When you stand shoulder to shoulder with other dads at your kids’ sporting events for hours at a time, you find all kinds of things to converse about. These are always pretty interesting to me, especially when talking with unchurched dads. They can ask pointed questions (thinking I’m some sort of moral authority) and I do my best to give stumbling answers. (One of yesterday’s questions was whether I was in favor of legalizing marijuana).
Another topic of conversation was about who my church’s “competition” was. It’s a common question and one I try not to get sucked into. At my previous church, there was some bitterness/jealousy toward the big Presbyterian church in town for various reasons and I kept reminding people that we’re on the same “team” as the Presbyterians (and Catholics and Lutherans). If we want to think about competition, I’d say, let’s try to figure out how we can outdo Starbucks, soccer games, and shopping malls on Sunday mornings.
But I knew what the other dad meant because even though I try not to get sucked into it, I do. I look at what other bigger churches are doing and fight feelings of jealousy and inadequacy. As I was walking the dog yesterday morning, I saw some door hangers in our neighborhood publicizing another new church in the South Loop. I immediately went online to check it out. I found fault with various things on the site, chuckled at certain ways of phrasing things, and lumped it into the category of other conservative evangelical churches in the city that are trying to start a new thing.
None of this is necessarily helpful for me to do, just human. Later on, though, I found myself admiring the young adult who’s trying to do this. According to his blog, he seems to have taken a big risk to move into the city and he and his wife have significant debt. But he’s driven by this call and has a passion for reaching others for Christ.
He and his church have now found their way into my prayer life, along with the other churches I compare ours to. I work on sincerely praying for their own faithfulness and “success” (whatever that is) and, of course, in the process, I pray for my own transformation, too.