Reflections from The Hill – Making Disciples or Feeding Vampires?

We’re in survival-mode here in Oz. Leaving aside the mega-churches, of which there are mere handfuls, congregations across the country average out somewhere between 60 and 70 souls (NCLS 2001).

Mercifully, there are a few, so-called extra-ordinary, parishes that are bucking enough of that trend to give some hope to what is an otherwise starved church landscape.

Among those 60 or so, there is usually enough coin collected each week to pay the rates, phone and electricity bills, but not much more. So the Priest leaves, the Rectory gets leased out and the rent money keeps everyone happy.

People like us then turn up at the Service on Sunday to watch the visiting (or non-stipendiary) clergyperson strut his/her stuff; we put our few bucks in the plate, have communion, go home rejoicing and somehow think that’s OK.

From one perspective, this looks awfully like survival; what’s important in St Agnathena’s Parish (put your Parish name here) is getting from one month to the next with money in the bank. Nothing much else counts so long as the bills are paid.

Any new-comer who strays into one of these Sunday services straightaway becomes a target for vampires. (I pause to add that, at this time of the year, there’ll always be a few hardy souls who’ve just been transferred into town or have made a New Year’s resolution and will try anything to make a few friends, even if it means coming to church.)

Sitting in our pew, we size them up, recognise the possibility that, at last, help is at hand for our weary bones, sidle over to them at coffee with fangs at the ready and ask, “Would you like to be on the roster?”

The friendly vampire has struck again. When churches don’t know how to connect with the world around them, they become vampires. It’s an elemental survival mechanism.

Discipleship, however, isn’t about being on rosters or any other activity believed to get people in. Discipleship is about hanging out with Jesus.

Nathaniel wasn’t so sure about that. He could see that a few of his mates (Philip, Andrew and Peter) had hooked up with Jesus and he was being chary about Philip’s invitation to join them.

If Nate was a flatterer, there may well have been a different outcome to this encounter, but he wasn’t. He was honest – Honest Nate, what you see is what you get, the bloke with no bull in him.

With his customary insightfulness, a quality oft-time seen in clergy spouses on their way home from Church, Honest Nate questions Philip’s statement: “Nazareth? Can anything good come out of that joint?”

Philip asked him to check it out, to come and see for himself. It’s a significant moment because Jesus didn’t have a multi-million dollar ad campaign focused on the generational traits of the under 40s to work with.

What Jesus had was something greater than that. He had a sense that Nate was looking for something important and, in the light of the rest of the Gospel Reading for today, that something included connectivity with life itself.

Like Phil and Honest Nate, each of us could do well to belong to a mutual admiration society with Jesus, where we recognise something of worth in each other; a bond of trust, perhaps, that enables both of us to grow.

Of course, the two parties would be unequal but Jesus won’t swamp us. The recognition of someone else’s power doesn’t decrease our own, ever.

The shame would be if we continued being a vampire. Certainly the kingdom of God would be diminished and we would never get close enough to see those “greater things”.