Why Jesus Did Not Have A Car

Tech­nol­ogy frees and iso­lates at the same time. I once made the state­ment that if I did not have an auto­mo­bile I would be able to dou­ble the mem­ber­ship of the church where I worked at the time (El Paso, Texas). Like just about every­one else in this call­ing, I put a lot of miles on my vehi­cle duti­fully vis­it­ing hos­pi­tals and ful­fill­ing other oblig­a­tions, but see­ing very few new peo­ple face to face. Church growth has to do with meet­ing new peo­ple face to face and hav­ing gen­uinely mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions (some­thing you sel­dom have — espe­cially if you are tex­ting and dri­ving at the same time).

There are enough peo­ple within walk­ing dis­tance of just about any church to fill that church. Iron­i­cally, we drive past other churches to get to “our” church. Cars give us choices, but limit how we spend much of our time. Per­son­ally, I think God is a genius for not send­ing Jesus dur­ing the auto­mo­bile age. He just let him walk around and meet some peo­ple face to face. I some­times won­der how many pairs of san­dals Jesus wore out in his short life. I am think­ing he went through a num­ber of them.

He wrote a brief note once in the dirt, and it changed the atti­tude of mil­lions over the last two-thousand years (the story of the woman about to be stoned for adul­tery). In min­utes, enough peo­ple had walked across the mes­sage to erase it, but the changed hearts even­tu­ally penned enough about it to fill a small library.

There is some­thing about hav­ing a sim­ple face to face con­ver­sa­tion that is vir­tu­ally mirac­u­lous. For all that is touted about on-line courses, there is some­thing miss­ing by not actu­ally being in the same room with the teacher. The same is true for tele­vised min­istries. The church was invented by the same Being that did not give Jesus a car. In a church you have to deal with peo­ple a lit­tle (or a lot) unlike your­self. Do that well and it will change the whole world for the better.