Walking through Life

Recently I read someone’s analogy that likened the American Christian Church to a train. I found it quite interesting and I’ve been thinking about it for days now. In the analogy, Christians treat the various churches and denominations as if they were a train taking them somewhere. They arrive at the train station with some idea of where they want to go, then choose the train that matches their desired destination and desired cost and desired level of comfort. If you would like to go from Washington, DC to Boston there’s a train that leaves at 5am and arrives 7 hours later. You can buy a business class ticket for around $500 or you can go first class for just south of $800. You choose. If you aren’t in Washington, DC, or you don’t want to go to Boston, then that isn’t the train for you. Pick a different one.

When you ride the train you generally have no role to play in it getting to its destination. You come in, sit down, and watch the world go by outside your window. Because the train runs on a pre-defined set of rails, outside of the ability to switch the tracks from time to time, the train is going where it is going. It’s difficult to stop on the way, indeed if you were to see something along the way that caused you to want to get off, it is unlikely you’d be able to convince the engineer to stop the train for you. The best you could hope for is to be able to get off at some pre-determined stop some ways down the track.

It seems to me that often we treat “going to church” the way we treat riding the train. We find the train that matches where we think we are versus where we think we need to go. We climb on board, we sit down, and we hope that the church gets us where we need to go. Unlike the train, if we ever get to a point where we feel we aren’t going where we should, we can easily hop off and find some other train, I mean church, to jump aboard. If we stay on the train long enough we might find ourselves up toward the front, giving some input on where the train should go, what stops it should make. I’ve heard this group of people referred to as the “permission givers” in the church. But often times we are content to sit in our chair and wait until the train stops and see where it has taken us.

I’m not entirely sure this is what God had in mind for His Church, though I’ve struggled to come up with an alternate analogy, until today. I think what God intended for His people, His bride, his body, his Church, is more like the German volksmarsch. I spent four years in Germany when I was in the military, and though I never participated, and heard about these events. The literal translation is “people’s march”. Basically it’s a gaggle of people walking from one point to another across the German countryside. They might walk through towns, through forests, down a country lane, etc. Though it has a start and end, that isn’t the point of the people’s march. The march itself is the point. There are no awards, it’s not a competition, and anyone can do it. They don’t typically do it to raise money. The purpose of it is just for people to walk and enjoy each other’s company and the country side.

You ever walk down a street that you normally always drive down. Did you ever notice how much more you see when you do that? You are moving slower, you don’t have to constantly look ahead of you, you can stop and look at a nice yard, or pet a dog, or talk to a person, without causing any trouble for anyone else.

I think that is what church is supposed to be like for the bride of Christ. I think it’s supposed to be slow so that the Church can interact with the world around it. It can stop and help someone along the way. I think it’s supposed to be participatory. Everyone in the volksmarsch is part of the event, walking together, experiencing the same things, encouraging each other. I think rather than looking for a thing that is going in a specific direction to get us to where we think we ought to be, we should be looking for a group of people with whom we can walk through life.