It’s Thanksgiving! Three Church of Christ Practices I’m Grateful For

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Even better than Christmas. It takes much less preparation — but yet it requires some serious investment of time. Families travel across continents to be together on Thanksgiving — even if they don’t much like each other. It’s hard to appreciate a holiday that doesn’t cost some effort.

The credit card bills for Thanksgiving are much more manageable. The crowds to buy turkeys are nothing like the Christmas crowds. It’s not nearly as commercialized.

And you get an automatic two days off tacked on to a weekend. And so it’s never on Sunday. I mean, this year Christmas is on a Sunday, and in the Churches of Christ, we take communion every Sunday. Skipping is unthinkable. Moving it to Wednesday is unthinkable. But church on Christmas morning? Right after the kids have opened their presents? Not a good combination!

Oh, and Thanksgiving food is better than Christmas food. And there’s more of it. And there’s football. And the only parade is on TV — so you don’t have to shiver in the cold to watch it.

It’s the perfect holiday.

So I’ve been thinking about what to say about Thanksgiving. I thought maybe I’d express my thanks for the Churches of Christ. I mean, this blog is largely a corrective to problems I see in my beloved Churches of Christ. And correction is necessarily negative. Every once in while, we need to take a moment to reflect on what’s good about the Churches of Christ. If we love them, what makes them lovable?

So here’s a start, and I encourage the readers to add their own. (And you may not be snarky or vent your anger at the Churches. It’s Thanksgiving.)

* A cappella music. I love a cappella music. I also love instrumentally accompanied music. I also love pure instrumentals. I love music. But the Churches of Christ are about the last place left to worship a cappella, and so far, that remains my personal preference — even though I’m a Baby Boomer and grew up on Motown and what is now called “Classic Rock,” a euphemism for “rock as it was meant to be.”

I see no doctrinal basis at all to insist on a cappella music, and see plenty of biblical reasons to refuse to let instrumental music be a test of fellowship. But being opposed to condemnation and division over the instrument does not make me opposed to the practice of a cappella music.

Now, I’m spoiled. I’m a member of a church of 600+, with great praise teams and worship leading, and we do a cappella very well indeed. And I attend the occasional lectureship where there are thousands very well led. These have been some remarkable times of worship.

But you don’t have to have huge numbers and rarely gifted leadership to do it. I’ve participated in some powerful singing in much smaller, less professional venues. A cappella can be done, and often is done, extraordinarily well. And I love it.

I would hate to see our a cappella tradition die. It shouldn’t be our identity. Our identity should be in Jesus. Nor should it define us. We should be defined by Jesus. It certainly shouldn’t define the boundaries of who is and isn’t saved or even part of “the Lord’s church.” The boundary is (you guessed it) Jesus. But I think it’s a wonderful practice. I’m glad my own church sings a cappella. And I’m glad that so many others do as well. (We just need not to turn it into a salvation or fellowship or identity issue.)

* Weekly communion. The early church took communion weekly — even daily — because communion defined their community as body. It was a chance to be with each other, to encourage each other, to welcome each other into an egalitarian society where sometimes slaves were elders overseeing their owners. It was a chance to remember why the persecution was worth it.

There’s a mystery in communion that we’ll never fully fathom. It’s a time of mourning and celebration, to remember Jesus on the cross and Jesus resurrected and living through his body on earth. We discern his body on the cross and his body in the room.

But we sometimes shamefully disrespect the communion service, treating it an interruption in the true purpose of the service — to hear a sermon culminating in an invitation. But the sermon is just not the main reason we assemble.

Indeed, to me, the beauty of the weekly communion is that it pushes us to reflect weekly on why we’re there. It imposes a certain discipline on the service. You can never get too far removed from Jesus and his sacrifice, because we celebrate that sacrifice every week in the middle of every service. Even if the preacher has another agenda, Jesus will be remembered. And that’s nothing but good.

* Wednesday nights. Many churches have de-emphasized Wednesday nights. They are plainly not scripturally bound. No one even remembers how the practice started. Fewer and fewer people attend.

But if you ask those who attend why they attend, most will say it’s “to recharge my batteries” or “to be with friends.” You see, church is, among other things, community, and if you love each other, you want to spend time with each other. And time spent together builds community.

The modern trend is to minimize attendance burdens to make room for more service opportunities — which is great and proper if we actually take the time for service and do it with each other. But I think most actually give that time to baseball, ballet, and TV.

The solution isn’t to rail against and damn those who fail to make the mid-week meeting, but to —

* Encourage other opportunities for the members to be together, to build community and to serve others. Be more flexible. Encourage accountability groups, small groups that meet throughout the week, maybe women- or men-only groups that meet over lunch or breakfast. You get the idea.

* Don’t kill Wednesday nights — not yet, not unless and until the community formation role of the meeting is better served other ways. (Ideas?)

You see, the nature of modern life is to pull us away from each other. We meet once a week, spend 5 minutes talking football, shake hands, read announcements about people we barely know, and then go hundreds of different ways. Modern society becomes more lonely every day.

We replace the thrill of being with our family of believers with the thrill of extraordinary preaching and worship leading. It becomes an experience, a concert (even if a cappella), and not a gathering of family.

Thus, one of the beauties of Wednesday night is how very unprofessional it is. The preacher may not even teach Bible class. The members minister to each other. Wednesdays are very horizontal and, hence, community building.

(Test this hypothesis: Those who attend regularly on Wednesday nights are more committed to their fellow members and their congregation than those who don’t. I think that’s plainly true. Is it cause or effect? I think it’s both.)

Adults get used to the loneliness of modern life, but I think our true natures are revealed in our children, who delight in being with friends on Wednesday nights. Teen and campus ministries often have their best attendance on Wednesday evenings.

But adults learn to suppress their relational needs — for children, for work — and so we adults could all use a little more discipline in our lives about being with those we’re supposed to love as family. And leaders, accustomed to a theology that builds salvation on doctrinal perfectionism — a purely intellectual pursuit — forget that the church is about much more than Bible class.

Yes, it would be even better — much better — to do service together instead. And some do. But most do not. And until we figure out how to get as many members involved in weekly service projects together, I’m for keeping Wednesday nights on the schedule. But not as obligation. As privilege. As opportunity.

We can be more creative and thoughtful about how to do Wednesday nights. We can think a lot harder about why we’re really there. We can avoid the temptation to schedule things just to get the numbers up, without regard to the purpose of the gathering.

In fact, we might even decide it’s okay for the parents to drop off their kids in the children’s wing and spend an hour sipping coffee and talking. Some of those hallway conversations just might be of more service to the kingdom than our classes.

And so, dear readers, what is it about the Churches of Christ that you’re thankful for? (For certain readers I will not name, I’ve left some obvious ones to the readers. Read nothing into the fact that this list omits your favorite.)