Food for Thought: Responsible Churching
by Ardith Hoff
In recent years parenting has been tagged with plenty of labels: tiger, helicopter, elephant, free-range, etc. The school year of 2018-19 began with a new moniker, "lawnmower parent." A post that went viral on We areTeachers.com explained how lawnmower parents mow down all of their children's challenges, struggles and discomforts. Editorial Director of the website, Hannah Hudson, shared a few examples. A high-school student's parent asked a teacher to walk her teenager to class to assure he wouldn't be late. One parent requested that someone in the cafeteria blow on her child's hot lunch to cool it down. In their attempts to help a child succeed, lawnmower parents take away virtually every opportunity for maturity and resilience to emerge. Hudson suggested it's not an emergency unless the cell-phone-totting student would be willing to go to the school office and use the secretary's phone. All parents want to help their child succeed; we just need to make sure we're really helping. USAToday.com, 9/19/18
This makes me wonder if churches haven’t also become lawnmower churches. After all, most churches today provide pre-written prayers, prescribed rituals for worship, and familiar hymns to keep us comfortable with worship. Do we make it too easy for the people in the pews to skate through Sunday morning services without having to think about or take responsibility for much of anything?
I am not advocating that we should make worship an onerous experience, but I think that like lawnmower parents, we might be making it so comfortable that parishioners do not even have to think for themselves about what God has ask us as Christians to do. Yes, a good preacher can inspire his or her audience toward thoughtful action and cause them to realize that there is a need for accomplishment, but do we really require people to have to follow through? Are we too afraid that people will not want to be part of a church that lays too much responsibility on them?
Don’t we as churches bare some responsibility, just as parents do, to help people become more mature and responsible adults? Don’t we need to inspire people to want to do God’s work? As it says in Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” In other words, we have to ask people to walk the walk.