Where I grew up, there were not a lot of options.
The only school was the public one designated by your address — private schools were fifteen or more miles away. While there was a foreign language requirement, the only languages offered were German and Spanish. There was no football team. The fire department was made of volunteers. There were only a handful of restaurants, about half of which were constantly in the process of being reopened by new owners. Of the 80+ students in my senior class, only 60+ graduated. Had we been born ten years earlier, most of us would have worked in the steel mills or for AT&T, with the largest portion of the remainder doing farm work. As it was, neither of these were the employers they used to be, and our options were even slimmer — and less certain — than they were for previous generations.
My best friend’s dad owned the local hardware store. Among other things, that meant he got his own car with his driver’s license, whereas I did not. I was of course jealous, despite it being one of the worst cars ever made — a mid-1980’s Ford Escort.
For the purposes of this story, know that I had grown up working on cars with my dad — both our own vehicles (usually later-model vehicles that needed constant attention to keep running) and genuinely old cars from the 1940s and 1950s. I also started working at an auto shop at 14 years old, and by the time I was 16 I was doing oil changes and tire/brake work.
One day we were out in the Escort and it broke down. The engine sputtered and died in a way that was decidedly not fuel-related, and my buddy edged it off the road. He looked straight at me with a confident grin, said “Don’t worry, this happens sometimes,” and got out of the car. Curious, I exited as well, and followed him to the trunk. There, he removed a hammer.
Now while I did not grow up in a hardware store myself, I know there are different kinds of hammers for different purposes. For visualization purposes, you should know that this was a claw hammer, like what you would use around the house to drive nails. There is no reason whatsoever for a hammer like that to be used in automobile repair and maintenance.
I followed my hammer-wielding friend to the front of the car. He opened the hood, and vaguely surveyed the engine bay. It was clear he had no idea what anything was. Then he started hitting stuff… at random… with varying intensities… until I stopped him.
We did get the car running again that day, but it had nothing to do with his hammering. I found a loose wire. But what gobsmacked me then and gobsmacks me still is that he admitted this was how his dad taught him to sort out car problems. His dad gave him that hammer to keep in the trunk. His dad showed him what to do. This instruction was passed down across a generation.
There’s an expression that many of us have heard that goes something like: “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” My friend’s family was a kind of embodiment of that. I used to think this was about limited options and using the tool they had and knew. But in the years since, I’ve realized that they didn’t just have hammers in that hardware store: they had all kinds of other tools that would have actually been useful for repairing cars.
What they didn’t have is a willingness or ability to actually learn what was wrong. So instead they used the tool they were most comfortable with (the hammer) to exert force against what they did not understand. It must have worked sometimes, by chance. But there was a greater likelihood it would do more harm than good, and there was a guaranteed eventuality when it would not work at all.
At risk of forcing an analogy that is already clear, it seems to me that there are “tools” churches are more and less comfortable with — and that when up against something they do not understand, a church will often wield those more comfortable “tools” with greater and greater force, even if they’re not the right tool for the job, so to speak. A church can feel like it doesn’t have a lot of options, so it grabs what once felt good and pins its future on it.
The bad news is that doing so is just as likely to do harm as my friend wielding that hammer against his Ford Escort.
The good news is that the Church — in both broad and local terms — has a considerable variety of tools available that may be much more effective when we are willing and able to learn what is wrong and how to use them.
Remember, we’re all in this together,
Pastor Michael