My friends keep teaching me that it’s not enough to pose a negative and let it lay there. What’s the positive? So, recently….

When I did an article on this page about “how churches show you are not welcome,” among the comments it generated–and on Facebook, it pulled in more than here at the website–was one asking me to do the reverse: ‘Tell us how churches show you are welcome.” Great idea.

So, I posed that question to the 4,200 or so FB friends I’ve managed to amass in the last couple of years. And the comments began flying in.

Oddly enough, however, all the comments on how a church shows it wants you boil down to the same thing.

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Some of the laziest people I know are workaholics. But most aren’t.

The lazy-overachievers push themselves night and day in a vain effort to convince themselves they are not lazy, not sloths or couch potatoes or blights on humanity. But most lazy people are under-achievers of the first order.

The workaholic has his own demons to tame, so we will leave him to them.

The rest of us are just cotton-pickin’ lazy.

Who would have thought that the ancients would have identified sloth as one of the deadly sins? It looks so tame, so benign. It doesn’t hurt anyone, but just lies there on the couch doing nothing. How could that be a sin?

The sloth rises from the bed at 10 am and whiles away the day, then rises from the couch at 10 pm wondering where the time went. Where the time went is into the trash bin, into deletion, never to be recaptured.

The sinfulness of sloth is that it wastes life. It denies that “this is the day the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24). It takes what is God’s and buries it. Sloth is life-denying, and thus rebellion against the purposeful Creating God.

I know about laziness. You too?

Now, I’m known as the guy who rises early and works late, who gets up in the night to tweak something and stays at it for hours.

As a young minister, I went for years without a vacation or taking an off day. From the outside, it looked noble to everyone except my longsuffering family. On the inside, I was living in fear. I was afraid of being accused of laziness, of not doing enough, of not earning my pay.

From the outside, that does not look like sloth. But my heart is where sloth resides.

In the same way that some part of me is an unbeliever, a thief, a liar, and an adulterer, I am lazy. The urge is ever-present, the all-too human tendency toward rebellion and indulgence. Staving it off is a never-ending chore.

Now, one reason we know laziness is so prevalent across humanity is that Scripture–particularly Proverbs–has so much to say on this subject, none of it good.

Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise (Proverbs 6:6). The ant, says Solomon, is worthy of our study. Unlike the ancient philosopher-king, we have seen nature films depicting colonies of ants working and cooperating and fighting. We stand in awe of this little critter.

Now, Solomon clearly knew nothing approaching what today’s scientists have learned about ants. And yet, what he said is exactly on target. The ant, as well as the squirrel in my back yard, puts us to shame.

The lazy man is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly (Proverbs 26:16). The person who does not get up off the couch to run the vacuum or wash the dishes or to earn his pay in the office always has reasons and excuses.

For the record, here are the Proverb references to sloth and laziness: 10:4,26; 12:24; 13:4; 15:19; 19:15; 20:4; 26:14-16.

First, let’s say what laziness and sloth are not.

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You move to Miami Beach from Sand Mountain, Alabama, in order to start a church.

Big assignment. Not because there aren’t zillions of needy people there and not because you are not committed and zealous.

The first problem is you don’t know these people, do not speak their language–actual or cultural–and have no idea how to connect with them.

So, we come back to our question on penetrating a culture: “Where would you get started?”

Our initial answer was: “Ask Questions.”

But questioning is useless without this: “Be very quiet and listen.”

If you are not there to learn, no surface respect for their traditions and no superficial asking of questions will make a bit of difference.

Nearly a year ago, Chris and Kassy brought their two small children from Kansas to New Orleans to start a church.

They did it right.

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I had just returned home from England where our youth choir had given concerts in churches and schools, and I’d preached several times. The phone rang in the office of my Mississippi church. It was a fellow in the next town over.

“We’re beginning an amazing ministry to England,” he said, without any idea that I had just returned from there.

“What we’re going to do,” the young man said, “is to invade that country with the gospel of Jesus. We’re going door-to-door and show those dead churches how to do evangelism, how to build great churches. We’re going to bring the dead back to life again.”

I said, “Uh, my brother, have you ever been to England?”

The fact that he had not did not seem to bother him. He was sure that the approach to Kingdom-building that had worked for him in rural small-town Mississippi provided a template workable anywhere, in any culture.

The conversation went downhill from there. I recall telling him that several ministers in the London area had told us how they resent know-it-all American evangelists arriving in their country with all the answers. One said, “We do not mind their coming to help us. What we hate is that they are not interested in anything we have to say, not in learning the customs or traditions. And if we don’t get behind them and support them, we’re opposing Jesus.”

Arrogance is not the exclusive property of young ministers, although I can tell you from personal experience, it seems to find the ideal elements for incubation in those who are uninformed but zealous, untrained but certain. I will spare you the numerous stories of my own presumption and foolishness in judging faithful workers in the Lord’s vineyard for not producing more fruit when I had very little idea what I was talking about.

There is a way to make an impact on any culture, thankfully.

And there is a way to begin. May I suggest that way is: Begin by enrolling as a learner.

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Last Sunday, January 1, my friends Mike and Karen, who pastor a church in Mobile, invited their married daughter and her family home with them after worship for a traditional New Year’s meal.

The meal finished and the dishes cleared away, Mike and Karen were settled in the living room and Mike had found the football game du jour on television. Oldest grandchild Jayda, nearly 10, I think, sat nearby doing something. The daughter, her husband, and their young son were in the kitchen gathering the dishes they had brought to take back home. The three of them were laughing it up and having a good time.

Suddenly, as Jayda jumped up and started toward the kitchen, she called out, “Are y’all being a family in there without me?!”

Grandmother Karen told me that story and said, “I love what it says about her concept of family.” Indeed.

God wants us to be a family.

He wants our family to be a “real” family–that’s the reason for the numerous proscriptions in Scripture regarding this smallest and tightest of all communities. We are to honor parents and obey them, to love one another, to provide food and shelter for them, not to engage in sexual relations outside marriage, and so forth.

God wants His people to be family, also.

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