Bear Gryllis wouldn't be proud (long)

Upon coming home I found a nice surprise; my parents have cable. Now they don't have cool cable with ESPN and CSTV but they do have the Discovery channel which I've been watching like you drink water after running in the desert. It's good stuff. One of the three shows they're showing is "Man vs Wild." I like it. They drop this guy out of an airplane with a camera man and he shows you how to survive in bad situations. Its kinda cool.

About a 1 1/2 years ago a couple of guys and I decided to go camping during the semester. So in February we all got ready for our Friday night out- three of us couldn't have gotten dates if we were in Vegas with B. Franklin's hanging out our pockets. So K- Stew the Biochem professor, B-stone the physics major, Jake- the Western PA guy, Jeremy - the roommate all were meeting at Kevin's house before the trip.

I showed up on time. Later Brandon Stone and Jake moassied in with a truck bed full of unchopped wood and an axe. There's something soothing, something medicinal about chopping wood; I don't know but it just seems to help. So we chopped wood for the next 30 minutes waiting on Jeremy. Unfortunately the wood was acquired by the "found by the road" method and was apparently pretty wet. I say apparently b/c when we got to the campsite and tried starting a fire it wouldn't light.

I was thinking about this the other day. Except not with wood. I was thinking how many times churches invite people in who don't stay. You put in effort and time and they walk away a week, month, or year later leaving you tired. Just like our fire left us tired from chopping and blowing on it. It stinks and you feel cold for a while. If you can't find people (or wood) on the side of the road then where are we suppose to find them? It's a difficult question and scenario.

Thinking forward I would like to say that our wet wood fire never started. It would give me an excuse at the end of the blog. But after 2 1/2 hours of blowing on a small fire with the wet wood piled around it the fire dried out and caught. Now we had a truckbed full of wood on fire. It just took a little more time and a lot more effort then we expected, but it was cold. I'm realizing I'm not putting the analogy together very well so maybe this helps wet wood : church visitors/ projects :: slowly starting, time consuming, effort wrenching : new members. I've seen a lot of project families go down the drain. Is it b/c of the effort? I don't know. Is is b/c of where we're finding them? I have a suggestion.

Maybe we should go about finding people in less obvious places then our doorstep looking for assistance. Maybe we should find those people that have no interest in church or religious institution what-so-ever. Today there is a new ideology passing around in Western thought. Its the idea of being "Spiritual" but not "Religious." Religion implies you do something over and over for the sake of doing it. People who claim to be "Spiritual" usually have something against the set ways of the church. And usually they have a good point. I think these people are our "Wet wood." They won't walk into the door by themselves but I think they would really burn when you got them in. I think this free thinking person would also be attracted to how most of my reader's churches don't have a definite list of do's and don't about religion but how we see the grey area; not just the black and white. I think that's appealing to this Neo-hippy spiritualist group. They like the idea of well a educated group, benevolent, free thinking group; which I think most of our churches are. Now we just have to get them in on board.

Paul "Prometheus" Murphy

P.S. Don't try to get them in the door immediately. They would probably be more receptive to a less traditional setting then the church building- like bible studies. Also these people seem to flourish at Ultimate Frisbee games and college campuses.