Facing the Self-Sufficient
How do you pastor someone who doesn't see a need for God?
Mark Buchanan
January 1, 2004
Several years ago I did a wedding on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, a one-hundred-kilometer stretch of coastland where a wild shoreline of sandy coves and pebble beaches and rocky shoals meets a puzzlework of primeval rain forest and fjordlike escarpments. The coast is dotted with small villages where prawn trappers, beachcombers, artists, and eccentrics dwell.
The wedding ceremony took place far above the clawlike curve of a rock harbor, in a wooden Anglican church built into a cleft of the steep mountain slope.
The inside of the church was decorated in wildflowers gathered from the hills and garden flowers garnered from local homes. The bride wore a simple but elegant white dress, the groom his own suit. The service had a beautiful simplicity to it, like something hand-carved.
The reception was held outdoors on property the bride's family owned, a promontory that jutted out into a harbor, with a large lawn bordered on two sides by rocky shore and blue-green sea. Sailboats crisscrossed out where the breeze cut unhindered over the water. That same breeze, gentle and fragrant, braided its way over us. The guests gathered on the lawn. Laughter. The ping of crystal. The smell of Cajun shrimp frying over hickory coals. The couple, Edenic in their joy, moving among us, speaking and receiving benediction.
The day was perfect.
There I met a young philosophy student, perhaps in his early twenties, tall and healthy and good-looking. He asked if I really believed all that religious stuff I had spouted back up at the church. I said I did. He smirked. I asked him what he believed.
"I tried your religion for a while," he said, "and I found it's just a burden to carry. You know what I've figured out? Life justifies living. Life is ...
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