “Yeah, that’s how we like it back here. It gets warm in the kitchen.”

 

I replied, “Yeah, but your people sitting out here are eating with their coats on.”

She looked around me at the dining area and then looked back at me like I was from another planet and said, “I know. But this is how we like it back here.”

Being the astute observer of humanity that I am, I knew this wasn’t going anywhere. I ate my cheeseburger with my coat on.

 

That’s a picture of many of our churches. We like it a certain way back here and the people who don’t have a clue and can’t relate to the language, the style, the customs, and the music, are sitting in our churches with their emotional coats on freezing to death, we frankly don’t care about them. We like it like this...we’re comfortable and this is how we’ve always done it. A few decades ago we would have used this argument for traditional versus contemporary, hymns versus choruses, drums versus pipe organs. But I would rather make this a philosophical case for inwardness versus outwardness…and what I just described is the total opposite of an outward-focus.

 

For those of us who can only look at the others who are sitting with their coats on and say, “That’s the way we like it back here”, when we die off, there won’t be anyone left in the church except for a few people who think that it’s normal to be miserable in church. And eventually they’ll get to the place where they think that since they were miserable, everyone else should be miserable too.

 

It was Jesus Himself who said in Mark 10:45, “The Son of man didn’t come to be served, but to serve…and to give his life as a ransom for many.” I wonder what would happen if we really saw the Church’s primary duty as serving lost people.

 

It could start a revolution.