The DNA of Caring

"'Ikon doesn't care about you. Ikon doesn't give a crap if you are going through a divorce. The only person who cares is the person sitting beside you, and if that person doesn't care, you're stuffed.' People will say, 'I left the church because they didn't phone me when my dad died, and that was really hurtful.' But the problem is not that the church didn't phone but that it promised to phone. I say, 'Ikon ain't ever gonna phone ya.' [I] might, but if [I do], it will be as [me] and not as a representative of Ikon. Ikon will never notice if you don't come. But if you've made a connection with the person sitting next to you, that person might. Ikon is like the people who run a pub. It's not their responsibility to help the patrons become friends. But they create a space in which people can actually encounter each other." (Christian Century, June 2, 2009)

The speaker is Peter Rollins, creator of an emergent group in Ireland called Ikon. Rollins is quick to clarify that Ikon is not a church -- at least in any conventional sense of the word; he even resists describing it as a "community" -- which means, among other things, that it is hard to pidgeon hole. About the best you can do is observe that it is a monthly performance held in a pub that tries to "disrupt people's understanding of Christianity and get them to think differently." It is an open-doored experience designed to meet and relate to God on different terms -- it is related to religious tradition, insists Rollins, while seeking to reimagine how that tradition might function.

His decriptions of the events are fascinating -- and simultaneously disconcerting -- but it is characterization of relationships and responsibility that catch my attention. It isn't a new thought that institutions can't feel -- only people "feel" -- but churches and their "members" continue to err in the expectation that they will. The institution can create mechanisms and systems for visitation, "shepherding", pastoral care and the like, but the institution makes no visits or telephone calls. Only people do that -- people who have accepted an assignment, perhaps, or who will feel guilty if they don't, maybe, or quite possibly people who have come to feel a genuine connection with the recipient of their ministrations and respond.

In my experience the institutional systems that churches develop create about as many problems as they solve, not the least of which is creating the illusion that responsiveness -- concern, compassion, shared joy, etc. -- happen automatically, because there is a system in place. For my money, give me one person who has genuinely missed me or is glad to see me over 100 who have been assigned to shake my hand or follow up with a phone call.

No institution -- be they unions, fraternal organizations, the Rotary Club or even the church -- has the DNA to care. Only people can manage to do that.