A recent edition of 60 Minutes included the story of coach Frank Hall of Chardon High School in Ohio.
On February 27, 2012, Coach Hall heard shots ring out in his school. He chose to run toward them instead of away, chasing the lone gunman, teenager T. J. Lane, out of the building at great risk to himself. Lane, who was later arrested by the police, had shot six students, killing three of them, before Coach Hall chased him away.
One of the students who survived, but was left paralyzed from the waist down, and another student who was not wounded, spoke to 60 Minutes about their coach’s heroic efforts. CBS reporter Scott Pelley told then they were more than students to the coach. They responded, “Yea, we know, we’re his family.”
Those words reflect the theme I discussed last time – that all of us are connected to one another, and that what affects you affects me.
But that doesn’t seem to be the way millions of Americans think anymore. Instead, radical individualism and clan-ism dominate. It’s all about what’s good for me or my kind at the expense of everyone else.
It’s no wonder we seem to be a nation where it’s American against American, race against race, class against class, an attitude commonly found in government, cities, towns, schools, and neighborhoods.
But what is astounding to me is that it is also found in churches. In today’s America churches seem to serve as a divider of people as much as anyone or anything else.
Consider the fact that controversial issues such as racial integration, economic justice, gun rights, war and peace policies, gay rights and gay marriage, are flash points in churches the same way they are everywhere else.
And the only solution church leaders have come up with is to try to avoid them, to discourage anyone from bringing them up.
What does it say about the state of the church when congregations have to avoid tough issues because people can’t talk about them in a civil tone, that they get upset and angry to the point of saying nasty things to one another or quitting altogether?
I think what it says is that churches are full of people who have forgotten what Coach Hall and his student players knew – that they are family, they belong to each other, that what happens to one of them happens to all of them.
This is what it means to be a real community, “a unified body of individuals.” It doesn’t mean there is always agreement among the individuals, or that they think alike, believe alike, act alike.
It means they retain the sense of connectedness in spite of not being alike, that they are committed to working for the good of all, that they understand different points of view doesn’t make them enemies or mean they cannot get along. It means what unites them is more important than what divides them.
It seems to me that if a football coach and a couple of his teenage players had no trouble understanding that, maybe if the rest of us, especially those of us who are still in the church, set aside our egos, needs, and wants even a little, we wouldn’t either.
Wouldn’t that be something worth seeing!
