Get Clean or Don't Come To Church!

I saw one of my friends (Wes, he is a follower of this blog, God bless him) tonight and he told me after reading this blog he was surprised I worked at a church. That really did not surprise me because at most churches people that work at churches can’t say what they are thinking. Much less be themselves and still get to be a part of a suburban church.

Chuck Smith, the founder of the Calvary Chapel Movement; describe a crisis in the original Calvary Chapel when it was still a tiny church in Costa Mesa, California. It was the 1960s, in the early days of the “Jesus Movement,” and some street kids began attending their services. The kid’s dress didn’t conform to the suburban expectations, and even worse, like MOPS, they were tracking a lot of dirt into the building. Since these kids spent a lot of time on the beach, their dirt was in the form of sand, which was even a bigger housekeeping headache!

What should the church do? They held a business meeting to answer that question. Someone put a motion on floor, “not to allow anyone to attend services if they weren’t wearing shoes and if they had long hair.”

Keeping the Riff Raft Out by Making Them Pay for Their Pew

In Wesley’s England families paid an annual fee for their pews in some aristocratic churches. If you couldn’t afford to buy a pew, you couldn’t attend that church. It was effective, it kept the kept the riff raff out. But, in Wesley’s day it was just the aristocrats who function as Christian elites. Today, in America, it is the broad suburban middle class fighting to keep the riff raft out.

Not sure of the exact numbers that Chuck Smith faced in the motion, but the motion was defeated by one vote, something like 8 to 7. And once again, the rest is history. The Calvary Chapel Movement like MOPS has become one of the great stories of the 20th century American church. But both were almost killed by suburban church power brokers, who in their search for the American Dream, made housekeeping issues a top priority.

We figured out how to deal with that at a church I worked at in Southern California, we just locked all the doors. That way only those of us with combination's and keys could use the rooms we wanted to keep nice and neat and clean.

By the mid 1960s American churches had moved from Liberalism vs. Fundamentalism which pitted:

Right and Wrong Vs. Life and Death

To the Suburban Captivity which pitted:

Neat and Clean Vs. Life and Death