Crawdad Fishing and the Death of the American Church

When I was around 8 or 9 years old I went Crawdad fishing with my older brother Jimmy and his friend Scott. Just like every other day that summer, we were going to go Crawdad fishing at the creek that was near our house and afterward we were going to try and find a pool to sneak into and take the sting out of the California sun.
The creek that we craw-fished at didn't have a name, we just called it "The Crick"...In fact I'm pretty sure in looking back that it wasn't a creek at all - but a muddy-hole in the middle of a swampy field that smelled like raw sewage...Either way, "The Crick" had Crawdads in it, and I wanted to fish 'em out and eat 'em up. Like you do.
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Here's a little perspective for you city folks that have never heard of Crawdads or had the pleasure of fishing for their kind...

- Crawdads are Freshwater crustaceans, they are also called Crayfish, Crawfish, Crawdaddies, Creek Crabs, Mud Bugs, Fresh-Water Lobsters, Spoondogs and/or Yabbies if you're from Australia. Crawdads look like very small lobsters with too-big claws...they are mud-dwellers that eat water-bugs, small fish...and, well...mud.
- The best way to catch Crawdads is to tie a piece of fatty meat (preferably rotten Corned-Beef) to a string, stand on the banks of "The Crick" and dangle the meated-string in the murky water until you feel a nibble...pull up the string, hold the dangling Crawdad over a bucket of "clean water" and start jerking the string up and down until the sucker lets go and drops into the bucket.
- The best way to eat Crawdads is to heat a frying pan filled with garlic-butter to a simmer...simply drop the Crawdads into the simmering liquid and watch 'em sputter. On a technical note, Crawdads make a popping sound much like popcorn if the garlic-butter is hot enough.
- After the Crawdad is done squirming you know he's ready for feasting on...simply tear the shell, legs, claws and tail away from the meat of the little monster and enjoy. Granted, you need to saute about 50 Crawdads to feel as if you've had an actual meal afterwards...plus, your breath smells like death, your stomach roils like pissed-off thunder and your...umm, left-overs...smells...well, it's enough to make you never want to eat anything, at all, ever again...

Basically what I'm trying to say is that Crawdads have very little redeeming qualities in total and I have no idea why I was out fishing for some of these disgusting mudbugs on that beautiful summer afternoon.
So, with that bit of background I'll pick up the story and continue...

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There I was, all 80 pounds of me, standing on the bank of this smelly mud hole, holding onto a string with a piece of meat at the end; hoping to feel the nibble of a creature that weighed no more than a few ounces.
My body was tensed, my mind was a steel trap...I was hoping for the Grandaddy of all Crawdaddies but I was ready for anything...Anything that is, except for the gentle nudge from behind from my brothers friend Scott...I fell like a wet bag of cement...right into the middle of that muddy, smelly, disgusting hole in the ground.

I can tell you now that before that time in my life I had never been so terrified, I thought I was going to die.

It's not that I couldn't swim or that I was afraid of what creatures lurked below in that murky creek; its that I didn't know how deep that muddy hole went and I was immediately frozen with the kind of fear that keeps you from yelling out for help even though it's all you can think to do.
After that initial moment of extreme panic and shock, I tried to grab onto the reeds that grew out of the bank of the creek, of course the thin reeds would not support my weight fully before breaking and dropping me back into the water - I was Indiana Jones in a muddy trap and I was running out of options quickly.
When I knew that I couldn't get up onto the bank by myself I started to panic a little extra and flail about looking for other options until I had that moment of clarity that said "You're stuck, where's your Brother?" - Of course! Jimmy will save me!
And that's when I realized that I couldn't see my brother or Scott anywhere, Jimmy wasn't on the banks of the creek and I couldn't hear his voice either...I was well and truly scared that I would never be able to get out of that muddy hole alive.

Several minutes later, my brother appeared out of the thick foliage that surrounded the crick.
Apparently he'd been calling out my name and looking for me for the past several minutes but I'd been to panicked to hear him or respond. When my brother saw me down in that muddy hole he got down on his hands and knees right away and started reaching out for me...it only took him a few pulls to get me out of the crick and up on the bank - where I immediately told him the whole dramatic tale, with a little embellishment and BS on the side to make the story a legendary tale that would last until my dying day...well, c'mon, I am Irish after all.

I found out later that Scott didn't push me into the crick on purpose...He'd been walking backwards to get around a tree trunk on the creeks bank and had bumped into me and walked away before he realized that I'd fallen in - I only despised Scott for one afternoon for his clumsiness and then I forgave him.
After it was all said and done, I was fine. I hadn't been clawed at or snipped by any Crawdads nor slurped upon by leaches and despite my wild imagination the crick was not home to an indigenous school of ravenous Piranhas that ate stray dogs, cows and children...I wasn't hurt in the slightest and only after I was out of the hole did I realize that the water in the crick had actually been quite soothing and it was my panic at the suddenness of being in the crick that had made me so afraid of what my have been beneath the surface.
I told you that story to tell you this one...

I grew up in many different kinds of churches, some were Baptist, some were Pentecostal and some were just a bunch of families sitting in a living room talking about how we could change the world if we just had a few more people that thought like we did. The thing that all these churches had in common was that they were all formed with the basic idea that they would be Evangelical by nature and seek out "sinners" to lead to Jesus.
Of all of the churches that I grew up in and took part in - I never felt completely at peace with where/how I fit in to the grand design of those churches and their congregations...I thought that I never would know.

I knew in my early teen years that the churches that my family and I went to seemed to be struggling to survive...why else would they ask for money if not to keep the doors open and the lights on? At least, that was what I thought to myself.
These churches seemed to struggle in other areas as well, not just in not having enough money to continue their ministries but also - the churches seemed to have lots and lots of old people...(Which my brother and I tended to call "Blue-Hairs" for reasons evident by the many attempts to cover the gray-ish hair of the aging masses; which left a bluish hue covering the heads of many wrinkled faces)...there were barely any kids my age that went to the churches we went to and it seemed that there were even fewer young families that had babies coming into the church too...something just wasn't happening the way that it needed to; in order to survive.

It's only now after several years in ministry and personal trials that I know what has been happening to the American Evangelical Church since as long as I've been alive...

The Church of our fathers is dying - member by distinguished member with no cure in site.

At some point in the last 10 to 15 years America stopped caring about God.

Churches were no longer seen as places of community and brotherly love but as places of cultural and religious segregation and family traditions long-dead. If you were to ask a person passing you on the street what's wrong with churches today you'd hear something like "They gossip"..."They make me feel like a sinner"..."There are...rules"..."Can't do this, can't do that"..."I feel out of the loop when I go"..."It's hard to sit through"..."It's...boring"... "It's not going in the way that I believe to be true". Hearing these kind of responses, I wouldn't want to go to a place like that either.

Not to mention that most of the great voices of the Evangelical church had long since been silenced by their own folly, greed, lust or simple stupidity. In order to find out anything about the "Glory Days" of the Evangelical Church you had to go to the oldest person in the room and ask them to retell stories that had been retold thousands of times before - if not out of a need to know, out of a need to repeat those days long gone.

We had seen great men fail utterly in their pursuit or righteousness and beg for forgiveness on national television, only to rise to the top and fail all over again...America's patience for these supposed "Men of God" was being given the ultimate test and failing under the pressure...We had seen and heard stories of local respected pastors frequenting whore houses and meeting with known drug dealers...Feeding addictions of drugs and sex, abuse in the home and sexual harassment in the church office...We had seen the Catholic church go through so many sex scandals in such a short period of time that no one had time to recover from one accusation of sexual abuse before the next accusation came out...our collective heads were spinning from all of the sin that was becoming evident and apparent from the inside of these places of supposed righteousness and holiness...America was tired of seeing the mighty falling to their knees to beg for forgiveness - all the while screaming from their pulpits that they had been ordained by God Almighty to turn others away from sin and toward righteousness...America wasn't buying it - Instead America was buying everything else...because at least whatever else was out there was honest.

Americans were no longer listening to the older generations, no longer asking for advice from the people that knew them since birth...Instead of an American culture born unto God through tradition and morally founded values - an American culture of mass-consumption and self-service was born, with these base traits coupled together; Americans were searching for meaning in inanimate objects and things rather than searching their own souls for the meaning that was already planted inside..."GIVE ME PURPOSE"; you could almost here the inward scream of thousands as they searched in vain for any thing that would give them peace...

The American Consumer was born and the American Mall was the new Holy Place, tithes and offerings paid daily.

Whatever spurred this sudden change in the spirituality of American culture, wherever that change came from, it came rapidly and the churches of our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers were fast becoming valued real estate scheduled for re-zoning rather than expansion. I've lost count of the number of churches that I know of personally that have closed their doors forever because the "Holy Fire" that once burned so bright and clear had faded to nothing more than a lukewarm cinder...And what was more sad than seeing those doors close forever was not knowing whether or not all of the lifetimes of strain and effort to get people to come into those doors had been in vain; but how would Jesus speak to everyday people now that the doors of the chapel were closed?

There is a growing group of christian people in America that have come to be better known to more and more everyday people as we have grown further away from the 90's and the televangelistic screechings of an entire generation determined to save the world in their lifetime - as well as line their pockets with cold cash in plain view of millions.
This group of people that I'm talking about are popping up in different places all over the United States and under many different names - but they all seem to have the same goal in mind...The Reconciliation of America to the Grace and Love of Jesus Christ.

The individuals in these groups seem to have grown up in their parents and grandparents churches, they have seen the best and the worst that religion can offer, and they are tired of the bullshit. They are young, most under the age of 35. They are Single, Dating, Married, Gay, Straight, Lesbian. They are full of questions, usually more questions than answers. They have a passion to know God and to experience God in a real and authentic way, and to pass along that knowledge of God to anybody who is interested...They hang out in Coffee Shops, Pubs and Clubs...They live out loud and enjoy it. They call themselves by many different names, they come from many different backgrounds... and they all seem to share a common journey and cultural-language.

They call themselves The Emerging Church, Emergent and Post-Modern, Missional, Tribal and still others, Neo-Gothic. They use words like Ancient-Future Worship, Organic Faith, Journey and Experience. Their core values are Grace, Meaning, Truth and Beauty and they want to extend these core values to the communities that surround them.

What does this all mean? Is this something new? Do these names and words mean anything at all OR are they just that...Names and Words?

Is this movement a new thing or is it a sort of return to an older time of faith and belief? Are these just new names for a very old faith that has been around for two thousand years? Why is this change necessary? Who started it and why? Who cares? Who should care? Why?

When Martin Luther nailed a copy of his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church he did so to spur debate within the Church, why? - Because nobody was coming to Church anymore...The pews were empty.

What happened because of Martin Luther's hard questions is what has come to be known as The Reformation...In effect, Martin Luther changed the way that the Church related to the people forever. All by posing some simple observations in a humble yet forthright manner.

Is this Emerging Church trying to Reform the already Reformed?

You must be asking yourself by now...What could Crawdad Fishing and the Death of the American Church possibly have to do with one another?

Here's the thing...

When I went fishing for those Crawdads when I was a kid, I did it because that's what my brother and his friends always did on summer days, so I did it too, why not? It was tradition.

But, when I look back on that day now and see myself falling into that muddy pool, I'm given a clearer perspective of what that whole experience means for me now...

I am a minister, of sorts, a worship leader with a "Post-Modern" or "Emergent" Church...What I know for sure is that I am called by my Lord and my God to be a "Fisher of Men" - I'm called to reach out to those that are Lost and Broken, Lonely and Hungry, the Fatherless and the Widow...if that means that I have to be uncomfortable to do it, than that's what it'll take.

Like myself as a child, the Church has been standing on the bank of that muddy pool for a long time now...dipping a baited string into the water and hoping for a bite...The Church has been standing on the precipice of a great change for years, practically standing on the diving board but not jumping in.

We, the Emerging, Missional, Post-Modern Church have made an honest attempt to well and truly immerse ourselves in this culture in order to share the love of Jesus Christ in much the same way that he did. We haven't fallen into this "murky water" on accident, we weren't pushed in either, we jumped in with all of our clothes on!

We didn't come to swim nor to fish...We are in the water because this is where the fish are.

These young Emergent churches have had to flail their arms a bit and learn how to swim and yes they've had to call out for help from their bigger brothers too...But their not asking to be pulled out! They're saying: "Leave us in the water...We're trying to get as wet as possible"...To immerse themselves so deeply in this culture that this world can no longer tell the difference between the Church and those that they've come to share God's grace with.

The Emergent church asks - If Jesus had the habit of eating dinner with the worst of his day and he called them his friends and made them his disciples, shouldn't we follow that example?

And not just to say that we're doing it, but to do it!

If we, the Church, can reach one person with the love and grace of God by meeting them where they are, rather than asking them to come up to some unattainable level...shouldn't we do it without hesitation or question?

Lastly...

Is the Church itself changing? No.

Is the Emergent Church trying to change the way that Churches in general interact with the rest of the world? Yes, and necessarily...It must in order to remain relevant and in step with this ever-changing culture...otherwise the American Church will die.