Sitting next to Unchurched Harry

When I was in college, my mom told me about this church in Chicago called Willow Creek. She said they’d started by taking a marketing survey of what people didn’t like about church, and getting rid of it.

To my mom’s hyper-conservative ears, that sounded like compromise. The worst imaginable form of apostasy, maybe. She believed if you weren’t offending everybody, you weren’t doing your job.

To my ears it sounded somewhat intriguing.

Wouldn’t you know, a couple years later we move from Nebraska to Chicago. We go church shopping.

Laura and I tried a few places. Ho-Hum. Then we visited Willow Creek, just once.

They had me at ‘hello.’

I sat there in the comfortable seats, enjoying the neutral setting. Admiring the excellence, watching well-produced theater sketches, listening to jazz and watching their pastor in blue jeans. I said to myself, “DANG. Someone finally fixed church!!!”

Before then there had always seemed to be something wrong about church that I could never quite put my finger on. Willow had put their finger on all that stuff. They had re-invented *everything.*

I immersed myself in it. (My mom was deeply disturbed. She nearly gave birth to puppies.)

One of the more radical aspects of Willow was: It was entirely and completely OK for anyone to go there every single Sunday and *not* necessarily believe a single word that was said.

You could be a Buddhist, you could be an Atheist, you could be a Muslim or a Jehovah’s Witness, and you were welcome to come for as long as you wanted to. Years, even.

And nobody was ever going to get in your face and say, “Hey pal, hurry up and crap or get off the crapper!”

There’s a lot of tension in that. Your typical evangelical conservative can hardly stand it. Sitting right next to Unchurched Harry week after week, knowing that Harry doesn’t believe the same thing you do, is extremely uncomfortable.

What if Harry is Pro Choice?

What if Harry didn’t vote against Bill Clinton?

What if Harry wants to confiscate my firearms?

What if Harry dies and goes to hell tomorrow? (Will it be my fault for not having called a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting this afternoon in the Atrium?)

Eventually I came to realize that you can let Harry come out of weakness, or out of strength.

If you let Harry come out of weakness, it means since we’re really not all that sure about what we believe anyway, we might as well just let everyone show up. After all, maybe whatever he believes is right.

If you let Harry come out of strength, it means since we are 100% certain of what we believe, we aren’t the least bit threatened by the fact that he disagrees. As a matter of fact, we’re also going to try to get Harry plugged into some kind of non-teaching ministry, like helping in the food pantry or fixing cars for single moms.

We’re going to make Harry feel so welcome that he wants nothing more than to truly belong to our community. We’re going to speak the truth in love and we’re going to trust God to do the heavy lifting. (Life change is an inside job anyway.)

The years I spent at Willow transformed my ability to relate to people of every imaginable belief system.

And so it is with almost anything that creates tension in your spiritual life. Jesus hung out with a whole collection of prostitutes, swindlers, drunks and extortionists. He was completely secure in who He was and in His calling. And he furiously loved those people.

Jesus lived comfortably in friendship with every imaginable kind of person – actually thriving in a tension that drove the Pharisees crazy.

Thrive in the tension. Relish it. Enjoy it. Do it out of STRENGTH, not weakness.

Perry Marshall