OK, I’ve blogged (which sounds like a plumbing problem—and often is!) about the similarities between the comic industry and the modern American church and the struggles they face. Now, I want to examine some similarities of struggles faced by both churches and the Lions Club (and, presumably, the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, the Oddfellows, etc.).

This comes about because I received a gracious invitation last week from a couple friends to attend a meeting of the local Lion’s Club. This was not entirely new territory to me as I was once a member of the Lion’s Club in another state. The meeting I attended last week was much like the meetings I remembered, except the Lions here in Dumas allow women whereas my previous experience was with a club that only let women cook.

Everyone was just as friendly as they could be last Thursday. People greeted me at the door; they greeted me as I signed in; and they greeted me as I sat at the table (which I had been directed to by one of the people who invited me, who had also come over and happily greeted me). They cheerfully informed me of the “rules” (most of which are rather silly and the penalty for violating them is a “fine” which goes into the Club’s charity fund).

We sang, we prayed, we pledged the flag, we ate and we listened to a local speaker who held our attention. Then we shook hands with one another and left. There were many invitations to join—they even gave me an application—and I got the feeling they would have loved to have me join even if there hadn’t been a pledge drive going.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have no interest in joining. I know the Lions do good work—I especially admire the work they’ve done over the years to fund corneal research and to see that people, children foremost, who need corneal replacement surgery are provided with the best care and donations. I know people who really enjoy being Lions.

I just can’t get interested in joining. It starts with my basically parsimonious worldview (which isn’t always bad, I just found out my credit score is 816!), but $35 a month is more than I want to pay. Most months, that works out to more than $8 a meal. Now, it was a good meal, don’t get me wrong. But it was a meal I could have gotten at home. My wife is an excellent cook and she could make pork chops and vegetables to rival theirs with her eyes closed. I know the $35 a month goes to more than just food, but the food’s the first and most obvious tangible benefit.

Second, I can’t get too enthused about the meetings themselves. I enjoyed the visiting I got to do with the people around me, but that wasn’t much because there was a program going on and politeness dictates that I stay silent during same. The program wasn’t the most boring thing I’ve ever been to, but neither did it hold my interest. Maybe another speaker would have, but I doubt it. [Quick aside: the speaker was the football coach, who told us how much more competitive the team was going to be than the prognosticators had foretold and told us to watch for evidence in that night’s game in which Dumas was a 17 point underdog going in. He was right that the prognosticators were wrong because we lost 47-0.]

Second-point-five, the meetings are replete with ritual. From the fact that we couldn’t take a bite of anything until the “Sweetheart” (a high school girl who looked like she’d rather be somewhere else having root canal work done) had taken her first bite, to the order of service which dictated that the MC start off with (in the words of the person who had invited me) “the lamest joke he could find”, the fact that they referred to everyone as “Lion Doug” and “Lion Sally” and “Lion Harcourt Finzwitt III”, to … you get the idea, it was like something from a bygone era—and I’m more than happy to let bygones be bygones.

I remember when I was little and we’d go out to eat (especially with my grandparents, because they took us to “restaurants”, whereas my immediate family tended to go to places defined by their initials: DQ; KFC; Mr G) and I would see those signs in the lobby of the restaurant that read, “The Lions meet here every Tuesday at noon.” Or the Rotarians, or the Kiwanis, or the Whoevers. I liked their cool symbols, especially the lions.

Sometimes, we even ate in restaurants while the Lions (or someone else) were meeting there. I’d get a peek through the door into the other room and see these guys in nice suits laughing and looking important and—occasionally—throwing biscuits they’d soaked in their tea at one another. I was curious. I thought that might be a fun thing to do when I got older.

What happened? It’s not just that I got older, because the corresponding maturity is a lot less than you’d think.

What happened was a lot of things. First and foremost: the world changed. When these clubs were in their heyday, there was a lot less competition.

Almost everyone faces this. The “big three” networks may say that their problems are the result of the competition of 200 cable channels, and the movie theaters may say their problem is the competition of DVDs, home theaters and cable, but the reality is that competition is the name of our existence.

Fifty years ago, a man had his job, his home and his club. There wasn’t much choice of what to watch on TV and, if his kids played sports, it was one or two evenings a week and only during one or two seasons a year. Now, though, he (or she) has the choice of 200 channels, ten times as many movies in the theaters, multiple sports activities for children and adults, as well as work and whatever else seems necessary for life.

So the prospective Lion-Rotarian-Oddduck-etc. looks at his/her life and asks whether he can really afford another 35 bucks in fees, another hour out of the schedule (plus the incumbent volunteering such service organizations were built for), and either quickly decides it’s not worth it or is so quickly whisked onto his next appointment that the whole idea gets shoved the back-burner, never to be seen again.

Within the figuring this person did were the twin gods of the Me Generation: what’s in it for me and what value does it provide? (Which is really the same question, but it’s so important to us we ask it twice.) The stated bennies (community service, sight for the blind, etc.) seem like good things, but also things the person tells himself he could do on his own for less than $35 a month. Whether he will actually do them is another discussion and so far out of the realm as to be immaterial.

What to do about it? I think the Lions made a mistake by moving out of highly visible restaurants and into building they own themselves. While I find their meetings uninteresting, other people might find them interesting if they were exposed to them. As it is, no one’s going to go in that Lion’s building on their own and will, in fact, give it very little thought as they drive by.

Now, tell me what I’ve said in the preceding paragraphs that doesn’t apply to the local, modern church? Even up to and including the fact that we’ve left the public realm and now sequester ourselves off in a building that most people only notice peripherally as they drive by. We hold arcane “services” that are what we expect but just seem quaint and ultimately useless to the uninitiated.

That, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe our Christian meetings should be geared toward the saved and our lives the rest of the week geared towards the unsaved so that, when they do join us for church “service” they have learned enough from us and our lives to make the services seem valuable even if they’re still a little strange (at first).

What do we do? First, we need to acknowledge that the world is different. I don’t know that we should want to go back 50-100 years in time but I do know that we can’t. We’ve got the world we’ve got and we work from here.

My only temptation about rejoining the Lion’s was that a friend invited me to and I didn’t want to disappoint him. While I don’t think we should use guilt to get people to join church, maybe there is a lesson there in that the relationships (ours to God and ours to man) are more important than our rituals. In a society moving as fast as ours and with so many choices, the thing that seems to be missing most glaringly is the interpersonal touch. I think that’s where our future lies: not in returning to a past (that we’re probably remembering wrong, anyway) but in connecting with people.