Ever have a favorite restaurant you return to often?  You might even know the name of your favorite waitress.  The food's pretty good, the atmosphere's not too bad and it's generally a comfortable place to eat.  You know you've been going there a lot if your waitress knows your name.  Kind of reminds me of going to church.  The minister is the cook; the waitress is the usher.  If I like what the cook makes and how the waitress serves me I come back and I may even throw some loose change into the offering plate as T.I.P.S. (To Insure Prompt Service.)  Best of all when I decide I don't like the food or the waitress doesn't serve me the way I like I just head on down the street to one of the other perfectly acceptable establishments where I can satisfy me desires.

 

Should that be what church is like?  Why do I even bother?  It seems like a church should be more than a restaurant.  Have I missed the point?  Church isn't meant to be like a restaurant is it?  It's suppose to be like . . . .

 

. . . a university teaching hospital.  A place that can help the wounded and hurting.  A place where we can come with pains, gashes and cancers and find relief.  Sweet relief.  Even more than that, it's a place that should be inspiring the wounded to want to help others.  To get healed and move on.  We will never forget our past pains and even some of the horrible treatments it took to heal if moving on isn't the goal.  Once we start to emerge on the other side, then what.  The after care isn't bad and may even be great but it's not meant to go on forever.  After care has to stop and moving on has to flourish in our lives if we are to truly living lives of meaning and purpose.  We get so accustomed to being served and some well meaning persons gets accustomed to serving us that we don't see how GOD wants to use us or them to help others in need.  We need to re-define what healing looks like and what it accomplishes.  We need to help people understand that the church is a living, breathing organism and it needs balance in its purpose.

 

We don't have to be a surgeon to work at the hospital.  We just have to remember that every part of the hospital is an important function that allows the whole hospital to function as it's meant to.  If there are only surgeons, who would feed those in recovery?  Who would pay the bills to keep the lights on?  Who would keep the place clean so that diseases wouldn't start growing on the walls or bed sheets and make people even more sick than when they came in?  Stop thinking that even the simplest of jobs is unimportant or that the surgeon is all that matters.  We're all guilty, from the surgeon down to janitor, of under and over estimating our importance to the process.  We're all guilty of loosing focus on the goal of healing, empowering and commissioning.  And we're all guilty of characterizing the church as a restaurant instead of as a teaching hospital.  And what about when we're off duty?

 

We should all leave the hospital with a sense that we are, at the very least, emergency medical technicians.  When we drive down the road and we see a car crash do we stop and render assistance. All too often the answer is no.  Sometimes because we feel inadequate but too often because we are so into ourselves that we really don't care to help anyone else.  Or perhaps we have made ourselves so busy that any interruption in a carefully timed and jam packed schedule would throw everything out of whack.  Whatever the reason, one of the saddest times we fail to render assistance is when it's someone we know.  Someone who is crying out for help but who we don't want to see because it may require sacrifice on our behalf.  We may have to get our hands dirty.  We may get mud or blood splatter on our crisply pressed shirt.  We may have to face some ugly truths in our own lives that we'd rather keep hidden.

 

So here is the million dollar question.  Can a firmly established restaurant be  converted into a teaching hospital or must a good teaching hospital be built from the ground up?