Wednesday January 23, 2008
Stacking chairs
It was back in December, after a community event in the local hall. The potluck dinner had ended, the plates had been cleared, and the members were starting to stack the folding chairs to clear the floor.
The chairs looked as if they were all similar. But they weren\’t. They didn\’t quite fit together.
That\’s not true. They would fit together if you jammed them down. But that tended to damage the edges of the molded plywood seats. Which, in turn, tended to leave splinters in the next user\’s posterior.
“No, no, not like that,” objected a long-time member. “You have to match the colors!”
Superficially, the chairs all looked the same –plywood seats, plywood backs, metal frames…
“Look at the color of the frames,” explained the organizer. “Put the brown-painted frames with the brown frames, the gray frames with the gray, and so on.”
With that change, the chairs stacked together perfectly.
Chairs and people
I got thinking about those stacking chairs while I was researching an article about church conflicts a few weeks ago. The article concluded with the observation that the two factions were going to have to separate.
“It\’s not an ideal solution,” I commented. “But it is a realistic one.”
We have an ideal that religious people should get along with each other. They should swallow their disagreements. They should tolerate, even celebrate, their differences. They should set a model for the world on how to get along together.
But the ideal doesn\’t always work. People do have differences – of belief, of style, of history.
And people would rather hang together with those who share similar views than with those who don\’t.
It\’s like the stacking chairs.
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I know that I, for example, would be seriously unhappy in a Southern Baptist congregation. Perhaps I would be even more unhappy in a church that calls itself The Ultimate Messianic Church of Divine Jesus Christ of the Original Bible.
I just wouldn\’t fit.
Of course, a black Pentecostal would probably find the worship services I attend much too repressed emotionally. And a Quaker would certainly find them too noisy.
That doesn\’t make any of these variations wrong (although I might question the scholarship of the Original Bible people!) but it does suggest that an attempt to homogenize all tastes will have about as much appeal as a four-course turkey dinner put through a blender.
The “lowest common denominator” approach will satisfy no one.
Nor should my musings suggest that we exclude those who may look different, or come from different backgrounds. Like the shock treatment administered to heart attack victims, a stranger may provide precisely the spark that\’s needed to revitalize a congregation stalled in the doldrums of deadly routine.
But only if the existing group is willing to listen to the new view, to try it, and to take the risk of being changed by their experience.
Like stacking chairs, we may look alike superficially. But we function more smoothly when gathered with like-minded peers.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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