Sunday, May 25, 2008

it make me CRAZY

when a well meaning individual does something that is culturally insensitive to a visitor in church, so that the visitor is embarrassed and wants to melt away and never return again, ever.

It makes me so crazy sometimes.

What do you do?

12 comments:

  1. What do you do ? Vent about it on your blog, offer the right knee of fellowship to the wrongdoer, scream aloud, and keep the faith.

    Simple really.

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  2. "The right knee of fellowship"? LOL. Perhaps there's something I'm missing in that statement, or perhaps I get the joke I'm supposed to get, but that image made me laugh!

    :)

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  3. :)

    We all have cultural things that get in the way of the gospel for others, and hey, even I make the wrong cultural mistake sometimes, but it just becomes frustrating when you work so hard to not let those kinds of things happen, and they happen anyway.

    And I should clarify that that is not just about one event on one Sunday morning, sadly it happens regularly.

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  4. complain about it to your intern and give a good moral lesson.

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  5. Moral lesson? Pshaw! GIVE 'EM THE RIGHT KNEE OF FELLOWSHIP! LOL!

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  6. Marc, if you found yourself crossing your legs when you heard about the right knee of fellowship you got the joke ! Not that I've ever deployed it irl, but there are times when the right hand of fellowship just won't do !

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  7. Educate.

    Or if that fails and they ARE well meaning, ask them to stay the hell away from visitors.

    Bet I've fouled up like that a few times.

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  8. I'm pretty sure whoever it was could just cry about what happened. Pretty sure they don't need a kick in the pants from anyone other than themselves. People try, get cut down, stop trying. If I'm out of line here let me know.

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  9. I don't think anyone literally needs a kick in the pants. I don' t know the specifics of this situation. I just thought the image was funny in a general way. Sorry if I've offended---that wasn't my intent.

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  10. Tammy, some people would cry and others would say they were just communicating their preferences. I've seen both. And again I'm not talking about one situation, this kind of thing happens almost monthly round about where I work. And peoples responses are different.

    I've done it myself from up front even, which when I discover the result, it kills me, like a knee to the neither regions.

    Marc, I'm pretty sure you didn't mean that they LITERALLY needed a kick in the pants, so there is no need to apologize, and the specifics of the situation? Well there really are no unique specifics because again it happens regularly.

    A couple of incidents ago I did figuratively kick some one in the pants because they made a negative remark about natives and there were two young first nations girls standing right behind them, listening. For them even the "kick" didn't help.

    For others, even just a word would be like a hard kick. Which was where I started this comment. Some would get it and others simply don't.

    Barb has an idea of how this operates and she is often on the receiving end of this kind of treatment in her line of work, (If her blog is any indication.)

    And I agree with Toni that people continue to need education. It just feels like such an uphill battle sometimes.

    From the church that uses exclusive language, to the church that invites all the visitors to stand up so that we can properly identify them (Cringe cringe), so much work needs to be done.

    And I'm not talking about that PC crap here. What I am talking about is how, like Paul, we can work so that our cultural background does not become an offense to the gospel. The Cross should be the only offensive.

    And that may be very easy to say and very hard to live out.

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  11. Tammy, I guess we all form our own picture of a situation when we read about it on the internet. The picture I got was of a frustrating encounter where someone didn't know they were out of line; my attempted humour was about letting out frustration in private, rather than with the person concerned. I am sure that if my picture had been the same as yours - of someone who knew they'd slipped up, I wouldn't have been so flippant. Peace - and prayers for the real life situation.

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  12. run around the sanctuary screaming "this is a den of iniquity".

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