It began in 1989 as a response to the ‘McDonaldization’ of food and
restaurants - food that is served quickly and no matter where you are it is
always the same. We have a name for
it. We call it ‘fast food.’ A counter movement emerged in Rome where,
after it was announced that a McDonalds was going to open near the Spanish
Steps, protesters chanted, “We don’t want fast food. We want slow food.” And with that a movement was born that today
has over 1,300 local chapters in fifty-three countries.
The Slow Food movement is not just about food. It is a critique of what Carl Honoré, a
Canadian journalist, labels the “cult of speed,” which is rampant in our
society. Fast, he says, is busy,
controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient,
active, quantity-over-quality. Slow, on
the other hand, is calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried,
patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity.
Slow is about “making real and meaningful connections – with people,
culture, work, food, everything.”
On nice afternoons when I was in school in Boston, I drove to Gloucester to
sit on a bench overlooking the bay to do my reading. I liked the feel on my face of the sun and
the breeze off the water. The sounds of
the bay – gulls and bells – were calming.
I watched trawlers making their way out and home. I could go on for some time about those
wonderful afternoons, but suffice it to say it was a fabulous environment to soak
in theology or church history or whatever.
Gloucester’s best known landmark, the Fisherman’s Memorial Statue (a
mariner at a ship’s wheel looking out to the sea), was located not far from the
bench where I did my reading. Passengers
from dozens and dozens of tour and school buses flocked around the statue, took
pictures, and departed on ten minute intervals.
What is the difference between fast and slow? They had a picture, but I had an experience
of the bay.
The sociologist George Ritzer coined the phrase “McDonaldization” to
describe “the process by which the principles of fast-food restaurants are
coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society.” This trend, he says, has four dimensions:
efficiency, predictability, calculability (quantifiable results), and
control. These values, which drove the
Industrial Revolution, have led to an industrialization of almost every aspect
of our lives. How well do you handle the
opposite: messy, unpredicatable, immeasureable, and not under your control?
Chris Smith and John Pattison grew up in different mega-churches, but now,
as adults, have chosen to worship in churches that look a lot like us here at
St. Paul’s. They write about their
experiences in a book titled Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the
Patient Way of Jesus. To their way
of thinking, congregations steeped in the church growth model “come dangerously
close to reducing Christianity to a commodity that can be packaged, marketed,
and sold.”
There are books and seminars to teach you how to build a church that will
number in the thousands. It involves,
among others things, location, parking lots that can be emptied in fifteen
minutes or less, high-quality coffee, contemporary music, and lots of
technology. But by emphasizing
efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control, these churches
sacrifice something essential in order to be large.
Smith and Pattison write of their experience growing up:
Instead of cultivating a deep, holistic discipleship that touches every
aspect of our lives, [our churches] confined the life of faith to Sunday
mornings, where it [could] be kept safe and predicable, or to a “personal
relationship with Jesus Christ,” which [could] be managed from the privacy of
our own home. Following Jesus [was]
diminished to a privatized faith rather than a lifelong apprenticeship
undertaken in the context of Christian community.
There is nothing
fast about apprenticeship, is there!
Smith and
Pattison are part of a sizable movement of folks raised in the church growth
model who are leaving it in favor of something different. The slow church movement, they say, “is a
call for intentionality, an awareness of our mutual interdependence with all
people and all creation, and an attentiveness to the world around us and the
work God is doing in our very own neighborhoods.” It is not private nor is it quite what we think
of when we say public, in that it does not involve standing on a soapbox and
preaching at passing crowds. This faith
is communal. It is lived out in and with
others – members of our church and the people of our neighborhoods. By its very nature, it is neither efficient
nor predictable nor measureable nor under our control. It is, to go back to Trinity Sunday,
improvisation. It always takes on a life
of its own which we do not dictate, but participate in.
This morning we
hear Jesus tell two parables about seeds.
In the first he describes the miraculous way seeds sprout and grow
without any help from us. In the second
he reflects on how a small seed, over time, will grow to become a large
tree. Each parable tells us something about
the kingdom of God. There is nothing
spectacular about a seed and certainly there is nothing fast. Once a seed is put in soil it takes time for
it to germinate, to sprout, and to grow.
There is very little we can do to speed up the process. Our role is to water and to weed and to
wait.
How does it make
you feel to know that God works on a timetable and at a pace different from
what you might like? You can say and do
all the right things – come to church regularly, say your prayers daily, tithe
you wealth happily, tend to the downtrodden compassionately – but, as they
often say in commercials, actual results may vary. God works in God’s own time and we cannot and
should not hurry the process along.
These two
parables assure us that God is at work in and through our lives. That certainly is reassuring. But they also call on us to be patient and to
trust, and that is not always easy. If
you are computer proficient, think of it as trying to teach someone who has
never held a mouse and right-clicked.
How natural is it to jump in and take over for that struggling person;
to short-circuit the slow process of growth?
After all, we want to be efficient, predictable, productive, and in
control.
But life – thank
God – does not always work that way.
Just like a slow cooker brings out flavors you will not taste in food that
has been microwaved, the life of faith creates deep and sustaining roots over
time; time spent in incalculable, seemingly meaningless interactions with God,
with yourself, and with others. It is
only over time and taking in the long view that you recognize God has done
something enduring in you and with you and through you.
This morning, as
we say thank you to Amy Austin for her service as our parish administrator and
hello to Cindy Cowan as she steps into that role, we have a wonderful example
of what it looks like to be in a place, to allow it to touch us, and to open
ourselves to connecting with others. Amy
has not been a person with a job title and a function to perform. Slowly, over time, she has become one of us
and very central to what we think of when we say “St. Paul’s.” She cultivated something in this place and
something very special emerged from it and we are grateful for it. We are also grateful for the early sense that
Cindy is going to “fit right in.”
I would like to
think that St. Paul’s is a slow church, in the best sense of that term. We cultivate our faith and our relationships
with one another. We don’t leave here
what we experience on Sunday mornings.
We take it with us out the doors and carry it with us throughout the
week. And most important, we tend to
what we see and sense God is doing in and around us. St. Paul’s is not our church. It is God’s.
When we are open to what God is doing in and through this place we will
be like the surprised person in Jesus’ first parable who does not know how the
harvest came to be, but rejoices that it is there. We too rejoice when we see what God is doing
in our lives, in our church, and in our community. It starts off small, growing slowly, but
eventually becomes something like a tree that sustains so much around it. We are a slow church.
