Faith Works 4-15-22

Faith Works 4-15-22
Jeff Gill

Telling the story, again and again
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Even in Easter week, people are talking about Intel. And most of us don't know the half of it.

Their arrival will forever transform the look and feel and population of Licking County, or at least for as much forever as any of us will have on this side of the soil. Farmland will be converted to factories, open land will become subdivisions, and new people will arrive.

The jobs we hear about won't all go to Ohioans, let alone Licking Countians: Intel is going to send many of their own employees here at least to start, those who already know how to build a chip factory, a "fab" as those in the know like to say. But that doesn't mean the talk of employment for ourselves, our friends, our children and grandchildren, is untrue. Some work to build means many more reliable jobs in construction, and the facilities and amenities and infrastructure will all pull in our local workforce.

And however many people end up working inside the fabs, the tens of billions of dollars just to open them up, all of this will draw in ancillary businesses. Anything from suppliers who want to locate nearby to needing more gas stations and schools where the houses will be sprouting like squarish mushrooms in the springtime.

Hey, preacher, it's Easter week — enough with the economic development talk, okay? Right, I know, but hold on. Because this is a macro version of the micro challenge for every Christian preacher of the gospel this time of year. We see on Easter morning full pews, added seating, and many unfamiliar faces. They may in large part be family coming to make grandma happy, or those who traveled who once lived in your parish and used to attend, but are now many states away. Are lots of the visitors on Easter complete strangers to your church? Probably not.

But we all know that there are large numbers of people who come for Resurrection Sunday as a way station on the way to ham and Easter candy, who are in worship rarely if at all the rest of the year. Maybe not even for Christmas Eve. Yet here they are.

Unchurched? Let's say lots of de-churched, functional agnostics, uncertain fallen away gone-fishing people who'd say "Christian" on a survey but are unclear in their own minds what it means to claim that name.

Your task, as an Easter preacher, is to tell the story. The Story, that is, for Christians. Liturgically, we take at least a week to do it right, from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, but for plenty of your guests, you have this one chance to plant seed and nurture some growth and pray for the Holy Spirit to blow even before Pentecost. The every week attenders are there, too, looking forward to singing "He Lives" and all that, but they might just need to be reminded of The Story.

And this is what I hope and pray devoted and committed Christian leaders are thinking about this Easter, 2022, before everything changes, and indeed it will. It's going to be Easter writ large, because friends, there are a lot of people coming to Licking County who do not know our story, or The Story. Unchurched? How about a big contingent of Never Churched? Oh, you've never met or talked to someone who has never been to a church service? May I suggest you think about what that might be like, from both perspectives?

Because this is, in at least one important and even eternal dimension, the great opportunity coming to our communities thanks to the Intel announcement. For a completely different set of reasons, maybe, than Easter Sunday morning in a crowded church, we will have a large number of guests coming our way. Some are interested in what we have to say about ourselves and how we give an account of the faith that is in us, some are quite cheerfully disinterested, and I don't doubt there are a few who will arrive hostile. That's fine: Saul was pretty hostile, too, but on the way to Damascus he encountered The Story in a new way, and his story changed.

How will we tell our story, The Great Story, the old, old story, of Jesus and his love? Guests, visitors, seekers, inquirers are coming. Are we ready to greet and welcome them?

Haste, for dawn is coming.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has mixed feelings about change, too. Tell him how you plan to welcome strangers and angels unawares at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.