It occurred to me recently that I had entitled this blog, "So a Presbyterian walks into a bar..." and the url contains the words "Bing in a bar," so I thought perhaps I should explain the whole "bar" thing. I love bars! All the way from honky tonks to trendy wine and martini bars, I love bars. I will not comment on the current craze of "oxygen bars" because that is not a proper bar. I have been in bars on this continent, the United Kingdom and the European continent. I often tell people, only half jokingly, that I spent some of my best formative years in bars.
Let me clarify one thing about bars...proper bars are not the places where one is encouraged to run up a tab while waiting for a table in a restaurant in the adjacent space. Those are just dollar traps. A proper bar is one where people go to sit, engage their neighbors at the bar, banter with the bartender and not wait on anything except time to leave and go home. A real bar does not have speakers blaring the words, "Smith, party of 4, your table is ready." A real bar may be loud, but the noise comes from the latest game on the TVs or from a band or jukebox, although I guess there are not a lot of jukeboxes left these days.
Why bars? Mostly because in many ways they are a combination of barometer and high temple of our culture, and our culture interests me. It doesn't interest me in the sense that I want to fall prey to popular culture, but I want to know what popular culture is and where it is going so that I and others can interact with it and bring the Gospel to bear on it. People talk in bars like they talk nowhere else. They will speak loudly and clearly on just about anything and let their opinions fall where they may.
In a previous pastorate in Florida, I learned that bars can be good evangelistic tools. When I had a wife and/or her children coming to church without the husband and/or father ever darkening the door, I would sometimes ask the wife what her husband's favorite bar was. Then I would call him and offer to buy him a beer there. The silences on the other end of the phone when "the pastor" suggested meeting in a bar and having a beer were priceless! Those meetings resulted in some good friends and some coming to know of their salvation by faith in Christ alone.
I am not suggesting that all Christians should run to the nearest bar and take a seat. Many will not be comfortable there, many will look out of place there, and many have scruples against bars where alcohol is consumed. Me? I'm Presbyterian, so bars are fine for me. I take to heart the Apostle Paul's exhortation to not be drunk with wine, and I believe that non-drunken consumption is fine.
I have met doctors, lawyers, prostitutes, well-dressed homeless men, not so well-dressed scholars, other pastors, believers, non-believers, atheists, agnostics, those celebrating various forms of "spirituality" and even a Holocaust survivor at a bar at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Fascinating conversation, that one.
I have a few rules for myself, particularly when meeting people at their request. No bars with nude dancers of any sort, no staying too long and breaking Paul's exhortation, and no bars where someone has been recently killed. Other than that, I am in. Just name the place and time.
If you have any favorite bars, or favorite happenings in a bar, let me know about them. Like I said, I love bars!
