The Front of the Shoes

They say you never get another chance at a first impression.  So if you have only enough shoe polish to do either the fronts or the backs of your shoes, do the fronts.  And in any world, whether it is one meager or flush with resources, the front should be done first.  Always allocate first resources to places of central and maximal impact. 

If you are trying to sell a house, making the closets nice while leaving the grass in the front yard overgrown is just bad strategy.  Potential buyers will never get in the front door to see the nice closets if they close down on seeing the house at all because of the front yard.  Thus, realtors talk about curb appeal. 

Let's leave aside for a moment whether we allow God's house to look worse than our own and talk saying, "Hopefully not."  The Saturday morning men's breakfast in fellowship hall, as great as that may be and I certainly love the ones I go to, is auxillary in the life of a congregation.  The main event, the last thing that will remain standing in a church is the worship service.  So being concerned about the "closet" of a men's breakfast in the fellowship hall is very secondary to the front yard and curb appeal of the worship service in the sanctuary. 

How is the worship service?  Vital?  How is the worship space?  Beautiful?  This is the event and the place where most of the attenders come most of the time.  A men's breakfast in a fellowship hall may get fifteen people once a month.  Compare that to the worship -- 100+ people every week.  The point is that worship time and space impacts the most people the most regularly.  Therefore, resources should be applied there first.  Imaginative resources.  Elbow grease resources.  Financial resources. 

Now you could have the order of the worship service be stellar and the sanctuary be pristene and still have missed out on making the worship event and place as full as it could be.  We cannot overlook hospitality resources.  I cannot be "up" all the time.  I have to let my hair down sometime, someplace.  But Sunday morning worship is not that time or place.  I don't want inauthenticity.  But we all can choose our attitudes to a large extent.  Sunday morning every Christ follower's wonderful goal is to be truly hospitable person, to dole out encouragement, to smile, to thank, .... 

I have often been blessed by the guy who said to his staff member with respect to his bad attitude, "Listen, I am paying you and I can get bad attitudes for free."  Or let's say you are a policeman.  You put on the uniform.  Do you get to, while you are in the uniform, have any ol' attitude or mode of conduct you want?  I should say not.  That person lifts his whole self into a professional role.  And we who profess Christ, let's lift ourselves into a high road and high encouragement and high hospitality role for this heartbeat event for any and all churches -- the worship time and space.