{"id":1390,"date":"2019-02-28T19:23:26","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T19:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=1390"},"modified":"2019-02-28T19:23:26","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T19:23:26","slug":"rice-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=1390","title":{"rendered":"Rice Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend at (after) Mass, we heard the annual financial report for our church. The church, like a lot of people and organizations, is struggling to make ends meet these days. One of the charts presented during the presentation indicated that the church has something more than 500 members and during the last year, only a little over 300 contributed any<\/em> money to the church. That means that at least 200 didn’t contribute anything \u2014 not even a dollar. Not only did they not contribute, I\u2019m pretty sure they never attended, certainly not regularly.<\/p>\n

I don’t know that that makes our church unique in any way \u2014 it very well may be typical. People become members of a church for various reasons. Many people consider the church just one more place where they can go to have certain social, political and even physical needs met.<\/p>\n

In nineteenth-century China (and other parts of Asia) there was a name that was used for people who attended church because they were hungry for physical sustenance. It was known that Christian missionaries could provide food \u2014 primarily rice. So, people converted, were baptized and attended churches that had been started by the missionaries. They remained active members as long as their physical needs were met. But once their prospects improved through employment or help from family members, they drifted away from the church. Christian missionaries began calling them \u201crice Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course these \u201crice Christians\u201d had missed the whole point of going to church, but maybe we actually have rice Christians as \u201cmembers\u201d of our church. These people chose to join the church and become members for some reason \u2014 maybe their \u201creason\u201d is no longer valid, maybe the church no longer can fill their \u201cneeds.\u201d People tend to look for a church that has the \u201cright\u201d kind of worship, the \u201cright\u201d pastor or the \u201cright\u201d kind of people, that provides the \u201cright\u201d activities for their kids, does the \u201cright\u201d thing with financial contributions, etc. A lot of people seem to be looking something that will satisfy a particular need or sustain them physically. The church offers something that will sustain them spiritually \u2014 kind of like \u201csoul food.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure why I thought about this right now, except maybe to prove that I do pay attention in church, at least most of the time. But looking around at the attendance at our church this past weekend as compared to say, Easter and Christmas\u2026. maybe the \u201crice Christians\u201d didn\u2019t fade away in the nineteenth century.
\n\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend at (after) Mass, we heard the annual financial report for our church. The church, like a lot of people and organizations, is struggling to make ends meet these days. One of the charts presented during the presentation indicated … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1391,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions\/1391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}