WE WENT TO CHURCH TONIGHT
By ROBERT MEYERS

A dear friend of mine once told me that most church services reminded him of some lines from Clement Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” He said that when the songs were finished and the preacher had mounted to his pulpit, the audience seemed to settle down comfortably and prepare itself not to listen, as in these lines:

And mamma in her kerchief,

and I in my cap,

Had just settled out brains for a

long winter’s nap.

I knew at once that he was right for I had seen exactly this ever since I was a small child. I have even wondered whether preachers must not school themselves to overlook the apathy of their hearers. Certainly it is dismaying to sit where one can carefully observe how little serious attention is paid by the audience to the average evangelistic effort.

Women often fuss endlessly with their small children, a legitimate activity which I have suspected sometimes they rather appreciated as a relief from boredom. Men learn to fix their eyes on the preacher and turn their minds to other thoughts. It is apparent from the glazed remoteness of their eyes that this is what they have done and that they are really not listening at all.

I must confess that I am sympathetic with these devices for relieving tedium even though I wish they were not necessary. After twenty-five years in the pulpit I know how little most of us have to say that is relevant to our hearers. In sheer self-defense they are obliged to checkmate our droning inanities until they can escape home and dutifully report to someone, “We went to church tonight.”

Not long ago I attended a typical gospel meeting in a small church and sat behind a young man, his wife, and their two small boys. The boys were weary and irritable to begin with and they became steadily more miserable as the hour and a half wore on. The mother was clearly exhausted, but dutiful to the last wracked corpuscle. While she wrestled to quiet the children (three and five years old), she cast occasional quick glances of meek reproach at her oblivious husband.

This worthy, meanwhile, gazed studiously at a copy of the King James version of the Bible. It was one which he had picked up idly from the seat, hoping, I suspect, to alleviate the monotony of the all-too-familiar stereotypes from the pulpit. He looked so disillusioned, so infinitely bored, and yet at the same time so terribly conscientious about the heralded worth of the Bible, that I yearned to lean over and whisper to him: “Try Phillips some time, and see how much more exciting it is! Or perhaps Goodspeed. or the New English Bible. You’ll be amazed at how much more you’ll get from your reading.”

I fought off that urge, knowing the young husband would have been convinced of my madness for the rest of his life. Yet all the while I knew the compulsion was a good one, because the Bible is our most precious legacy and there can be no greater tragedy than that it should bore one.

As I observed the family, a scene unrolled slowly which I had witnessed a hundred times before. Occasionally one of the little boys would move a bit too vigorously and his father would thump him vigorously with his knuckles in an action so reflexive that he did not even bother to take his eyes off the page. The child would then slide over to his mother’s side for comfort and she would patiently rearrange him, glancing meanwhile with some not-to-be-fathomed perplexity at her husband.

In a little while the smaller boy would cash in on his most successful appeal, whispering urgently in his mother’s ear. While she struggled out past protruding knees in her row, the five-year-old would watch the departure with a mounting realization that adventures were occurring in which he had, alas, no part. Scooting over, he would stretch to ask his father where mommy had gone. The response would he a hard shaking against the decorous oaken pew and a fierce admonition: “Shut up! Be quiet! I’ll take you out and spank you right now if you don’t get still!”

Neither the little boy nor I would understand this very well. Perhaps I had it harder than he, because I had an additional thought to plague me: how can a man turn from reading the Bible to show such fury to a tired child? It happened three times that night, as I had seen it happen so many other times in my life, and each time it seemed more incongruous, I had an urge to lean forward again and start that whispering madness:

“Young man, the God whom you came here to worship gave you this little boy. He is more precious to God, even, than he is to you. He is weary and he does not understand what the preacher is saying and he is terribly bored because there is nothing here to catch and hold his attention. Why not take him quietly home, where he belongs right now, and talk to him softly for a while before you tuck the covers about his shoulders and leave him to blessed sleep? I assure you that this is the best thing you can do for your God right now.”

Mad as that would have seemed to the young father, I know it was good advice if I had dared give it. There are times when taking so young a family out to an evening service for adults is a form of cruelty rather than an act of profitable devotion. The pressures of family life are greater than ever now, time is in short supply, and fathers and mothers may often more rewardingly give themselves to their tiny children than to the latest in a series of visiting evangelists. It is even conceivable, were they well taught, that at the end of a holy time together in their own homes, they might say to one another with a smile: “We were His church tonight.”

This will sound like rankest heresy to all those who boast of having “never missed a service” in all their years of parental care, but it is a conviction much thought upon and most passionately held. We often link religion with tedium so inseparably for our children that a lifetime may not be enough for their discovering differently. “Be still and know that I am God,” our book says. More of us need desperately to create those quiet hours when we can learn with our children who He is.

I do not contemplate with joy the ire these words will arouse in some of my colleagues who travel widely over the evangelistic circuits. Party prestige depends heavily on how many people can be “gotten out” to another meeting at which the same old cliches are likely to ring in the rafters. To stimulate jaded minds, advertising and promotional schemes proliferate wildly, ranging from tricky capsules and fake fortune cookies to elaborate panegyrics of the latest evangelist’s monumental successes around the country.

Perhaps not strangely, these schemes work better with members than with non-members. The docile herds in any sizeable city move from one congregation to another to support the latest effort, even though in private most admit that they are “preached out” and yearn for a quiet evening at home. Some ninety-five per cent of all such audiences are composed of these dutiful persons who have been persuaded how meritorious it will be if they can help fill the building.

Scandalous as it will seem to many, Carl Ketcherside was right when he said that “the world will not be saved by our own fluttering about from one meeting to another.” He speaks, as I do, of that dutiful response to artificial stimulants, not of the joyous excitement which a meaningful church service always inspires in eager Christians. No one with much experience in church work can doubt that he is right when he speaks of how we labor “to keep those coming whom we can never get going.” The pews are filled with dutiful deadwood from which no fire will ever blaze out.

Can we hope to get away from all this machinery so long as preacher prestige is at stake? With the ever-spiraling gimmicks for luring out the reluctant can we hope for a “name” preacher who will dare to tell people there may be something better than running from meeting to meeting? A tragic multitude I have known over a quarter of a century have made their whole piety consist of attendance. They have rested their hopes on having gone here and there, endlessly, no matter how frayed their nerves or how needy their families might be for quiet companionship at home. They deserve now to find out that no evangelist or church building has a monopoly on Jesus, with whom, if they will learn how, they may walk in gracious intimacy away from the constant crowd. —867 Spaulding, Wichita, Kan.

A NEW BOOK BY ROBERT MEYERS

Voices of Concern: Critical Studies in Church of Christism edited by Robert Meyers, is soon to be published. It consists of essays by members of the Church of Christ, some of whom have “left” us and some of whom have not, who are concerned about our condition. It is a responsible and provoking volume. The testimonies will amaze you, if not alarm you.

Reserve your copy with us at once. We will mail you your copy as soon as they come from the press. You will be billed. The price will be moderate.

 Robert Meyers (Ph.D., Washington U.) is Professor of English at Friends University, and editor of the forthcoming book, Voices of Concern: Critical Studies in Church of Christism. He is also minister of the Riverside Church of Christ in Wichita.