Communism?

My buddy Tommy and I had a fun little adventure a few days ago. While we were having Manbrief in Slovakia we had the chance to visit one of the Largest castles in Europe. What we thought was going to be shorter bus route to arrive there ended up taking us to a different city then we expected, lucky for us Jacob came along. Jacob was a Slovakian man who loved hockey, knew a little English, and was willing to help us find our next bus. Most of the conversation focused around hockey, despite Tommy nor I not exactly being experts on the subject. Jacob even knew that the Colorado Avalanche’ stadium was the Pepsi Center. How he kept track of that stuff I have no idea. The conversation stayed rather normal until Jacob turned to politics, a subject Tommy and I didn’t really care to get into.

Long story short Jacob wasn’t happy. According to him things were better under the communist reign that Slovakia has only recently shrugged off. He pointed to the mountains where lumberjacks had been hard at work saying ‘devastation’, he joked around about how he was communist, we were capitalists, and so we shouldn’t like each other. There were a few other things he complained about with the new government, but I can’t honestly remember what they were. But one thing I couldn’t help but laugh about was when he said ‘I am rich”. Despite all of the complaints Jacob had about capitalism he was loving all the benefits.

As I think about it now though, we are a lot like that.  We like complaining about things, honestly a lot of us are just darn good at it, but in the end we like the benefits of whatever it is we are complaining about. I think we probably do this with church more than anything. It’s much easier to be a critic than a promoter, and that’s especially true with our churches.

But maybe every once in a while we just need to take a step back and think about the things that we are loving about our church. Maybe we didn’t like today’s songs but how was the fellowship? Maybe we didn’t like today’s sermon, but how about the conversations? What if we tried to find more things we like about our church to talk about then what we don’t like about it? What if we stopped being critics of our churches and started becoming promoters of it.