West Cocoa Chat

Our flight from Zoe arrived in Orlando around 2pm. We drove home, unpacked, and then “packed off” to our Sunday evening service. When I come home from Pepperdine or an experience like the Zoe Conference; I’m always looking for a little piece of what I experienced in my home church. Sometimes I’m rewarded in my search and then there are times like this past Sunday evening.

As I literally walked through the front door of our church, I saw a young man (late 20’s / early 30’s), a visitor, engaged in a rather serious conversation with one of our deacons. Ray gave me the kind of look one gives when someone in the church is looking to pass off an irate “customer” to an elder. So I walked up, introduced myself, and inquired if I could help (where was my bat when I needed it) with this young visitor’s questions? If I told you that he came from a very traditional background can you guess the nature of his question? O.K., I’m going to insert another picture from Zoe. Make your guess and then I’ll give you the answer under the picture. This will be fun.

This was taken at dinner on Friday night at Zoe. A great place downtown (I haven't forgotten the question) Nashville next to the CMT Building called "Demas."(or Dumas?) I'm the 2nd guy on the left with my lovely wife Barb next to me. If you ever go there, get the "club steak." It was outstanding. Two of our formers (Heather and Jerod - last 2 on the right) who now live in Nashville took us there.

Back to the question. The answer is (drumroll from the movie Christmas Vacation) "divorce and re-marriage!" Yes, this young man wanted to know if we had divorced deacons and elders. Jeff and I have been blessed to have not experienced the tragedy of divorce but we do have some deacons who have a divorce in their background. When I explained this to our “visitor” he wanted to engage me in a debate. I gave him a few quick answers and then I told him that our church had gone through months of study on the issue. I told him that I didn’t have the time or energy (having just returned from Nashville) to re-visit that study to someone that I had just met off the street. I started to tell him that I would be interested in sitting down at a later date (dumb idea?) to show him what I felt were the biblical answers to this subject but he just grabbed my hand, shook it, and said the “true church” isn’t in this building and left.

You know, in some ways I hope he’s right. The “true church” should be Jesus, living and working inside each of us as we touched a loss world around us.