Covenant Stories: Upside Down and Backwards

Story #17 in the Covenant series

I’d like to leave the narrative of Covenant Baptist Church for a moment and talk about something rather odd that I’ve noticed about our church. At Covenant, everything seems to be upside down and backwards. We’re not trying to be different. We’ve never called ourselves an “alternative church.” We do things that seem right to us, but they seem to be the opposite of what most churches do.

Now before I write this, I want to state very clearly and carefully that I am NOT suggesting that any other church ought to do things the way we do them. There is certainly no shortage of “how to do church” books out there, with Dr. This or Reverend That revealing the deep, spiritual truths he has discovered that will increase your fold, or foster real intimacy, or kick-start your small group ministry, or blah blah blah in a postmodern blah.

If I wrote a book it would be called, “How to take a church from 14 families to 40 families in only 10 years of bivocational ministry.” Just kidding, though that title would be accurate. My “how to” church book would be a single index card. Written on it in pencil would be this:

Read the Bible. Pray. Talk to your church friends in long conversations over meals and coffee for years and years. Learn to love each other so that whatever you do in church gets filtered through your concern for how it will affect others in the community. Then do church in the ways that seem right to you. Let no other concern EVER surpass your desire to be right about church.

Postscript to pastors - Be prepared to find a second job.

That would be my book. It’s free. And I think I’ll put a backwards copyright on it. If you like this short book, feel free to distribute it. If by some miracle someone pays you for it, keep the money. If you want to say that you wrote it and put it in a book of your own, go ahead. Copywrong Gordon Atkinson 2009

Well, I’m glad we got that out of the way. So, back to what I was saying. It seems that everything we do at our church is the opposite of what so many others are doing.

We do not know how many members we have. You’d think we would, given that there are only around 100 people who attend regularly. We have all the names written down, so we could count the members. And we would if the need ever arose. But the only reason I can think of to count members would be to have an answer when other ministers ask me how many members we have.

When we built our church, we put it back away from the road, hidden by the trees, because the highway is loud and ugly. And we thought quiet and pretty was better for worship. Everyone, including the City Building Inspector, said we were making a huge mistake. “You want to be on the road where people can see your church.” We thought about that, but we all agreed that we’d prefer quiet and beauty for worship. If there is a right and wrong to this, and we’re wrong, then I pray the Lord will forgive his silly servants.

Many churches are concerned about locking their doors and keeping their possessions safe. And many have valuable possessions, so I think they are right to do so. We, on the other hand, having nothing much of value inside the building, hand out keys to just about everyone. If someone wants to do a wedding at our church, I give them a key, tell them to come and go as they like, and ask them to clean up when they're done. I usually get the keys back from them eventually. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never counted the keys. It does seem that we keep having to make new ones, now that I think about it. There might be 50 or 60 people out there with keys to our church.

We do not pay for marketing. We don’t have a yellow pages ad. We don’t have a sign down the road. We don’t hand out leaflets. I want to be honest about this: We tried those things early on. It felt bad doing them. And not much happened. So we put our energy elsewhere and trust people will find us naturally, and they do. They hear about us somehow, or they find us on our website, which was designed for free by a member. Sometimes people see our sign as they drive by. Ironically, we get some people who pull into the parking lot to see if there really IS a church back there somewhere.

This next one is a little embarrassing to me because other ministers sometimes ask if we have a ministry plan. Then I feel like a slacker when I tell them we don't. I think we wrote a mission statement (or was it a vision statement?) back in the 90s. We found it to be a pretty useless document, and now it is long forgotten. I could probably dig up a copy in the archive box if anyone wants to see it.

We have a fireplace in our worship room. There is no stage or pulpit or fancy stuff up front. After 10 years of preaching on the floor, in front of the fireplace, not more than a yard or two from one of my friends, pulpits and stages scare me. I got asked to preach in big church recently. A REALLY big church. I had a hard time because the people were so far away from me. My way of preaching really only works if you are within arms length of someone you love.

And finally this. We have no long-range planning committee. We used to do that, but when everything started turning out the opposite of what we thought, that kind of faded away. We have no idea what the future holds. We don’t know what would happen if half the church left. We don’t know how we would handle a sudden influx of 50 people. We don’t know if we will exist in 20 years. We don’t know what God wants to do with us. We do have a calendar so we can see when the next youth campout is. Sometimes the calendar is up to date. Mostly it is. We really live week to week.

Everything is backwards and upside down. Everything seems to be the opposite at our church.

After reading this, I’m pretty sure some people are going to say, “Yes, and that’s exactly why you only have about 100 people at your church.”

And they’re right, you know. There’s no doubt about it. They are absolutely right.

Gordon Atkinson

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