Stuff Christians Like (10 page)

I’m a professional copywriter. I am, in theory, supposed to be a highly honed, detail-dedicated arbiter of punctuation and grammar. That’s why I look for typos in the worship songs at church. What’s your excuse?

I know, I know…you didn’t mean to. It was just up there on the screen, letters that are two feet tall practically screaming out at you, “Look at me, I’m a typo! Who’s got two J’s in their name and is here to love you in the chorus of this song? His name is J Jesus!”

And then you’re stuck. It only takes one hit to become an addict. You want to stop. Deep down inside, you know you’re supposed to be worshipping, to be communing with the Holy Spirit in song and praise, but now it’s too late. After that first typo, you start noticing more. And if the words are all spelled correctly, you start picking up on spacing problems. That “Thank you” should have been on the same line as “Jesus,” you think to yourself. That “Jesus” is just a widow down there, all alone on its own line. Poor little lonely Jesus, stuck down in a corner of the screen by himself.

Nobody puts Jesus in a corner. Oh great, now you’re thinking about lines from the movie
Dirty Dancing
during the middle of the sermon. And you’re mad that you have to stand during worship because it’s hard to write down the number of mistakes you found in the bulletin unless you’re sitting.

Now you’re proofreading the bulletin, which isn’t really fair, because the person who put that together probably had about thirteen seconds to get it to the printer, and the bake sale folks were late getting their info in, so is it her fault there’s a “Cank Sale” this Sunday? That kind of sounds like the abbreviation for
cankle
, which is when your legs just go right into your feet with no discernible ankle, you think to yourself. You’ve got to be kidding me. Now you’re judging people’s body images? Everyone else is singing “Blessed Be Your Name,” and you’re judging the cankles of the people in the row next to you?

Thanks.

I always cringe a little when a worship leader says, “Everybody clap together” at the beginning of a song.

Instead of marching forward in a united rhythm, what usually happens in church sounds like someone lit off a box of hand firecrackers. Smacks and slaps and claps just ringing out randomly with no sense of where the song is headed. After years of witnessing claps die merciless deaths at church, I thought it might be good to analyze how the clap goes so wrong, so quickly. Here’s what I think happens, laid out in a convenient chronological explanation:

The worship leader tells everyone in the crowd to start clapping. Often, he raises his hands above his head to demonstrate. It’s an exciting moment. The world is fresh and new. We’re all a little intoxicated on the sense of potential and possibility. So together, we start clapping.

Eventually, the worship leader stops clapping above his head. Either he starts playing an instrument or grabs his microphone in a dramatic, Creed-like moment. Suddenly, we in the crowd realize no one is leading this clap-a-thon. We’re all alone. We scan the stage for direction, but no one bails us out. The main singer is focused on the song, and the backup singers are doing some sort of PhD-level, rhythmic clapping that’s beyond us. At least 15 percent of people call it quits right here.

Most people feel pretty generous if they clap for the entire first verse. We won’t go the whole song, but at least we pitched in. It’s the equivalent of serving at church by stacking chairs. You still feel like you gave something back to the church, but you didn’t have to interact with anyone or get up early. About 40 percent of people quit clapping here.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Just when some of us have decided to keep clapping, we run into a chorus that defies all logic. It’s suddenly faster than the verse was and we don’t know what to do. Do we speed up our clapping? Do we stop and pick back up on the second verse? Somebody, please, a little help! More than 20 percent of people quit here.

At last this crazy ride is over, the clapping is done. We’re finished and can feel good about what we’ve accomplished. But just know this: If you ask us to clap on a second song, about 50 percent of us will flat-out refuse. We’re all clapped out.

A casserole of hope is a food dish that a Christian gives you after a tragedy. It usually involves pasta and cheese in some format, but sometimes, if they really love you, they’ll make something in a crock pot. The challenge, though, is that it’s hard to know what to give someone. Do you make something big and hearty or light and fruity? Is it one meal or a series of meals? Is a dessert too frivolous? Does a serious situation require a serious meal, like some sort of melodramatic stew?

Fortunately, I’ve come up with an easy list of what types of dishes certain tragedies require. Tear it out and put it on your fridge. It will serve you well in times of need and casserole.

This depends of course on the severity of the crash, but the key here is to give food that’s not portable. Chances are the crash might have occurred when they tried to make a cell phone call while driving and eating a twenty-seven-layer burrito at the same time. Don’t tempt them with any food that’s in tube form or easy to eat in the car. Give them soup with a packet of forks. It’s really hard to eat soup with a fork in a moving car.

Nothing baked. Nothing spicy. Nothing seared. Nothing grilled. The important thing is not to bring any food that will remind them of the fire. The last thing they’ll want is your famous “four alarm chicken wings.” Give them something carved of ice. I’m not sure what that is, but you can probably get one at Whole Foods.

Beef jerky. For starters, the person whose ceiling was wrecked by a friend possibly named Jeff who was texting a girl instead of staying focused on the squirrel chase at hand can pretend
the jerky is the squirrel. Also, jerky is portable in case this hypothetical person named Jonathan Acuff is required to take an overnight trip to the couch because he messed up his bedroom, which his wife completely didn’t see the humor in. And lastly, the squirrel is still loose and your friend will need a meal he can eat on the run—or on the rafters of his attic, as it were.

I don’t know what to give someone who lost their job. But I know what
not
to get them: Easy Mac, those small, microwaveable packets of macaroni and cheese. When a company I worked for went out of business, I took what I called “the summer of Jon.” (Or as my in-laws called it, “The summer of the guy who married our daughter, took her from Georgia to Boston, and promptly lost his job.”) My wife’s one rule was that I had to get up when she did for work. That meant that at 6:30 every morning, I was showered and dressed with nowhere to go. I decided to kill time by eating Easy Mac for breakfast and lunch and snacks. I gained about fifteen pounds. Give an unemployed person a salad.

Don’t worry too much about nutrition when someone is going through a difficult time. If they wrecked their car or the house caught on fire, the last thing people are concerned about is exercising their “core” and getting enough lycopene.

My cousin attends a church called “Warehouse 242.” There’s another church in his area called “Elevation.” In Durham, North Carolina, there’s a church called, simply, “The Summit.” I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point we started naming our churches after stores that sell designer jeans. And I’m cool with that. I don’t think you have to name something the “Back
to the Bible Holiness Church”—which is outside of Atlanta in case you want to attend.

I think it might even be a great thing to have a funky name because it opens up some good conversations with people. Imagine you’re at work on Monday and someone says, “What’d you do this weekend?”

You can reply, “I hung out at Elevation.”

Your friend will then say, “Is that the new salsa/techno/hip-hop/Southern Cambodian traditional dance club? I’ve heard the girls in that place are ridiculous.”

At which point you can answer, “No, it’s a church,” and then proceed to share the entire gospel with him and possibly get him plugged into a small group on the spot.

Okay, it might not go down exactly that way, but at the bare minimum, saying you went to “Elevation” is going to at least keep the conversation rolling and possibly even raise some questions. If you said, “I went to ‘God Is Awesome, Praise Jesus Cathedral of Hope and Light’ over the weekend,” your friend might throw a handful of glitter and climb out a window to escape the conversation. Which is never a good thing.

On a Monday morning right before a meeting at work, I got the following phone call from my three-year-old’s preschool.

“Hi, Mr. Acuff. This is Susan at Small Wonder. McRae ate some sort of fungus on the playground. We’ve got Poison Control on the other line and have saved a sample of what she ate. They don’t think it’s going to be a problem, but we need to keep an eye on her for a few hours.”

It turns out, there’s a white, clumpy fungus that grows in bark mulch called “dog vomit fungus.” While playing outside, McRae saw some and thought to herself, “Hey, free marshmallows!” and proceeded to eat as much as her little hands could
grab. Then when they lined up the kids to bring them inside, the teachers saw McRae’s fungus-covered face and asked, “Oh sweetheart, what have you been eating?” McRae, blessed with her father’s heart of a servant, immediately answered, “I’ll show you,” and walked the teachers over to the bark mulch buffet she had been enjoying during recess.

That reminds me a lot of God.

Not really, but I wanted it to. I tried to think of a way to write something about sin and how it looks good at first but then if we eat it, we end up throwing up all night and sleeping on the floor in our parents’ room. I looked and looked for a segue, but ultimately I realized that if I tried to connect that story to the Bible or God I would just be perpetuating a “fake sermon illustration.”

A fake sermon illustration is when a pastor is desperate to tell a story but can’t figure out a way to tie it back into his sermon. It’s something funny that happened to him, something silly his kids did, or maybe even a movie clip that really shook him up emotionally. But he can’t find the bridge between the illustration and the message, so he just tries to sneak it by you really fast and hope that you don’t notice.

I prefer that the minister says one of two things instead:

“Now let’s talk about God.”
I have a friend who can hear a story about low test scores in public high schools and then say, “That reminds me, I was thinking about eating sushi tonight.” What he means when he says, “that reminds me,” is not, “here’s something related to what you’re talking about.” He means, “Now let’s talk about me.” I think pastors should employ the same degree of honesty. I told you a story about me. It was funny or sad or whatever, but “now let’s talk about God.”

Or:
“That story has nothing to do with God, but it was awesome, right?”
Sometimes it’s just fun to hear a good story. To laugh and shake off the week with something interesting and hilarious. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it doesn’t need some intricately woven connection point that makes the entire crowd say, “He started talking about bunny rabbits made of cotton candy and we didn’t know where he was going, but now that he’s arrived
in Malachi 1:3, I can see what he meant all along. Brilliant.” If you’ve got a good story, just bring it. Drop it off. Say, “This is awesome.” Then move on. We’re with you. We like awesome too.