Octogenarians and Bicycle Helmets and When a Church Isn't a Church

I had a strange dream last night.

In it, my wife and I were the ages we are today. But we were back to taking preaching calls to congregations with pastoral vacancies or where the pastors were on vacation, just like we did when I was in seminary thirty years ago.

We arrived at a church building that looked more like an old-fashioned township hall than a traditional church building. The exterior was covered with simple white clapboard and it was topped by a simple, shingled roof like you'd see on a slab house.

We walked inside to see that the interior was one room, except for a few restrooms tucked away in a corner. The walls and ceiling were untreated, unpainted wood, the beams overheard, exposed framing wood.

There were no pulpit, altar, lectern, nor a single other item that looked "churchy."

That was OK, my wife and I told each other. Over the years, we've worshiped in school gyms, a Lions hall, a movie theater, and a cafeteria. 

The words of Article VII of The Augsburg Confession crossed my mind (yes, even in my dream):

...The church is the assembly of saints [saints are those who believe in Jesus Christ and are covered by His forgiveness] in which the Gospel is taught purely and the sacraments administered rightly. For the true unity of the church it is enough to agree concerning the teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions or rites and ceremonies, instituted by [people], should be alike everywhere...

In other words, church buildings don't have to look like church buildings we're used to and worship services don't have to be like the ones we're accustomed to, as long as the Gospel is taught in its purity and the sacraments (Holy Baptism and Holy Communion) are administered rightly.

I didn't remember all the lines of Article VII in my dream, mind you. I just smiled as I scanned this "unchurchy" place and thought, "Article VII."

But then, we met the people.

The average age was about 85, although it was clear that quite a few of the folks were in the habit of dyeing their hair (even their eyebrows) all sorts of natural, that is, unnatural, colors.

From the beginning, they were a talkative bunch. They talked through the Order for Confession and Forgiveness, through hymns, through the Bible readings, and, in fact, at every single point in the service.

And they weren't just talky, they were disruptive. They were all seated in chairs and none of them seemed to give a second thought to sliding the chairs across the hard floors to get up, creating sonic skidding sounds, in order to talk to a neighbor seated elsewhere.

Suddenly, I found myself preaching on an Old Testament text and was constantly having my own concentration disrupted by the mayhem. I'd be a in the middle of a point and the whole group would get up for restroom and smoke breaks.

My wife and I kept looking at each other in mystification.

It's probably no stretch to say that many, if not most, Christian congregations are composed of functional atheists for whom the Church is basically a social gathering which occasionally does nice things for people. But this group was overtly heedless, almost scornful, of God, Christ, the Bible, worship, and so on.

At one point, they'd settled back in to listen to the sermon and I determined to keep it short because of the short attention span of the congregation. Just then, a man with Grecian Formula brown hair and  mustache, pushed himself from his chair in the back of the sanctuary to station himself behind a person sitting toward the front.

In the meantime, one woman was speaking loudly to another woman, also toward the front. I did something I've never done as a pastor: I gave the loud talker the evil eye. She shut up, but then the Grecian Formula guy started conversing with the guy in front of him. I tried the evil eye on him. He simply looked at me dismissively, contemptuously, and started talking even more loudly than before.

The next thing I knew, the whole group had run (yes, the 85-year-olds ran) to a back room I hadn't noticed before and emerged with bicycle helmets in hand. As I struggled to keep preaching, each hung their helmets on hooks on the bare wooden wall and stood back about five feet. Then, in unison, they started a deafening countdown: "10, 9, 8..." At "Zero!," they all grabbed their helmets and were out of the room.

My wife and I were the only ones left in the little building. "I think we're through here," I told her. We both laughed and walked away, the bicycling octogenarians nowhere to be seen.

Keep in mind, this was just a dream.

But its point was clear: This strange church wasn't a church, not because it didn't look like a church, but because its people ignored the Gospel and presumably disdained the sacraments. The people didn't believe.

How many churches might that describe?

What Do You Make of This Dream?

This is the dream from which I awakened this morning.

I've apparently become a trucker hauling heavy equipment to be used by a road construction crew on Montgomery Road in Cincinnati and I'm heading north on I-71. My truck breaks down on the Montgomery Road ramp. Traffic starts stacking up behind me immediately. But I notice that it's also jammed ahead on the ramp.

Apparently, the construction crew needs the equipment I'm hauling quickly. So, I go to the back of my truck, unstrap the equipment, roll it off, and start pushing it up the ramp toward Montgomery.

On the way, I pull out my cell phone to tell my wife, who evidently works at or near Kenwood Town Centre at Montgomery and Kenwood Roads, that I may be running late. But, I tell her, I'll be walking to her, rather than driving. "That's OK, honey," she says, "I'll see you when you get here."

Mind you, I have no sense of struggling with this massive piece of equipment. I'm just moving along and it's gliding like the two-wheeled fork hand trucks we used whenever I worked at warehouses or loading docks. Only, it glides like those little trucks do when they were empty.

After I get off the phone with Ann, still pushing, I decide to call the truck driver ahead. How I know him or his number, is a mystery. But I call him and hear, at the other end of the line, the voice of Alan Greenspan. Evidently, we're old buddies and he's generous in sharing a working person's philosophical ruminations. Greenspan tells me that the key to enjoying life is to change jobs about every three years. "That's what I did," he tells me, "and I've had a ball."

By this time, I've pushed the equipment to where Greenspan is standing next to his truck, presumably awaiting help. We laugh, engaging in the kind of the yelling back-and-forth I remember workers engaging in back in my factory days, the dialog of people who can't wait to get home and away from their grimy jobs. They laugh to forestall the sense of futility they feel about their work.

Just then it dawns on me and I tell Greenspan: "Hey, you worked for years at the Federal Reserve. You were there more than three years." He throws his head back in uproarious laughter and we both wave as I push on.

By this point, I'm moving onto Montgomery Road, westbound toward Kenwood. I can see the road crew ahead.

But suddenly, there's a scene change. Evidently, it wasn't the crew itself that needed the equipment I'm pushing, but the company for which it works.

I find myself pushing this thing onto the grounds of the construction company's offices. There's a gravel parking lot, surrounded by twelve-foot fencing topped by barbed wire.

I stop pushing in order to report to someone in a small, squat, brick office building. Along the way, another trucker--remember I'm a trucker in this dream--starts walking alongside me. I find the guy annoying. I don't know him from Adam. But he's acting as though we're old pals. "Hey," he says, "I wonder when they'll let us off." He keeps up his patter, yapping at me like one of those little annoying puppies that won't go away when all you want to do is take a walk.

His question riles me up. I want to get out of this place in a hurry. I'm already late for meeting my wife.

We go into the building, which looks like any dispatching center you've ever seen, whether for a trucking company, smalltown police department, or highway patrol outpost.

There's one guy in charge there, bustling around. My annoying companion asks the bustler, "Hey, are we going to get out of here before 9:30 tonight?" "9:30?!" I cry, "I can't be here until 9:30. I'm meeting my wife for dinner."

"Hey!" the annoying guy says to me--and he's still smiling--"they always feed us dinner here." He says it as though it's a real privilege, a perk of the job. He enjoys it. I feel trapped. I want to be with my wife.

It's then that two things dawn on me. First, I'm an independent trucker. I don't work for this company. Having duly delivered their equipment, I don't have to hang around. I can walk away. Second, this is a stupid dream. So, I stopped it.

Now, several points should be made about the dream itself.

First: When we lived in Cincinnati, we often would take the half-hour trip from our house to Kenwood Town Centre or to visit with our friends there. But we rarely would have traveled on I-71 North.

Second: I have no idea what the piece of equipment I was pushing might have been. It was yellow and about the size of the cab of a crane used on construction sites. Lots of its paint was scratched off from heavy use. It clearly wasn't new.

Third: Alan Greenspan was in work clothes when I saw him.

Fourth: While I've done many jobs over the years, before I became a pastor twenty-four years ago, I never drove truck. I've never even learned to drive a stick shift, which may explain why I was broken down on the exit ramp!

Fifth: I remember dreams infrequently and I think that few dreams are imbued with much in the way of meaning. I doubt that that this one is either.

Have you had any dreams you've remembered lately?

What Do You Make of This Dream?

I usually don't remember dreams. But I guess that this one occurred close enough to my waking up this morning that I remember it.

I've been gone the past week, participating in a Group Work Camps Foundation 'Week of Hope' mission trip with three adults and nine youth from our church. (It was a great experience.) I'm taking tomorrow off and we'll be having a guest preacher.

In my dream, for some reason, my wife and I have to run over to the church building, which is about three miles from my house. It's Sunday morning. As I enter the church lobby, I glance at my watch and note that it'll be ten minutes before the service is to begin. Somehow, I slink into the church office without anyone noticing my presence. I'm both relieved and mystified by that; I want to get out before the service starts and not call attention to myself.

I run off some copies in the church office and write down some information for which I'd been looking.

Just as I come out of the office, I see the guest pastor breathlessly walk into the church building, an alb and stole flung carelessly over his arm. He must have had trouble getting here today, I think. (I have no idea what the guest pastor for tomorrow looks like. But in my dream, he's a man of about my age, mid-50s, squat, but powerfully built. He wears black hornrim glasses and a brown clerical shirt. His hair and moustache were once black, but are now sprinkled with grey.)

While I want to go and be out of his way, I decide that, since I'm there, I really should say something to him before I leave. I follow him into the sanctuary. While there isn't a huge crowd inside, I note that there are new faces and some people who've been with us lately and have returned, continuing a trend we've seen lately.

Again, as in the hallway, I somehow slither through undetected. And again, I'm relieved and mystified.

Try as a I might, I can't seem to reach the guest pastor. I do get within ten feet of him, but he's busily speaking with the worship accompanist. Knowing that he'll feel hairied if I try to greet him now, I set out for the parking lot.

When I get there, my car is nowhere to be seen. Instead, in the spot where I'd parked it, I find a cable car. My wife is inside. She explains that the conductor--of a trackless cable car?--needed to go do something and wanted me to take it for awhile. The end of my dream finds figuring out how to steer the thing, avoiding bumping into any of the cars on the lot, and heading out onto the street next to our church building.

So, what do you make of this one?