Driving Sixteen Penny Nails

One of my early employments in life involved a stint as a carpenter’s apprentice. We built apartment buildings in the metro Atlanta area. I was told to bring a nail apron, a hammer, and to be wearing steel toed shoes. Arriving at the job site, I was introduced to the lead carpenter and my co-workers. We were known as a “framing crew.” Once the foundations were poured and ready, we came in to put up the structural framework. It was good work for a young man in need of some good hard labor and a paycheck at the end of the week. The skill set for a carpenter’s apprentice was to be constantly learning by doing. I would be given a series of studs to nail into foot boards and top boards, all carefully marked to speed up our wall building, then we would work together to raise the wall, add temporary supports after making sure it was upright and level and then head on to the next. Nailing at first was tedious, I could hit a nail half a dozen times or more before sinking it. Co-workers taught by example, and I quickly learned to let the weight of the hammer being swung do the work and to sink it in three and sometimes just two swings (depending on the hardness of the pine boards.) Today that same work is done many times faster by a tool known as a nail gun. Nails bundled close together and dispensed by a simple contact with the wood are driven by a variety of forms of energy…compressed air, explosive charges, and electrically driven hammer all allow for a faster process. Many fewer nail drivers are needed. Technology has modified many of the working methods of the past. The interesting thing about the way tools have changed in construction, farming, and business of all sorts also applies to the ministry of the church. The tools we use at any period of time may or may not be the most efficient, most effective, or the most useful for the time and place. What we understand is the fact that in every arena of influence, we will of necessity make choices about changing with the times or not. Personally, I enjoy using a paper calendar to keep up with my appointments and meetings. For my younger colleagues in ministry, paper is almost secondary. They prefer to load that information into their laptops or handheld devices instead. Both work. Carpenters can still use hammers and sixteen penny nails to build houses instead of nail guns and electronic levels. The old works, but the new is faster and sometimes more accurate and cost effective. At church, the tools of communication and public ministry contact are equally diverse. As a teenager, we prepared a youth newsletter each month and shared it with the congregation. It took several hours of writing, typing, making a stencil, running the mimeograph machine, and using the church office on Saturdays to make it happen. Our church’s present generation of youth certainly have the capabilities to a similar thing, but the motivation for it is diminished in light of the intensive amount of time they already spend in exchanges of information via phones, computers, and websites, something their parents often use on only a limited basis. Some young people feel the church is irrelevant, not because the work and witness of the church is not important and needed in their lives, but it is often as if no one from church is talking to them very much. The radio and iPods are booming with messages; the TV presents alternative lifestyles to Christian faith in multiple forms; the models of sexuality apart from marriage are as diverse as the number of networks presenting them. We are not facing a shift or adjustment in the way we share the gospel, we are experiencing a tsunami effect of changes in the ways we communicate in our generation. The church must not always be behind the culture, when the culture needs the church to be leading it. It is time for the church to be not just the fad of the hour, but the movement of the day. It is time for the church to bear witness to the power of God in its people and to use the gifts of its people in purposeful service in Jesus’ name. The hammer works to drive a nail. The spoken word still drives the message, but the voice may be shared in this generation to millions in moments, to nations in a matter of minutes, to a world in need of the gospel as often as we are willing to strategize and emphasize and see God energizing the sharing of Christ. It comes when our lives are dedicated to the mission Christ gave us. The success belongs to God. The work is ours. The time is now.