New Year's Eve afternoon 2009. I spent the day with my family and we decided to go to a Mexican restaurant for some lunch. There weren't a whole lot of people there at the time we sat down and ordered our meal but as we waited for our food to arrive, a couple sat down at the table next to us. We didn't know each other, but they were rather friendly so we begin to talk a little. After a couple minutes of small talk, out of nowhere this gray-haired gentlemen looks at me and asks, "Are you a preacher?" I've known a lot of preachers in my lifetime, and while most of them are very fine gentlemen, there are those that...well, let's just say they have stranger personality traits than I think they should probably have being men of God.
I wasn't quite sure what the premise of his question was, and wasn't sure if he was trying to complement me by asking if I was a preacher, so I politely responded, "Well, I'm not technically a preacher...I'm a music minister slash youth director." His response: "I thought you might be a preacher or something along those lines. You just have a certain 'glow' about you."
I don't tell this story to 'toot my own horn'...I bring it up because of this reason: While I was complemented by what he was saying, the more I thought about it, the stranger it became to me. I find it a bit unnerving to think that I may be looked at as a preacher of some sorts before I am thought of as a Christian.
The implications are the main thing that bothers me about that statement. My point being: Why was his question not "Are you a Christian?" It's almost as if he was saying, "Preachers are the only people that really 'stand out' in the Christian faith." I consider it a little scary to think that people expect Christians to not really be that different...only their pastors. I draw from this encounter at a Mexican restaurant a simple conclusion: People don't know Christ. And here is my theory...
I shared a statistic in an earlier blog that in 2008, 77% of Americans considered themselves to be Christians. That means that of the U.S. population in 2008, more than 234 million people thought they were Christians. By definition, a Christian (I would think) would be someone who followed the teachings of Jesus Christ. Now, just imagine what this country would look like if there were 234 million Christ-followers in it. I'm not talking about your perception of what a Christ-follower looks like, I'm talking biblically. What if there were 234,000,000 of the 12 disciples? What a thought! It speaks in Acts on multiple occasions of thousands of people being added to the kingdom through just one or two disciples! 1 or 2!!! How many are being added to the kingdom through our 234,000,000 so-called Christians? If 234 million of us were living like Christ, there wouldn't be people in the 'Bible Belt' of the United States that didn't know how to pray (which there are...not by my own accusations, but I have had people literally tell me, "I don't know how to pray.") If 234 million of us were living like Christ, people wouldn't say, "You have a certain 'pastor's glow'." They would be saying, "Something about you reminds me of that Jesus fellow..."
"...You just have that glow."
