To begin with, let me disclose that I do not know singer Lecrae, whose real name seems to be Lecrae Moore. I only became aware of him recently when I saw his name and some comments being discussed on social media. I was intrigued by what I was seeing, so I did a bit of searching around and found a clip from a podcast in which he was discussing the local church. He said, “People say, ‘I need to see you in church on Sunday!’ and I’m like, why? So I can be, like, one out of 2,000 people, and I don’t have to speak to a soul? So I can listen to a great message that I could have listened to at my house?”
By this point in the column, you are perhaps wondering what Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has to do with any of this.
It was this past Sunday morning, Dec. 3. The attendance at our morning worship was a bit lower than normal; the flu is running rampant right now. We still had a good crowd, though, which was a blessing. Mind you, our church has 235 active attendees, so a “good crowd” may not look quite to us like it does to others in larger towns, but I was still pretty encouraged.
In lots of small-town churches, fellowship time is still a thing. For us, right after the morning offering, a time of fellowship is called while the pianist continues to play. People spend about five minutes milling about, shaking hands, exchanging hugs and catching up. And in our church, it is normally a time when a bunch of little crumb-crunchers run up onto the platform to hug me, show me their new shoes or clothes (or, in some cases, their Batman mask — pastoring in a small-town church is pretty unique!) or tell me how their week went.
But on this particular day, a precious and shy little girl of about 4 years old came to the platform but did not climb the steps up onto it. She just stood there by herself for a bit as if she wanted to be noticed. So I came down the steps that she was standing beside, sat down on them and asked her how she was doing. She grinned from ear to ear and handed me her Rudolph stuffed animal.