They beached the boat at Gennesaret and tied up at the landing. As soon as they got out of the boat, word got around fast. People ran this way and that, bringing their sick on stretchers to where they heard he was. Wherever he went, village or town or country crossroads, they brought their sick to the marketplace and begged him to let them touch the edge of his coat—that’s all. And whoever touched him became well. – Mark 6:53-56 (The Message)
One day last week I had a few hour block of time for pastoral visitation. I will admit that I have found visitation to be a real challenge for me. It generally involves multiple phone calls with an eventual 50% chance of finding a time a month out that someone is willing to have me come to visit, usually bringing communion. With a four hour block this week, I had a choice: spend time sitting at the phone to arrange one or two visits towards the end of October, or try just driving around to see who was available that day. Fifteen years ago that was how I always approached home visits, and generally had a success rate of more than fifty percent. In the past few years all people seem so much busier that it did not seem likely that cold calls would work (most people rarely even answer their phone, I’ve found). Yet to try something a bit different, I thought I’d give it a shot to see if people’s lives really have changed that much.
In four hours I was able to get to six members homes. Four were not at home. Two were home but had things going on that prevented them from talking, so I just said hello from the door. Having had no success, I stopped by the grocery store to grab a beverage on my way back to church. While there, I ran into a member and we had a nice conversation. Just wandering the grocery store, it seems, is more effective than trying to go to people’s homes. Certainly this is just one day and each person’s schedule is a bit different, but it does seem to me that there is a shift in how people on the broad scale are using their time. Schedules for people of all ages are more filled with activities than I have witnessed before. This means that ways of relating to others has also shifted. Again, that is not necessarily true of each individual, but taken as a whole it seems to be the strong trend in my experience.
What might this say about our life of faith and the life of the church? I try not to rush to say that different is automatically bad. It is simply different. In this case, it is perhaps a reminder that God is not confined to the church building or even activities traditionally considered to be “churchy.” Perhaps the connections we make and witness we carry is best lived out in public, in the midst of the activities of daily lives. Perhaps the grocery store is the greatest locus of connection that we have today. Perhaps our focus needs to be on recognizing God’s presence in those sorts of places; of seeing that wherever we live our lives is a place that the holiness of God might be made known. After all, as we see in the above passage from Mark, most of Jesus’ deeds of power, where he showed the presence of the Kingdom of God, happened in the marketplaces of the villages he visited. Maybe that is where the church needs to be going today as well.