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We just returned from our first cruise (a gift from our oldest son, Mark), the inside passage to Alaska. I won’t use this space to bore you with a travelogue, but I will tell you we had a fabulous time: sightseeing in Seattle before and after the cruise, visits to Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway in Alaska, each with its own highlights, and Victoria, B.C. 

The Ewellogy, as always, is about observations and lessons learned.

We were on the Star Princess, not the largest cruise ship out there, but plenty big enough: 17 decks, 1297 guest cabins, just 204 cabins fewer than the number of rooms in the Gaylord of the Rockies, the largest hotel in Colorado.

As I expected, the crew of our ship functioned like a well-oiled machine. There are two major divisions of the crew: the mariners responsible for the ship itself and the folks who ran the “hotel.” The mariners were largely invisible to us. I never saw the captain and only occasionally did I see an officer or a maintenance man walking around the ship. 

The hotel staff were a different story of course. They are everywhere. Housekeepers (“stewards”), chefs and their assistants, waiters at every venue serving food or drink, bartenders, baristas, “front desk” people, storekeepers, and a host of unseen staff as well. The ship had the look and feel of a luxury hotel.

When you think of it, the crew’s job is to create “holy moments,” not for themselves, but for us. They don’t know us. For the most part, they will never see us again, and yet their job is to serve…continually. The last sign I saw as I left the ship Sunday morning read something like:

All passengers will be on board by 3p. All crew must be on board by 2:30. We sail for Ketchikan at 4p.

In other words, less then 5 hours after we had breakfast in the Deck 14 buffet, they were serving lunch to the next group of passengers!

A number of years ago, there was a newspaper story about a church in Colorado Springs in which the church leadership made the point that their “customers” were not their own members. They said something like, 

Our job is not to serve our members. Our job is to teach our members to serve the community. The whole church is to be more like the employees at Walmart.

Today, I would say that the church would do well to see themselves as the staff of a cruise ship, not serving each other, but working together to serve the people in their environment—for them, the ship; for us, our neighborhoods, workplaces, and families. Perhaps, in addition to trips to Branson for seniors and ski trips for our youth, we need more mission trips—or, even better—more emphasis on the fact that we are on mission all the time.

For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. (Mark 10.45)

Do everything readily and cheerfully—no bickering, no second-guessing allowed! Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God. Carry the light-giving Message into the night so I’ll have good cause to be proud of you on the day that Christ returns. You’ll be living proof that I didn’t go to all this work for nothing. (Philippians 2.14 – 16, MSG)