John Fischer The Catch

“You mean this whole time, all I had to do was click my darn heels together?”

It was only fitting that we would find it in a flea market of all places, full of just about everything you could think of that you didn’t need. It was a button with a picture of Dorothy and a shocked look on her face with the caption: “You mean this whole time, all I had to do was click my darn heels together?”

It often comes as a bit of a surprise how much truth there really is in fiction and fantasy. I believe that’s because God has embedded the truth deep into our DNA and whether we acknowledge it as truth, or as coming from Him, it doesn’t seem to matter — it keeps coming out anyway. We can’t help it.

That’s why it’s the same for Dorothy as it is for all of us. When we finally discover the way home, we find out it’s really quite simple, and the means to get there has been with us all along.

The prodigal son discovered he’d had it all along back at his father’s house. All he needed was to turn around and go home. When you come home to Christ it’s not some great departure that requires much learning and restructuring of your thinking. You don’t have to go to a 12-week course to learn this. You don’t even have to go through detox. You just turn around and get home to the truth that’s been with you all along. It’s the Holy Spirit who’s been pulling on your chain your whole life anyway. You’re just finally coming home to it. That’s why we call it the Gospel of Welcome.

“Welcome back to what you knew was right from the start.” In fact, sometimes it’s this kind of thing that keeps some folks away; it’s just too darn easy. They want to have to do something to earn it — to get themselves somewhere on their own power. We want the answer to be something that makes us smart or clever or powerful — something not just anyone can access. That’s what the Pharisees wanted, an exclusive religious club. They wanted heaven with the riffraff outside. Jesus switched the tables on them. Heaven was for riffraff. If you aren’t riffraff, you won’t get in, and you certainly won’t like it there if you could. And that’s just what happened. When Jesus announced who the kingdom of God was really for, they weren’t interested. They stayed on the outside, convinced that Jesus was wrong about the kingdom.

Meanwhile the rest of us are standing around in stocking feet, holding our shoes in wonder and amazement, saying, “You mean all we ever needed to do was just believe in Jesus?” Yep. That’s it. Welcome home, Dorothy.

The Catch of the Day is excited and humbled to be launching its first ever membership campaign, 3 Clicks and We are Almost Home.

A Catch Membership means greater involvement for all of us. It means there are a significant number of you who want to see the Catch succeed in its Gospel of Welcome as a door-opening outreach, peopled by a community of believers eager to be marketplace Christians.

You have always been there. Record numbers of Catch citizens banded together as recipients of our message and ministry and to claim victory over a man’s ill intent to shut down our ever expanding ministry. You voted with your pocketbooks when our home was threatened and when a specific need arose. You have been the ones who have been eager participates in our various causes including the Isaiah House, a home for women without homes. You have gone out of your way to provide us with your good ideas and insights. You have shared with us your stories, stories that connect us all in our all too human experiences.

To be honest, you have overwhelmed us by telling us in such concrete ways what the Catch has meant to you in the past and how important it is to you to see the ministry as a part of your future. This is what has given us confidence to move forward in planning a membership campaign by electing eleven Catch members to lead us into this new phase of our journey as a virtual community.

The Membership Committee represents our Catch community in their assessment of the need, defining the objectives and setting the goal. Further, they individually stretched their personal commitments to present to you not only their best thinking but their personal commitment when asking you to join them as Catch members to sustain and secure the ministry today and into our future together.

On behalf of this community of members, we are asking you to accept their challenge in securing the commitment of 350 members within the next two weeks. That is quite a stretch for such a young community as we are. Yet the goal is one that I believe we can secure provided we work to encourage each other over the next few weeks to participate.

Members of the committee recommend the easiest way to become a member is to click on the shoes, which will take you to our monthly giving page where you can click on the amount you are most comfortable with, and pay electronically from any major credit or debit card account, including PayPal.  If you prefer, you can ask your bank to create electronic checks to be sent monthly or, of course, you can send to the Catch Ministry your personal check monthly. Whatever questions you may have, don’t hesitate to write to us in care of the Membership Committee and Marti or I or someone from the committee will be happy to get back to you.

Join us today in our 3 Clicks and we are almost home campaign. Your first click begins here:

“As rational as I like to pretend I am, I know that I am not ruled by reason. Looking back I recognize that many of my choices were choices of passion, neither governed by logic nor common sense. Many of these were good choices, though not all of them were. But taking stock of my life so far, I do not wish I had been more logical. I do sometimes wish I had been more passionate.” – Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal would have loved the Catch. He was a first century Christian seeking to be a compassionate voice of reason in the seventeenth century marketplace of which he was a participant. His “reasonings” are still considered to be some of the finest pages in French prose ever written. In his famed Pensées, Pascal surveys several philosophical paradoxes: infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity-seemingly arriving at no definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace (a rather apt description of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, I would say).

We follow reason because we are reasonable. We leave reason off when it can no longer serve us. So Pascal’s conclusions of humility, ignorance and grace do not mean that we should therefore be forever stupid. It just means we realize our minds cannot take us all the way to where we want to go, although they can get us part of the way there, and for that they are useful.

Pascal would have been a great Catch member because he was taking part in the conversation of his culture. He had already engaged his culture in the areas of mathematics and physics; he later used some of the same arguments he found in science to discuss religion, philosophy, and ultimately, belief in God. He made some of the most lasting arguments on the existence of God ever penned, but not from the place of clergy. Had we the cultural definitions we have today laid over on the culture of Pascal’s time, I am convinced his books would not be considered Christian books, nor would he be considered a Christian minister. Certainly not a pastor or priest. He was a prominent scientist and philosophical thinker. He would have been considered a spokesperson in secular society. He would have been a regular on Larry King, one Larry would have called upon to get a believer’s perspective. He was engaged in the seventeenth century marketplace; and he used that platform to openly develop and even wrestle with his faith.

In like manner, we seek to be engaged in the twenty-first century marketplace, explaining and living out our relationship with God in terms relevant to the discussions of our day. We read the Bible and the newspaper at the same time, and not the news as delivered by our own Christian version of the media, mind you (there would have been no equivalent to a Christian rendering of the current culture in Pascal’s day), but by secular society. We are where we live, and we live in the world, and as long as the world is our address, we will listen, observe, and compassionately engage it, not to win a culture war, but to win the hearts, minds and souls of those for whom Christ died.