The Thanksgiving Story - How a Country or Church Begins Sets Its DNA - Missional Thought of the Day

[James Nored]

Hello all. I hope that you are having a great Thanksgiving! Becki and I invited four different families to join us for Thanksgiving that we thought might not have a place to go. One family had a sick child, another had a sick dog, another did have family to get together with, and the last would have come except that we asked them after they had bought all of their food.

So, we did try to follow Christ's teachings about inviting people when we have a "banquet." I think those that we invited still appreciated us asking. After all, who wouldn't want to eat Thanksgiving with us?!!!

I am trying not to overeat this year, though I had already gained two pounds yesterday just in anticipation of eating a lot. When I read that the Pilgrims actually fasted when they ate their second Thanksgiving meal, that kind of threw a wrench into my anticipated gluttonous feast.

I'm not sure that my fasting would actually help feed anyone else, but it is supposed to be a really spiritual practice. So I'm considering starting to fast on Thanksgiving in 2025. It takes me a little while to do that whole transformation thing. (My waistline, on the other hand, has been transforming for quite some time.)

Speaking of the Pilgrims, I was driving around yesterday, and I turned the radio to Rush Limbaugh (please spare me the hate mail), and I heard him tell the "true story" of Thanksgiving. It boils down to this. According to Rush, the Pilgrims were not saved by the Indians--they were saved by capitalism. They came over to the US originally with a "commune" type of arrangement, where all of the settlers shared their food with everyone. But William Bradford saw that this was not working, so he gave each settler their own plot of land to work. Capitalism was born and saved the day, as each person, motivated by self-interest, worked hard to provide for themselves.

Whether or not this tells the full story, it is clear that the Protestant and Puritan work ethic, and a belief in capitalism, individualism, and freedom is built into our country's mythos. This is why, whether right or wrong, our current president's attempts to institute things such as government run health care and other government initiatives have met so much resistance.

You see, how a country begins has a tremendous shaping affect upon a nation. Alan Hirsch makes this point. He contrasts the beginning of the US--when the Pilgrims came for religious freedom and got down on their knees, kissed the ground, and thanked God--to the beginning of his country, Australia. Australia was populated by the English, who sent their prisoners there. When these prison ships arrived, they burned the ships and had a giant orgy. This is an entirely different mythos. This is why America, despite its religious decline, will long maintain a spiritual vibrancy, and why Australia will be secular as a starting point for a long time.

America is an interesting mix of capitalism, individualism, spiritual vibrancy, and freedom. (Sometimes, unfortunately, Christians uncritically embrace American values as being entirely Christian values.) This is the prevailing culture, and it would therefore be difficult to dramatically change the country away from the principles. Anything that moved the US away from this would probably be short-lived, due to a crisis. When the crisis went away, the nation would likely swing back to its roots.

But this post is not really about the US. I'm using this as an analogy for churches. You see, how a church was begun, or at least its mythos about how it began, is deeply embedded in the church. To change a culture of a church, to lead a church from being say, inward focused to outward focused, from primarily attractional to primarily missional, is very, very difficult. It might be prompted by a crisis, such as declining membership or generational loss. But as soon as the crisis seems to be gone or the missional leader leaves, the church will very likely swing back to its original DNA.

This is why church planting is so necessary. We should not write off established churches. They do much good, and I have benefited greatly from them. They helped nurture my faith, they are a great blessing to so many--and they pay my salary! But we need churches whose DNA starts out missional, and that continually seek to swing back to being missional.

Well, that's my missional thought for this very special day.

Enjoy your Thankgiving!