Like nearly all other Americans, I commute to work. Each morning I slide into my car and trek eleven miles down south to my job. Since I live in Denver, that drive takes forty minutes. I avoid the interstate like the plague and turn from one street to the next within town to get to my destination. Besides the benefit of steering clear of the traffic inching down the interstate, I’m learning more about this city we’ve made our home.
Along the roads I drive—past a handful of Starbucks and Chipotles, delicious mid-century modern homes, and foggy golf courses dotted with early risers—I’ve come up with a game. Like counting cows in the country or watching out for VW Bugs in hopes of punching the nearest passenger, it helps pass the time. It’s not bovines or mini-buses that I’m looking for though; it’s churches.
I count churches and I’ve counted at least nine churches directly along my path, from the edge of Aurora to directly south of the city. Big churches next to their vast parking lots and small churches with colorful glass window. Even a synagogue and a mosque outline my twice-daily trek. There’s the Universalist church with their brand-new LED sign and modern architecture, a giant Nazarene church that takes up a whole block, and a Presbyterian church right across the street from it. There’s also a Catholic church with a towering statue of Jesus. He’s ivory-colored and holding his hands out as if to receive a gift. I wave to him and wonder how tall he really is close up.
Even before moving to Denver I heard this loose fact about its residents: the majority of individuals in the Denver metro-area remain “unchurched”—uninvolved (and probably uninterested) in a church community. It’s not that I believe the fact itself is wrong or misleading. There’s data to support it if you look for it. In Barna’s 2017 study of cities, Denver ranks as the 14th most “post-Christian” city in America, ranking higher in individuals confirming no belief in God and little to no involvement in church than LA or Las Vegas.
What I don’t understand though is why—day after day—I can count religious buildings like Starbucks. You cannot drive a mile without finding one and most often, you’ll find one across the street from another. If there’s so little belief, why are there so many buildings?
Apart from the sanctioned religious structures, one other building has stood out to me. It’s a small white house with blue shutters on the corner of a residential road; the side yard faces the busy main road that’s filled with cars every morning and evening. It looks like every vinyl-paneled house on that street, except for the blue sign between two wood posts in the front yard that reads, “Believe and Be Guided by Psychic Truth”, encircled by yellow stars. A commercial neon “open” sign rests in the window closest to my commute, implying this isn’t just a home, but a genuine place of business. I’ve never been to a psychic before, but it’s only the prohibition in Leviticus 19:31 that keeps me from visiting this one.
The curtains are always drawn in the mornings, so I’ve invented a mental image of who I think lives there. It’s an older woman who wears long flowy skirts like my favorite college professor and she sits in a highback wicker chair across from a sumptuous yellow velvet couch in the dimly lit living room. Her face is warm and inviting, but her gaze is unwavering. She speaks in low, hushed tones as if she’s trying to keep from disturbing the flames on the candles around the room with her breath. My drive time provides plenty of time to further imagine the smell of incense, the stack of tarot cards, and the feeling of her delicate hands upon mine as she’d discern the trajectory of my life from lines upon my palms.
I don’t believe she could actually tell the future. But if she’s a smart psychic, she would tell her clients there’s good in their future; that they’ll meet a lover soon or that what they’ve been wishing for will finally arrive or they’ll overcome an obstacle and find what they’ve been working towards. She’d tell them that good is on the way—it’s just around the corner. She would give them more than a fortune; she’d be giving them hope.
The kinds of people who go to churches or work in churches like I do think of themselves as truth-tellers. Some who are better than others at it. The worst of them are the type who focus on the truth that you, your life, and your desires (and probably not even your dog) don’t measure up to what it should be. They cast a gloom and doom picture for the future—of a forsaken generation and a nation walking in step with the red pitch-fork bearer himself. Truth might as well be synonymous with disapproval and doubt.
What if, instead, we were known as hope-tellers—bearers of actual good news that makes tomorrow feel more bearable than yesterday, or even today? Christians have taken ministry advice from the business world for so long, I don’t feel ashamed to look at the methods of a work-from-home psychic and wonder, “What could we learn from her if we do believe we have real truth and beyond that—real hope for others?”
I’m not advising we put signs in our front yard or neon ones in our windows, but if we did, would it be a false advertisement for good news? Do our homes exist as more than a place to live, but a place to invite, welcome, listen, and share with passer-bys? Maybe we need fewer churches only open on Sundays and more residences hustling hope throughout the week.
Despite spending a lot of time in church buildings, I haven’t known a great many of Christians to be hope-tellers. The ones I have met have been a salve to my soul, shamans on my journey with my own cross, and serious sellers of the free gospel because of the way they walk through this life. They aren’t peddlers of health and wealth from a gilded god of American invention. Despite good, bad, hard, and unlikely circumstances, they believe in a humble Jesus and they’re guided by an impossible hope. An eternal hope. A hope that might not include the partner or pension that a psychic might purport. They’re the people who maintain the refrain, “But I trust God” and they actually mean it.
I’m beginning to believe we don’t need more churches to reach the un-churched or the de-churched or the uninterested or the cynics. They already cover the metro map like a box of Cheerios spilled on the floor. This city—really every city—needs hope-tellers; people who will invite even strangers into their homes and whisper with their lives and hospitality and their words, “Believe and be guided by this real hope.”
