The Gospel Meeting
By Robert Meyers
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There comes a time when a man says out loud what he has known for a long time. This happened to me the other day when, in the pulpit, I said in passing toward some other point that the gospel meeting is dead. I had not really quite intended to say it, but the moment I did so I knew that I had been convinced of it for a long time. Apparently my hearers had been too, for no one looked surprised or uttered a protest later.
I admitted that the corpse is with us and will probably be for some time, embalmed (as it will be) most studiously and scrupulously by those who profit from its continued presence. Evangelists, especially, will not easily grant decent burial to this decaying object because they find it both lucrative and pleasant to keep it on display. The evangelist comes into town trailing clouds of glory, clouds which have been carefully puffed by advance blurbs, local pulpit encomiums, and the exotic excitement of a new face and personality arriving on the tired old scene. He goes easily through sermons used in dozens of other such wakes, lambasting the denominational world (which isn't there), confusing it with the sectarian world (which is there, but doesn't
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Actually, not too many hear it at all, for I have observed much weariness of the flesh on such occasions, and much sleeping. It is no wonder, I suppose, since everyone knows exactly what will be said. The only intellectual excitement I have seen engendered at these wakes has occurred in the first moment or so when the crowd wondered what the clever title of the sermon might mean. As soon as it was settled that it was only a new name for an old bout with familiar Church of Christ positions, everyone settled down and either slept or looked around for interesting diversions.
Mothers have it on others at this point, since they can always attend to their children's needs, or else by fussing and pulling at them enough so that they will require attention--preferably outside. (I have been perilously close to believing, at times, that this is why mothers who would hire a babysitter for a movie date insist on bringing the babies to church; it is their escape hatch from tedium). Fathers frequently sleep, or go into a cataleptic trance in which their glazed eyes are fixed relentlessly upon the speaker while their minds wander through fishing and hunting dreamlands.
Satire, as Carl Ketcherside warns me occasionally, is a dangerous thing, so I hope to be understood truly about this matter. I do not think for one moment that the gospel is dead. Good news never is, nor ever will be. But just as many techniques of presenting it have been born and have passed away, so has the nineteenth century gospel meeting. And just as many of us would not put our dead out of our sight so quickly as the law insists, so do some of us refuse to bury the corpse of this dead and ineffectual event, because we associate it with childhood and rightness and hope.
Christianity is getting almost nothing from gospel meetings, and perhaps is losing much. It is one more device to keep people inside the building in the hope that the real pagans will enter to be converted. It simply doesn't happen that way, or, if it does once in a blue moon, it is not often enough to justify the expense in money outlay and party-pride boosting.
I am saying nothing startling, of course. Most city churches have begun calling the old gospel meeting a "lectureship" already, and the name change corresponds with the change in emphasis. Since few outsiders appear at these things, it has come to seem sensible to churches that they should be addressed to insiders. And the time has been drastically shortened, from two and three weeks when I was a child, to one week, to three days or a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday weekend.
Even the "lectureship" turns out, usually, to be the same old partisan propaganda in a new dress. About the second time around, no one is fooled any more, and the same tedium sets in. A new name does not revive a dead object, and the way in which the Christian community is most relevant now is not through endless rehashing of party views, or hairsplitting interpretations of dogma, but through outthrust--a dynamic reaching out from the protected pew to the alleys and byways where lost men are. More and more, men who know how to lead this kind of enterprise are being called to do so. This is where the action is, and where it will be for a long time to come.
(Editor's Note: Robert Meyers is a professor at Wichita State University, and lives at 867 Spaulding Street, Wichita, Kansas 67203).