How the church I used to pastor has now become the world we live in
by Jack Dunigan
They were a miserable bunch. On the first Sunday of November, 1997, I challenged and encouraged the church to make Thanksgiving a month-long celebration. Instead of giving thanks on one Thursday, I asked them to personally declare thirty days of thanks.
For the next month, I exhorted, abandon complaining and griping, replacing it with expressions of gratitude and gratefulness. Seeing the downside can become an enslaving habit. Focusing on the negative, the incomplete, the inadequate, the failures, and the disappointing can overwhelm and infect life with a misery as deep, dark, and eventually impenetrable as the blackest dungeon. Let him who would intend to love life and see good days refrain his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking guile wrote the writer of the first epistle of Peter.
It was, in reality a simple request. It was also, in retrospect, doomed to fail.
Why? Because they were, for the most part, a people whose pain and disappointment had become their claim to fame. It was what was wrong, or what they perceived to be wrong, that identified them and to which they laid claim as a badge. Bad news was, for them, good news. To put it more bluntly, if it was not negative and bad, they neither repeated it nor wanted to hear it.
How do I know? Because I had no sooner got home when the phone started to ring. “We have a right to complain.” “You’re trying to suppress us and are ignoring our pain.” “You are trying to tell us how to live.” (Actually, that one was true. I was.)
I created a firestorm of opposition by the simple act of suggesting that thanks and thanksgiving might be a better way to live.
Well, I didn’t last long there. In under a year I was gone and glad to be. They were…and as far as I can tell…still are a bunch insistent on wallowing in misery.
I had thought and hoped it was an isolated circumstance, but I now think I might be wrong about that because I keep hearing the same reasons.
For example, on a thread on Facebook just this past week, one Christian woman insisted it was her constitutional right to oppose and her mandate to speak up whenever something was wrong.
Another insists it is his responsibility to point out sin wherever he sees it. (I asked for his mailing address so I could send him a mirror but he wouldn’t give it to me.)
Any number of threads take issue with one point or another. They don’t like a phone call the president-elect received. They are unhappy that not enough people say merry Christmas. Others complain that someone somewhere is being suppressed, oppressed, or depressed…and that not enough of us are distressed enough about their suppression, oppression, and depression.
I was invited to speak at a church in a suburb of Toronto. Staying in a spare room in the pastor’s home, I witnessed a most amazing…and disturbing exhibition. Every evening, the entire family sat around the living room, all facing their mother (the pastor’s wife) who occupied a chair all by itself on the opposite wall. There she passed judgment on everything anyone said and what they spoke of. She did not like this, thought that was wrong, insisted that this one thing and another be changed, attacked, adjusted, or outright eliminated. Every evening for 5 nights is was the same thing – an outpouring of negativity and unhappiness the likes of which I had seldom seen.
I learned a few years later that the family had split up, the couple had divorced. I am not surprised. No relationship can survive an onslaught of negativity, ingratitude, and unhappiness like that. No matter what there was always something wrong and the wrongness of anything eventually became the failure of everything.
I challenged the church that November morning that if they did not cut the chains of ingratitude and negativity, not even God himself could help them. It was a prison of their own making in which they lived. An incessant fountain of guile will poison any life and unfortunately the lives of those around them.
The church I used to pastor has become the world in which we live.
There seems to be a need within most of us to pursue an ideal, to admire perfection. But the ideal cannot exist and perfection is almost never to be manifest. The pursuit of ideal social constructs (utopian communities) is not new. We can or at least should learn that they never work. No economic system is perfect. There are always inefficiencies and inequalities. So what?
The difference lies in the focus and the intent. For those in that church, their focus was on their discontent and their intent was to wallow in it. Given the failure of my thirty days of thanks experiment, I suppose I should have followed up with a celebration of Frank Costanza’s (from Seinfeld) Celebration of Festivus, you know the holiday for the rest of us. An aluminum pole is easy enough to get and they were primed to take a moment to tell everyone else how those people had disappointed them, a key component of the Festivus ritual.
It is the insistence that we have the right to demand that things be right as we want them, and the insistence that we activate that right that poisons the well. Gratitude and thanksgiving does not imply passivity. We can work for good without fixating on bad. The writer of Peter’s first epistle was correct – if you really want to live good days (the writer is not implying that the days are utopian nirvana), then it is well within your power to do so. But if you do not, not even God Himself can help you.
