Exploring The Journey

Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger recently published a feature on a local church referred to as “The Journey.” The article positioned The Journey as one of many small congregations involved in the emerging church movement — an increasingly popular approach to religion that favors tolerance, acceptance, honesty, and a desire to explore Christ through creative, mystical experiences.

Intrigued, I visited The Journey’s earnest but over-designed web site. What I saw encouraged me. In Jackson, we’re used to churches listing books and movies to be avoided; at The Journey, the staff is recommending movies such as Chocolat and Signs and music by U2.

The coup-de-grace? The Clarion-Ledger article featured a quote from a happy, openly gay member of the congregation. “At last, I have found a place where I can be myself.”

Could The Journey become our wellspring in the midst of Jackson’s dry spiritual climate? Might The Journey be the church home we’ve been looking for?

By the time I finished my research, even Clyde — who rarely seems energized about anything churchy — seemed optimistic. With high hopes, I invited a number of friends and set out to experience The Journey first hand.

The “Journey House” presents well. On a rainy night in Jackson’s artsy Fondren district, with its eaves strung with a single strand of white lights, it looks more like a boutique than a church building. The candle-lit interior looks more like a living room than an auditorium, with good art on the walls and a series of nooks (formerly changing rooms, from back when The Journey House was a boutique) converted into meditation booths.

The pastor, Stacy, comes across as warm, sincere, and friendly. It’s quickly obvious, though, that Clyde and I are a bit, um, long of tooth for The Journey crowd. When 5:00 rolls around, we find ourselves surrounded by seventy-five or eighty young people, most of whom appear to have been born around 4:30. (Okay, so that’s an exaggeration … but with one or two exceptions, almost no one looked a day over twenty-three.)

Still, when the little quartet begins to play, I’m glad to be in attendance. With their guitars and bongo drum, these kids are better than 90% of the coffee house musicians I’ve ever heard.

Their lead singer, an apple-cheeked young woman with streaming blonde hair, has a clear, handsome voice, and music spills out of her with casual grace. The lyrics, projected on a screen, speak of not waiting until everything’s right before allowing yourself to be embraced by Jesus … a sentiment that, when combined with the young woman’s earnest performance, brings a tear to my ancient eyes.

And then — the sermon.

So they won’t seem quite so harsh, let me preface my comments by saying my heart goes out to the young man who delivered Sunday night’s sermon. Facing an audience of any kind is very difficult; engaging people on a scriptural subject (and making Scripture seem relevant to today) is not a challenge for the faint of heart.

I was a young minister once, and I worked with hundreds of ’em back when I did my two-year stint teaching for a C of C seminary. Young ministers face special challenges. Frequently, they possess far more energy and passion than they do practical knowledge or wisdom. (That was certainly the case with me!) Like the Replicants in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, they look like adults, and sound like adults, but they lack the experiences that would help them deal more effectively with the obstacles they face.

Tonight’s Very Young Minister does not appear to be old enough to buy himself a beer (should he, in fact, be inclined to do so). He’s nervous … but, worse, he’s clearly unprepared for tonight’s session. He makes a series of weak, literal observations about stories from the book of Genesis. He stammers through a series of selected Scriptures, none of which seem connected by any logical thread.

Worse, about once every ten minutes, he apologies for his performance. “I feel like I’m saying the same things over and over again.” (He is.) “I don’t feel like this is making any sense.” (It isn’t.) After about thirty minutes of rambling: “Do y’all have any questions? Any comments?” (We don’t.)

That half-hour mark would have been a good time to conclude what wasn’t working for him … and what, based on the number of people in the audience who were either asleep or dull-eyed, wasn’t working for us.

There are, however, two kinds of young, unprepared speakers … and, as I learned back in my days at the preacher’s schools, they respond to situations like this one in two very different ways.

The first group can sense when a sermon is going south, and they have the maturity to deal with it. In other words: they quit early. They wrap it up. They “receive a sudden inspiration” that a few more good songs are what people need. They know a rambling ten-minute message is less offensive than a rambling one-hour message … and so they expound on one scripture, make one point, and toss the rest of their sermon aside.

The second group can also sense when a sermon is going south, but they lack the maturity or experience required to handle such situations with grace. They plow through their sermon outline with all the determination of an ox in a mud-choked field, lambasting themselves as they go. They may even tell the audience “This is terrible!” — yet they refuse to put a stop to the terror.

When their points fail, they simply make the same points again — more loudly, more emphatically, more earnestly, more often. When their logic gets tangled, they convince themselves (and tell the audience) that “it will all make sense in the end.” Worse, when they reach the end and things still don’t make sense, they improvise — usually by reading aloud lengthy passages of scripture.

The Very Young Minister, bless his heart, is from that second camp. After forty minutes of disjointed rambling (“I feel like some kind of freak,” he says once), he announces The Fix: “I’m just going to read the eleventh chapter of Hebrews to y’all, okay?”

I’m stunned. At 40 verses, Hebrews 11 is one of the longer chapters in the New Testament. We’re forty-five minutes into the sermon; by the time the young man reaches the end of Hebrews 11 — especially since he’s intent on stopping at the end of each verse to rephrase the already clear text in his own words — it’ll be 9:00 before we all go home.

Back at the thirty-minute mark, I was ready to leave; Clyde, however — always the polite one — resisted, knowing our departure would be disruptive and rude. However, by this time, even Clyde can bear no more, so we rise from our folding chairs, step past a couple of dozing kids, and escape into the night.

I am disappointed. I am exhasuted. I am angry. I am frustrated.

I feel about a thousand years old.

At the nearby 24-hour Aladdin Grill, we scarf down pretty good gyros and onion rings and decompress. We spend the entire meal asking, “How could this have gone so wrong?”

Perhaps we were there on a bad night. (If so, where was the senior pastor? And why didn’t he put an end to this young man’s public humiliation?) Perhaps this young man isn’t the regular speaker. (I’ve since learned that he does, in fact, speak often.) Perhaps the 8:00 pm service is for an older crowd. (We’ll never know.)

Perhaps, too, we would have been less disappointed had the paper and the website not built up The Journey as some vibrant, art-infused spiritual haven intent on restoring a sense of of the mystical to Christian worship. Instead, we found ourselves in what, back in my day, would have been termed a “youth service,” had our youth services taken place in a boutique and featured a live band. The web site led me to believe we’d see creative alternatives to dry sermons — poetry, fiction, media, technology; how disappointing, then, to be confronted with a one-way dialogue presented to a totally passive audience.

We head home. Our journey continues … but the Journey House will not be a stop along the way.