It's all about the Hang

The worship director at our church is a great guy named Don whose favorite saying is “It’s all about the hang.”    What he means is that life is all about hanging out, being together, enjoying the company of other like-minded people. For Don, leading worship is as much the experience of believers being together before God as it music and prayers and sermons. Like the professional drummer he was in his other life,Don loves the informal jam session and the bull session after the gig as much as any “performance.” 

As Don’s friend (and boss) this means that I have on my team a great guy who is always reminding us that our being together is as important as whatever it is that we do together.  That God meets us in the “hang time” as much as in the ministry time.

In his book, The Connecting Church, Randy Frazee makes a similar point, writing that Christian community requires being around each other a lot, living near each other, spending time with each other.  In other words, for Christians to truly experience the depth of life that God intends for them, they not only have to hang around (see my last series of posts on the “Spiritual Discipline of Staying Put”), but they have to “hang out.” 

Now, of course, this is difficult for many of us.  We have a tendency to race from one event or activity (even spiritual events or activities) to another, barely stopping to wave to the Christians with whom we enjoy “fellowship.”  But can Christian community really come on the fly?

For the next few posts, I will be writing about the Spiritual Discipline of “the hang.” (Or for those who prefer more “serious” titles (consider this “The Spiritual Discipline of Proximity”).

Tomorrow I’ll write about how even someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with this—though I doubt he called it “the hang.”