Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Do you feel too small or too shy to get out there?

Let me tell you a story.

I am a fairly shy person. In my early 20s, I was certainly not given to drawing attention to myself in public. But my first job after college was as a union organizer. It involved a lot of talking to people and an occasional trip out into the world to make some noise.

That’s how I ended up in a Home Depot outside Houston, Texas, in the door and window department, with a bullhorn and three workers from a Dallas door and window factory. Our job was to make a little noise, and draw attention to the poor working conditions in the factories that sourced Home Depot’s products at the time.

Everything went pretty much according to plan. We found the doors and windows. We started to chant. We used the bullhorn. We were asked to leave the store. We did. We stood outside the store chanting. When the police arrived, we expected to be told to leave the property and to move on to the next store. We had been doing this all day. There are a lot of Home Depots in greater Houston.

When the police arrived, however, it was not the single squad car we were expecting. Half a dozen cars pulled into the parking lot, sirens wailing. In each car were four cops in riot gear, riding with the doors slightly open, ready to leap out.

Leap they did, and began to look around in increasing confusion. Finally, attention focused on our little group and our little bullhorn. “Where are the rest of you?” demanded one of the officers. We confessed that it was just us. The officer seemed irritated. “Where is the manager??” We didn’t know.

It turned out that the manager had called in a protest of at least one hundred people, shouting and making trouble all over his store. The police sergeant found him holed up in his office, waiting for the situation to come back under control. It seemed that he was so surprised by the chaos we created in the middle of a quiet afternoon that he genuinely believed he was under siege.

I don’t really recommend the bullhorn approach for getting out there as a church. I live in an area where there is a certain amount of bullhorn-based religion, and it’s not pretty.

But don’t underestimate the power of a very small number of people doing something unexpected. If public prayer is not part of the norm in your local environment -- and chances are it isn’t -- it won’t take a very large group to be noticed.

If noise is not your thing, try silence. A small, silent group, dressed in black and carrying a large wooden cross on Good Friday will be noticed almost anywhere. I tried that once in downtown Long Beach… thankfully no one called in the riot police.

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