Back in the day I was a preacher. Inexplicably I was in charge of a church and in the end we ended up doing all right. We turned Sunday School rooms into apartments so homeless people could move inside, turned the Baptismal Pool into a bathtub and had the "Bob Dylan" pew.
There were a lot of Dylan fans who came so they sang together during the hymns mimicked his singing style. So "Amazing Grace" came out like Dylan would sing it.
"Ah...MAZ...ing Grace ... how sweet .... the sound."
They were hilarious.
We also danced in the aisles, played lots of unplugged hymns way before MTV launched "Unplugged" and once a year we'd close the church and go on a retreat. I'd always hang a "Go Fishing" on the front door of the church while we were gone.
Towards the end of my time there, I got invited to a lot of places to preach. Once in Knoxville, Tennessee after I'd finished a woman stood up in the middle of the congregation, crying and wailing. She said something about how everybody should listen as the Gospel had finally been preached.
I was never invited back.
Another time in Kansas City, I was in the middle of my sermon when this man yelled out, "THE POOR WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS!"
To which I said, "Finish the verse."
He didn't say anything.
"The poor will be with you always so that you can help them ...but you won't always have me."
I was never invited back.
I don't preach much any more. Now I give speeches and honestly I'm giving less and less of them. But this morning I'm preaching at Bar Church. I think this is my third or forth time. We meet in a bar and the bands really good. There's a brunch for those who have don't have much. The congregation is this rag-tag collection of people who normally wouldn't be caught dead together ... though most know what everybody else did on Saturday night.
There are no pews, carpet, baptismal pool or even a cross hanging anywhere. We do have really cool tee shirts though.
It reminds me of something my favorite writer of all time Frederick Buechner once said, "They make you wonder if the best thing that could happen to many a church might not be to have its building burn down and to lose all its money. Then all that the people would have left would be God and each other" (Listening to Your Life, Harper, 1992).
That's all we got at Bar Church ... God and each other.
Oh ... and really good music.
