Evolve

-Rev. Melissa Fain-

Like many people these days I play Pokemon Go. I got into it for the same reason I get into most things in life. Someone I love, in this case my husband, plays it. I wanted to connect to something he connected to. I'm personally on the fence regarding churches being Poke-stops and gyms. I mean, there's this one church's parking lot I know really well, because their sign is a gym. Their sign being a gym has not moved me to want to visit their church. Also, I have less respect for churches that can't set aside a special time and place to worship and petition to God.

At the same time, I roll my eyes when I see church signs that try to be above Pokemon Go. Like there was a church sign I saw: "Jesus can catch them all. It's not a game to him." Please read these next two sentences in mock understanding, dripping with sarcasm. Oh yes, that's totally going to reach out to a secular world. I bet that zinger really had people flocking to their sanctuary.

I'm five Ponyta candy from being able to evolve my Pokemon. What does that have to do with church? Absolutely nothing, and that's okay. As Christians we need to keep a couple of things in mind when we consider what Evangelism means:

• We need to treat non-Christians with a little more intelligence than we currently do. When we dangle pop-culture in front of us like it's some sort of carrot, we are admitting that what we are really trying to sell is not that exciting. Either that, or we are setting up a switch and bait. Seriously, we don't want people to come into a house of worship to gather a few pokeballs every five minutes. You know there are much easier ways to gather pokeballs, like walking a downtown street for about fifteen minutes.
• We are already part of the culture, and if we are not, we might as well be dead. If you speak a language other than Greek during worship, and gather outside of a house, you participate in something that has incorporated the outside culture. Yes, I realize that's a bit simplistic, but it gets the point across. There was no such thing as guitars, pianos, or organs when the church first became the church. And for you Church of Christ folks, there were no PowerPoint presentations and sound systems either. But, I'm digressing. Jesus used cultural norms to explain God to the people. As current followers of Christ, we are called to reach outside our doors too. We need to use Christ's example and understand their context first. 
• Fad jumping has to stop. Yeah, I know. I just said we should understand the culture, and what's more cultural than fad jumping? There are two problems with fad jumping. First, we are on the wrong side of it. When we jump fads we are creating instances where the church is just as much a participant as the people outside her doors. The church is the focus; not the fad. When we jump from fad to fad the fad is the focus, not the church. Second, it's possibly the biggest problem in the church today...
• When we try to vision where God wants the church it often means jumping on what's working for another church. This is totally tied to fad jumping. The church has become lazy. We reaped the reward of the 1950's when soldiers returned home and wanted to connect with their communities. No one had to evangelize. It just happened. Now we are in 2017 and the current has changed. Because our parents never had to evangelize, we never learned how to either. Therefore, we see those few churches that have figured out where God is already reaching their community and acting it out in their church, (which is the modern definition of evangelism) and just copying their result instead of doing their work.​

What does that mean for us?

Well, Pokemon Go is a fad, and like so many fads it's already starting to die. There's nothing wrong with using fads for sermon illustrations, but using it as a bait and switch will only make those outside your doors angry. Then, in six months it won't matter anyway. A more productive use of our time is to figure out how God is already in our communities and reaching out to that. It will last longer, and will mean more in the end.

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