September 06, 2023 – B

I was born into seriousness
and have swum around it it all my life.
It is the whole trouble with everything.

People take things so seriously.

Paul Watzlawick wrote a book entitled,
"The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious,"
which captures things quite nicely.

Comedians are bad about taking things too seriously.
Walking around in drug-induced comas,
or killing themselves,
or living out their lives 
sitting looking at a wall.
What???

Why don't we just lighten up?
That is the prime ingredient in enlightenment.
Just lightening up!

Itta Bena, Mississippi was/is a very serious place.
Everywhere I have lived was very serious,
until I got to Greensboro, North Carolina
and the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant.
It was fabulous.
It had out-lived its seriousness,
was running out of money,
had its back to the wall
and was willing to try anything
because nothing they had tried worked.

A dear woman came to the rescue
with a $4,000 dollar gift
and a "See what you can do with this,"
so we did four things with it.
We sat down with six or eight people
who were fun to be with
and agreed to ask our unchurched friends,
"What would it take to get you to church
once or twice a month?"
The results were astounding and beautiful:
No liturgy.
No offering.
No creed.
No organ.
No prayers of confession.
No Bible reading.
No prayers.
No hymns.
No sermons...
Things like that,
which, when you put it all together
came down to NO CHURCH,
at least no church the way the church
has always been the church.

The second thing we did was to create
an early service, that worked out to be 
"The 9:20 Service."
Why, 9:20?
It was late enough to not rush people
to an early service,
and it was early enough to allow time
for the traditional service at 11:00 O'clock.

The third thing we did was
to run a series of ads in the local paper
along the lines of
"No Bible.
No sermon.
No hymns.
No prayers.
No kidding."

The fourth thing was to invite local 
singer/songwriters
and musicians
to provide 20 minutes
of their kind of music
for $100.
(No "religious music" allowed),
in two 10 minute sets
to start and end the service,
and we had 10 minutes of silence
at the start.
That's thirty minutes.
We spent another thirty minutes or so
with time for people to say
what they had to say
and for me to talk to them
about things I write about here.
And ended in time to move out
and for the 11 O'clock people to move in.

It was a wonderful encounter with freedom
for all of us,
and lasted seven years up to my retirement,
when people who "didn't get it" came in
to do things like they ought to be done,
which is killing the church worldwide.

And it was a seven year demonstration to me
of the importance of lightening up
and not taking things too seriously--
of being serious about not being serious.

And of the difficulty in doing that
in a world where things are deadly serious
all of the time.

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