In my pre-planter life, I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to be involved in community life. At least not to a large degree.

Most of my time was spent in the church community, doing office time, going to church functions, etc. I’m not knocking that life, but it is a fact that most of my energy was spent on church folk.

By now that the tether is cut and I am “out here,” it doesn’t feel or look a lot different that at church. Interesting, huh?

Every group of people I belong to has the same dynamic problems as I saw at church: hurt feelings, politics, gossip, inertia, and pride. Though this is not always true, I find that help is more often appreciated “out here.”

Even though you have to deal with the same human condition “out here,” some of the veneers or facades that you see in church are missing. So you can actually see people processing what you say–if you don’t preach at them. And they don’t seem particularly interested in impressing you with how religious they are.

This week I told a business group I belong to that church folk sometime respond to our Playhouse Merced meeting place by saying, “When you grow up you can get a real church building.”

Actually, I think the advantages of our location far outweigh the disadvantages. The biggest is that we are “out here” and the minute we go into a traditional church setting we lose our credibility and our current audience.