A SIMILITUDE OF UNLIKE CONGREGATIONS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I want to share a reflection I wrote some time ago.  I wrote it for fun. 

It’s about bar people and church people. 

Bar people are just like everyone else.  They want to have a good time.  They want to be respected.  They want others to consider what they have to say.  They want to vote…for the best shooter du jour… and get it for free.

Bar people share a common convivial essence of humanity.  Most of them are drunks.  I mean that in a nice way, and in a funny way, because the word “drunks” sounds funny, like the word “pickles.”

Drunks are individuals.  They are like Kinsey’s gall wasps.  Sit a million drunks around one bar the size of Atlanta, and you will not find two who are identical in any way, except that they are all are drunk.

We tend to think of drunks being the same in the way prunes are the same, yet rarely is sameness more interesting than uniqueness unless the sameness of one group is compared with the sameness of another.  Indeed, to really appreciate a jar of prunes, it helps to compare them to a bowl raisins and vice versa.  

I have been a bartender and a pastor, so naturally I see a similarity between these two unlike congregations. 

Both require donations to stay in business.  In bars, these donations are called tips or gratuities.  Do not kid yourself.  If there were no tips, there would be few bartenders, and bars would go the way of opium dens.

In churches a donation is called an offering, but it works itself out as some kind of gratuity.  A lot of customers support bars, and a lot of parishioners support churches.  Disappoint them severely enough, they will give their donations elsewhere.

I worked in a Georgia Tech sports bar in Atlanta called The Beer Mug from 1987 until 1993.  A brass spittoon served as our offering plate.  We did not pass this plate around.  Our customers brought their donations to us and left them on the bar or on a waitress’s table. 

If people were happy, if they had a good time, if they were seized by the spirits, then they were very generous.  Sometimes, if they had too much fun, they left jewelry and expensive jackets with matching gloves. 

Bars and churches depend on a consistent crowd.  Bars call them the regulars.  Churches call them the faithful.  A bar and a church must work to keep their regulars coming.  Often this means making them feel welcome. 

Bars and churches preach hell to their congregations.  Bars tell regulars they can run a tab, and it will be hell if they don’t pay it.  Churches tell the faithful that they, their relatives, and their friends are sinners going to hell and running will do them no good.  

A lot of people who go to bars love to keep their tabs paid as much as the faithful love to hear that other people are going to hell.

Thanks for reading.  Next time: other ways that drunks and church people are alike.

         

Blessings…