It’s true.  I used to watch the show, Cheers, growing up.  It feels weird admitting this as a Baptist, because it’s a show that is based in a bar.  Yet, what I always remember about this television sitcom growing up is not the acting, nor the comedy, nor the famous actors.  I remember the theme song.  “Sometimes you wanna go, where everybody knows your name.  And they’re always glad you came.  You wanna go where people know, people are all the same.  You wanna go where everybody knows your name.”  I would wager to say that most people forty and over can sing the words to this song by heart.  We loved hearing it.

It dawned on me this past Sunday how the church should be such a place, how these words really should describe people’s experience with the church.  The church is supposed to be a place “where everybody knows your name.  And they’re always glad you came.”  No matter what rejection a person has experienced during the week, no matter their personal struggles, be it with sin, or just life in general, church is supposed to be a haven where love and grace are experienced through our dealings with God’s people, a place where we worship God together through Christ as a result.  What’s funny is that this dawned on me not in church, but in a restaurant of all places, a restaurant where I got to meet some very intriguing people.

You see, my wife has developed quite a talent for songwriting.  She picked up the guitar a couple of years ago after a twenty-year absence and discovered a hidden gift she did not know she had, songwriting.  This year, we encouraged her to enter a songwriting contest, and her song was selected, along with twenty others.  What this means is that she got to perform the song in Chattanooga on Sunday afternoon, in front of three judges.  While she did not win, I honestly scored her in the top three.  She was amazing.  However, what was interesting to both of us was talking and mingling with the other songwriters, most of who were very young.

They all looked extremely nervous and shy.  When my wife picked up on this, she greeted them and threw out as much love as she could.  That’s when they started talking.  And because they felt comfortable and accepted, the rest of the afternoon we were privileged to listen to their stories of music and songwriting.  Most had dreams to become performing artists.  Most had incredible talents.  And yet, they all possessed a need for extreme affirmation and encouragement, which they received from us and all the other songwriters.  I almost felt like I was in church even though I was in a restaurant that contained a bar, a restaurant like Cheers.  (Yes, I enjoyed my sweet tea.)

I was reminded I was not in church when a young man who played an incredible piano solo told me of his bad experience with a Christian private school he attended from kindergarten through high school.  I knew the school.  I had lived in Chattanooga.  The school is well known for its extreme strictness.  “I really don’t have any desire for religion,” he said.  My heart sank.  Somewhere along the line, perhaps the whole line, he had been given some bad gospel, a message that was not the gospel at all.  Instead of the church being a place where he could receive the type of behavior he was presently receiving among the songwriters in this restaurant, he viewed church as a place of extreme judgment instead.  The result is that he lost his belief in God altogether.  He looked to me to be all of twenty-four or twenty-five years of age.

I have not officially been a pastor for two years.  Yet, during the last two years I have learned more about people the church is trying to reach than in all my years as a pastor.  I feel ashamed of that.  Because I have learned there are a whole lot of people out there who God loves, yet people who will never step foot into a church sanctuary, a whole lot of people who have hurts and concerns just like we do as church people, a whole lot of people who desire a place “where everybody knows your name.  And they’re always glad you came.”  I am more convinced than ever that church is designed to be this place.  And I am more convinced than ever that as God’s people we have been commissioned to be “salt and light” who draw people to this place, who draw them to the God who loves them and has a place for them in his family. 

I don’t offer any easy answers for how we can reverse the trends of people feeling the way they do about the church.  I can only tell you that God has certainly changed my heart.  I no longer view people without church backgrounds as enemies to be conquered or statistics to add to my church role.  Instead, I now see them the way I should have been seeing them all along, as people who God loves, and Jesus died for.  I am no better than them.  Instead, I am simply one beggar trying to tell another beggar where to find bread.  Because I know that when they taste this “bread of life” through an authentic experience with Jesus and hopefully his church, their lives will never be the same.  Who needs to feel this way about your church this week?