She was smiling, coming up to the counter from the back of the kitchen at one of those “you-design-your-own-pizza” places. A bright, natural smile, of a kind infrequently seen on the faces of young people employed in the fast-food industry. This girl looked like she might actually enjoy her work.
For all, I could tell, we were the only ones in the place. I commended her on the smile, gave her my order, and asked how she was doing.
“Pretty good,” she said, adding toppings to my pizza. “Glad ‘m not working tomorrow. Wanna get back to my sewing.”
“Are you a seamstress?”
“Nah. I just like sewing hammocks for my rats.”
“Hammocks for your …”
“Yeah.”
“How many do you have?”
“Seven.”
“Do you make individual hammocks for each of them, or … do they all sleep in one big …?”
“Both.”
“So, they all get along?”
“Three of them do. And the other four, too, mostly.” She paused, mid-pizza, to shudder happily. She gave a deep sigh of affection.
“I just love ‘em,” she beamed.
Some do. The next day, I was regaling a colleague with that conversation. He smiled and shrugged. “I kept rats as a kid,” he said. “My folks were allergic to dogs.”
Perhaps there are more rat aficionados about than I realized. Maybe, if rats were a little bigger and puffier, we’d keep them in elaborate cages in our children’s bedrooms. If they were a little smaller, we’d draw cartoons of them and build amusement parks to their glory.
Instead, when one appears in our lives – like, say the one my dog came running around the corner of the house with, in his mouth, a few weeks ago – we leap up in horror and sound the alarm. My dog dropped the rat in surprise at our frantic reaction; my wife scooped up the pup, raced him back to the shower, and scrubbed him from the mouth out within an inch of his life.
It was my solemn duty, she made clear, to flush and kill the rodent that had risen, rumpled, from the patio and limped quickly behind the workbench. I stood there, shovel in hand, watching him scurry back and forth along the wall, looking for his escape route. I knew what was required. I couldn’t do it. I stood there, feeling my already meager complement of machismo draining away … but just couldn’t bring the great spade of death to bear.
Reassuringly, neither could my wife, once I passed the shovel to her. We settled, instead, on the hose – sending the rat scurrying for a tiny hole in the fence half-a-step ahead of a fierce jet of spray. Banished, bruised, drenched ... but free.
The problem with rats, of course, is not the creatures themselves – it's what we associate with them: filth, trash, disease. If I meet a rat in an open field or a tangled forest, I give him room. In a broken-down barn, on the streets of a ghost town, on the deck of a deserted ship, he’s part of the atmosphere and at liberty to roam.
But in places we want to be clean and healthy – the rat is looked on as a threat. A companion of flies and roaches, a carrier of ticks and fleas and germs and death. The rat, of course, would claim no ill intentions. He’s just following his natural instincts. Unfortunately, those instincts pose considerable dangers to the rest of us.
Thought of all this recently, listening to friends describe an incident at church. The acting pastor – formerly and for many years the minister of music – walked into choir practice one recent evening and abruptly read a prepared statement announcing the termination of the choir.
His words and tone caught many thoroughly off-guard. The choir had outlived its usefulness, he said. They were no longer any good, and few liked listening to them. Young people today prefer more modern forms of musical expression, and – he added – those don’t include hymns, which would henceforth be mostly banished from the church’s worship repertoire.
His unusually blunt tone brooked no discussion, but drew plenty of questions. He shut them down hard, one after the other. Anyone not liking this new format, he told them, was welcome to take their attendance out to Sun City, where old folks can croak their way through their prehistoric musical preferences.
He offered no compassion, no understanding, and little appreciation for the singers' long history of service and ministry to the congregation. He didn’t even bother to open the meeting with prayer.
One friend made a heroic effort to understand what might prompt a shepherd – even an “acting” one – to regard his sheep with such casual contempt. The man must be tired, he said … he’s the one who has to deal with complaints … he is, after all, the congregation’s chosen leader, and we’re duty-bound to submit to that authority.
But I’m afraid, having watched many church leaders of this sad ilk in action through the years, I find myself looking on them now in much the way I look at rats. No, I don't consider them vermin. I don’t wish them ill, and certainly would not deliberately move to hurt them. But they are unwitting carriers of a disease that has spread across our nation and its churches more swiftly than Covid ever did. And they are leaving considerable spiritual damage in their wake.
Intentionally or not, they infect our congregations with the idea that churches should be run like a business. That the inclinations of the immature must dictate all forms of worship. That church is about putting on a really good show every weekend, and giving those in the pews some spiritual bang for their buck. That the church must be utterly divorced from and silent about what is happening in the culture around it, even as it embraces as many of that culture’s worst impulses as possible.
That the content of our services must conform to a clock … and the clock doesn’t allow for intensive prayer or extensive Bible reading. That people’s insecurities and sensibilities preclude any assertive effort to share the Gospel, encourage a personal response, or suggest any kind of personal sacrifice ... be it the risk of a germ from a hand-passed offering plate, the endurance of a song written more than 10 years ago, or the embarrassment of a public expression of faith or repentance.
That the purpose of church is considerably less about reaching lost souls for Christ than keeping saved souls satisfied and undisturbed … less about meaningful worship than garage band amplifiers and special effects … less about discipling struggling Christians than giving preachers a platform for trite theology and well-oiled comedy routines.
In short, less about giving a dying world a bold message of truth wrapped in a particularly courageous kind of love than in giving people bound for heaven a safe club with great refreshments, served amid consistent reassurance of how much nicer we are than the people around us.
Again, these kinds of leaders surely have no intention of spreading disease. Like rats, they don’t knowingly hurt anybody. They’re simply following their instincts ... content, perhaps, in the knowledge that lots of people “just love ‘em.”
Some do. And all of us should, per Paul's admonition that we in the church are "to recognize those who labor among you, and are over you in the Lord and teach you, and to esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake."
But you can love Typhoid Mary, treat her with respect ... and still recognize that she's carrying a plague. One whose effects too many churches – and so many, many broken hearts and longing souls – may not survive.
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