"Diggin' Up Bones"

In 2012 Randy Travis wrote and recorded a song titled “Diggin’ Up Bones.” Yes, I have long listened to that genre of music. It is what I was raised on, payed on radios at home and jukeboxes in taverns and bars. Travis' song is about a guy grieving a relationship which has died. Here is the link to the song on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6M2YuAVxuQ. Here are the words of the refrain,

I'm diggin' up bones, I'm diggin' up bones
Exhuming things that's better left alone
I'm resurrecting memories of a love that's dead and gone
Yeah tonight I'm sittin' alone diggin' up bones

One of the things I catch myself doing is "diggin’ up bones" of the church as I once thought it to be. I grieve its loss. I think many of us do that. It doesn’t matter if we are teaching elders (ministers), ruling elders, or members. Many of us who have a length of tenure in the church have a tendency to dwell on former years and experiences in the church. Today, compared to the former days, feels like a dearly held love which has left us alone.

We walk past the rogues’ gallery of portraits of former pastors, and sigh thinking how good things were back then. Somewhere in a classroom or on the walls in the basement are pictures of the men’s Sunday school class fifty plus souls strong. In a display case are the trophies from the church league softball, volleyball or basketball championships our folks won. Our hearts grow sad as those days have blown away like late Autumn leaves skimmering across the road, except in the memories we cling to while hoping beyond hope for their return.

We gather in naves built for two or three hundred or more worshipers and can still imagine seeing Aunt Minnie and Uncle Al Hoppe where they used sit, sometimes their ghosts appear occupying the pew. But the thirty of us who now come continue to sit in our usual places where our families used to fill a whole eight foot pew. On Christmas and Easter we sometimes took up a pew and a half, or had to sit on folding chairs in the aisles. Now, we feel so damn alone. Great voids of space exist between us another worshiper. The minister once joked that she felt the need to wear sunglasses on Sunday during worship so as to not be blinded by the shine off the varnish of the empty pews. That was cruel, and she didn’t need to say that.

Honestly, we spend a lot of time “diggin’ up bones.” We sit entombed waiting for Jesus to call to us, “Lazarus, come out!” and to give instructions to others for our unbinding. Maybe what is keeping us from finding new life is our propensity for “Exhuming things that's better left alone, and resurrecting memories of a church that's dead and gone.” The way it used to be is not the way the church is going to be. Can we dare bury the portraits, the pictures, the trophies of yesterday to make room for what the Spirit may be creating for tomorrow? Can we give up our sacred pew spaces to gather into a more critical mass as we pray and sing? Are we willing to clear out the reminders of yesterday for new treasures today and tomorrow? Or are we content to sit alone “diggin’ up bones?”

Unburied Skeletons

"Abandoned Church - Winter" by Brian Wallace

Across the stretches of rural areas and in the midst of urban neighborhoods lay grim reminders of communities and congregations which have literally given up the ghost. Abandoned and delict church buildings belie the ever optimistic challenge to renew, revitalize, transform a congregation which is just waiting to die, waiting for the last few members to die, waiting, waiting, waiting.

What witness do these buildings give? What hope do they offer? What consolation do they bring to others who are creepingly moving toward the same fate? No longer do hymns resound from them giving glory to God and fortifying the worshippers. Today, they stand like skeletons which were not buried. They are monuments to a past and warnings for the future. Mercifully some have collapsed in the wind, or have become a pile of ashes from a consuming fire. The agony of those still standing presses upon the souls who pass by them traveling to another destination.

Current congregants of declining congregations look upon them as a portent of things to come to their own frail existence. Even as the last gasps of life bleeds from the lungs of the dying ones, they insist, “That will never happened to us.” Some will seek to rally the troops with tales of the exceptional resuscitation of one which had been on the edge of demise. “If it could happen to them, it may be God’s will for us.” There is no one to play the piano or organ. The paint and wallpaper are stained with water from the leaking roof. A window, here and there is cracked from foundation settlement and bulging walls.

In far flung regions where the railroads and highways by-passed once communities fill of promise the people moved on rather than being starved of commercial and industrial energy which would have kept them alive. Yet their edifices of stores, homes, schools, saloons and churches stand in resistance to the primal elements. Only those who go seeking them find them standing lonely against the horizon. The “pickers,” the human vultures, have carried off anything which might have a few pennies of value. In the urban areas some have been repurposed into breweries where there is more life and fellowship than the congregation knew in its last decade or so. Others have become squatter havens and crack houses for those as bereft of life and hope as the cold and drafty buildings themselves.

Vestries, sessions and boards did their best to keep the spirit alive as along as possible. Dioceses, presbyteries and associations sought to provide the necessary life support. In successive efforts to save themselves from death only ensured their death. More tightly they drew their huddling. Insisting on maintaining their solo existence, and refusing to join forces with others near or distant to share resources, to reduce expenses, and to expand mission and ministry.

Has God abandoned them, abandoned us? It is God’s will or our stubbornness which has left these wreckages littering the landscape?  Vainly we struggle to delineate a new identify to carry into a changed and ever changing world. What witness shall we leave behind us, decaying structures of yesterday or vibrant communities of grace, peace, and reconciliation? Do we hasten our death in seeking to save ourselves, or do we boldly proclaim and demonstrate a new and vibrant life spending ourselves for the sake of others?

When we look upon the abandoned edifices of the past let them be a warning to us and a call to us to see our survival is bound to the abundance and free life of all others. Shall we learn nothing or everything from those unburied skeletons of the past?