c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ Twenty-eight months after moving from pulpit to pew, I have come to three conclusions about church, two of them probably heretical.

First: The view from the pew is different, and views within the pews are even more conflicted.

Second: Our facilities are both blessing and curse, but mostly curse.

Third: A rigid orthodoxy is crippling the Christian movement.

I want this week to address the first of those conclusions.

Clergy and laity would get along better if they accepted how differently they see the Christian enterprise. Parish clergy are proprietors of an institution, but laity don’t necessarily see themselves as members of an institution. A few do, just as an energetic few become highly invested in PTA or soccer league.

Most laity, however, come seeking something of God. Institution, and its annoyances, are a price to be paid, not a primary purpose.

Clergy feel a call to convert, prod and instruct. Laity don’t necessarily feel a need to be converted, prodded or instructed. Sitting in the pews on Sunday are an amazing collection of needs: broken marriages, lost jobs, financial stress, troubled children, failing health, loneliness. Some want soothing, but even more, folks in the pews want meaning: are these trials leading to life or to death? Where is God?

The greater tension in congregations, however, is between the energetic few and the many whose life-focus is elsewhere.

Any volunteer organization depends on an energetic few. If they are running the candy sale or recruiting coaches, they deserve special benefits like a relationship with the principal or a moment on stage.

We treat church as another volunteer organization. Pastors spend inordinate amounts of time tending to the energetic few. The few, in turn, develop a proprietary attitude toward church, seeing it as theirs to enjoy, protect and control. They wish the many shared their enthusiasm for institutional life.”What can we do to get more people involved?”they ask.

But church is different. Church exists for the stranger, for the wounded, to proclaim good news to the poor, to welcome outcasts, and to incarnate the non-hierarchical love of God. Being present is the height of being”involved.”Drinking at the well and then going out to live and to serve is reason enough for the faithful to gather.

Instead of focusing on the energetic few and their needs for control and applause, the church’s energy ought to be outward, toward the many and, beyond them, the world.

I think of the cookie monitor who stood beside a serving line to enforce the one-cookie-per-person rule. From an institutional-management perspective, her hovering made sense. But it communicated two messages: Grace is in short supply, and the institution needs to be protected against me.

God’s kingdom isn’t a closed economy, however. Our model is the feeding of the 5,000, where the Twelve distributed food whose existence, availability and abundance weren’t theirs to control. The cookie monitor’s role, if she wanted to have one, was to find more cookies, not to protect an artificially limited supply.

As a pastor, I recruited and rewarded cookie monitors. Now that I sit in a pew, hungry for God’s food, I find cookie monitors an annoyance, not just because I wanted two cookies and she stood in my way, but because my approach to God is already tentative, shaped as it is by my sins, my needs and the confusion that getting anywhere close to God inevitably inspires. I don’t need one more barrier. I need arms so improbably and irresponsibly open that I know this place is of God, not of the world.

Cookies are a small item, of course. But I observed her proprietary attitude, her defend-the-gates posture, her focus on the cookie plate and not on people seeking food, her obvious distrust of children and the uninitiated, and her enjoyment at having this measure of control, and I saw the entire enterprise more clearly.

With our rules about who can receive communion, the creeds we demand people sign before joining, and the club atmosphere we create with our focus on the inner circle, churches protect their integrity against the motley herd. But the job Jesus gave us was to pass out food to anyone who is hungry.

MJP END EHRICH