What's With the Briefcases?

Today I am going to pick on Chris, but since Chris is going to read this anyway, I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it.

Chris and his family started to attend our congregation a few years ago, and while they were familiar with our doctrinal peculiarities, they were completely new to our way of doing things. They immediately and enthusiastically jumped into the life of the church, and although Chris never said anything, I would occasionally notice an impish grin over something or other that we would say or do.

One weekend Chris was out of town and visited a sister church in another city. The next week he had a question for me. “What’s with the briefcases?” I patiently explained to him that briefcases are to carry things. But Chris was having none of it.

“When I first started coming here I noticed that the guys come in with briefcases. No big deal. Then I visited this other congregation in a different city, and it’s the same thing. So why the briefcases?”

Now, bringing a briefcase to church has great practical value. You can carry your entire family’s Bibles, a couple of notebooks, and other needed miscellany. But still, that question got me thinking. I know of no command in the Bible to carry briefcases, but here is a denomination of sorts where somewhere in our misty history someone decided to stuff his briefcase with religious paraphernalia, and it is now an international distinctive unique to a certain subculture of a small faith community. And our guys never think about how unique this tradition is in the history of Christianity.

But more than this, the briefcase can be taken as a metaphor. Chris noticed our briefcases, but what about the other baggage that we carry as a congregation? What will someone who is visiting us for the first time see that we don’t see because we just accept things as a matter of course?

Is our song service uplifting and inspiring? Are the messages relevant and thought provoking? Or are they dry and pedantic? Do we nurse wounds from past hurts, and are such wounds on open display? Do we come across as sincere students of the Bible and disciples of Jesus, or are we just playing church? Will the first impression be such that people will look forward to coming back, or will our baggage litter the aisles and become a stumbling block? What will they see when they come through your doors?

Questions worth asking, I think. What kind of baggage do you have at your church?