Reflections on the Plans for the Memorial Service

Evie's heart surgery is less than one week from today.

She did all of the pre-admission stuff a week ago. I wasn't there. But, Evie said that all of the people from Penn assured her that, as aortic valve surgeries go, hers is simple, that they do this all the time and that she's going to be fine.

That's reassuring.

However, Evie's brother died on the operating table during heart surgery and her mother died of a stroke as a result of otherwise successful heart surgery.

Both of these tragedies took place nearly 25 years ago. Both took place in hospitals vastly inferior to Penn and both involved very average surgeons, at best.

But, those heartbreaking events, no pun intended, are in our memories.

So, Evie and I have been talking through worst case scenarios, just in case.

It's clear to me that she giving these things careful thought.

I actually initiated the conversation about her memorial service.

Honestly, because of the way we connect to the Body of Christ, I was really asking...though I didn't say it...who, i.e., which, pastor,...she'd like to lead her service.

It didn't surprise me that she'd already thought carefully about the memorial gathering and answered my question with great detail.

I was inspired by the clarity of her yearning to use the gathering to proclaim the magnificence of the grace of God.

But, I was surprised, as she described her vision for her memorial,...

...that the organized church wasn't even in her thinking.

Evie has a connection to the organized church from infancy. She served with me during my decades as a CGGC parish priest. She was once the Director of Communications for the denomination!

Certainly, both of us understand that the church will be present at the gathering she envisions. In one of the rare Bible passages in which Jesus used the word church, He said, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them."

But, Evie envisions no role for the organized church and has no notion that a clergy person will lead it. The person she prefers as the moderator of the gathering is a devoted, committed disciple. But, not a member of the clergy.

For me, Evie's thinking represents an important truth about the state of Christianity today.

In matters, literally, of life and death, what churchy people think of as "the church" is increasingly irrelevant, a nonfactor, to a rapidly expanding number of people who follow Jesus with every ounce of their strength.

That reality stuns me.

In my denomination which is declining and aging rapidly, leadership's focus, more and more as time goes on, is on saving the church.

My take on the impact of their efforts is that, increasingly, people, even people with a deep connection to the organized church, don't care about what denominational leaders care about.

The fact that it, apparently, never occurred to Evie to turn to a member of the clergy or an organized church in planning her memorial service represents a very significant truth about the place of institutional Christianity in the world.

Increasingly, that version of church doesn't matter to many people for whom Jesus is all that matters.