How would people of your church respond to a vandal spray painting a provocative question on the side of their building? I found inspiration and gospel in a news story about the Grace Episcopal Church in Randolph, NY. The essay, Vandalism as a Conversation-Starter, by Elizabeth Drescher, was posted by Religion Dispatches on Tuesday of last week.
Excerpted from Vandalism as a Conversation-Starter:
...When “Can I still get to heaven if I kill myself” appeared in two-foot letters on the side of the modest, Victorian church on Monday, May 20... (Grace Episcopal was among a number of buildings tagged in the area)...the initial response was dismay. Rather than approaching the tagging as a criminal act, however, church leaders decided to take the graffiti seriously as an expression of something spiritually meaningful—a cry for help, perhaps; even a mocking expression of religious skepticism. They approached it relationally, using the church building itself as a social media platform, and responding with their own message of hope (see photo below).
The promise...in this story, then, has to do with a church waking up to a bigger world, a more complex and challenging religiosity, and responding to it with, dare we say, a measure of grace that speaks not merely to angst-ridden teenage taggers, a small parish community, or a rural town, but also to the blur of cars along the highway outside the church, drivers waving and honking as they pass, read the tags, and head down the highway—as well as to the clicks of digital believers, seekers, and skeptics who shared the story across social media in the hours since it appeared.
 |
| God loves you with no exceptions! |
No comments:
Post a Comment