I remember a time when, in seminary, we had gone as a group with a professor as a facilitator into the various contexts to which we had each been assigned as students. Debbie and I lived in a challenging neighborhood called West Phillips in Minneapolis and our contextual “cluster” visited with a pastor not four blocks down the street.
We were discussing the needs of the neighborhood and where the church might fit in and somewhere in the midst of the conversation (more of a lecture really) this pastor mentioned that he had some competition in the neighborhood, (not meaning the church where I was assigned, less than a quarter-mile away, we were no competition) a street preacher named Brother Bill who preached up and down the block.
He then sighed and shook his head and said that it wasn’t really much competition, Bill didn’t have a church to call home so there wasn’t much to his preaching.
I don’t think that it occurred to me at the time what an incredibly pompous thought that this was. Looking back I have a hard time not thinking of this devoted servant of Christ as a sadly insulated soul, stuck thinking that the trappings contribute to the Word, or that their message is not valid without them. While I understand that given a replay of his comment he would deny that this was the gist of the comment, you still cannot get it back into the tube, so to speak, like toothpaste. It is the defining thing that has formed my thinking of this man and I wonder how many stupid, conceited, self-righteous things I have said that have formed the central nugget of peoples’ thoughts about me?
In any case, Debbie heard Amos Lee on NPR the other day and heard him perform his song Street Corner Preacher and it made me think of that. Nothing special, just wondering how people would react.
