New burger spot in Dallas draws hour-long lines

When I got up this morning, I didn’t expect to write an article on a restaurant that calls itself “Not a Damn Chance Burger,” or NADC Burger for short. Nor would I have expected a restaurant that sells only one kind of hamburger, fries, a cookie, and drinks to generate a cult following. But that’s what’s happened, and what I’m doing in response.

Owner and founder Neen Williams is a professional skateboarder. He and Michelin Star chef Phillip Frankland Lee set out to make the best hamburger they could for themselves. 

They settled on a simple formula: Texas Wagyu beef with cheese, sauce, jalapenos, onions, and pickles. When they started sharing it with friends, they were told they should sell their burgers. So they did and quickly gained a cult following.

When they opened their restaurant on August 15 in Dallas, customers waited up to an hour to get in. Williams explains: “Do the one thing you can do and do it the best you can do it and don’t worry about doing a bunch of other things.”

As my subtitle indicates, I’m not writing to promote NADC Burger or to claim to be a culinary expert. Rather, I see a principle here that relates to the church in America today, one of vital importance to our missional impact on our secularized culture.

Shocked by crowds in Cuba

When I read about the restaurant and its hour-long wait, my first thought was to wish that our churches had the same kind of crowds attending our worship services. Then my next thought was: But some do.

My first time in Cuba, I was shocked to see the multitudes who came for Sunday morning services. They crowded into the auditorium (what the church called the “temple”), overflowing its thousand-person capacity and standing in the aisles. Those who could not get in gathered outside near the open windows so they could hear what was happening.

This despite extremely adversarial conditions. Not only was the auditorium unairconditioned in the hot Cuban summer, but government informants were known to have infiltrated the crowd, ready to report on its activities to the Communist authorities. The service itself lasted nearly three hours; the congregation was on its feet in worship for most of it.

I saw the same thing when I was a summer missionary in East Malaysia: warehouse churches crowded to overflowing with worshipers. This in a Muslim country with a large Buddhist minority, both of which persecuted them for their faith. I witnessed one teenage girl’s baptism and took note of some luggage nearby; my interpreter explained that her father told her if she was ever baptized as a Christian, she could never come home again, so she brought her luggage.

It was this way at our beginnings as well: “More than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women” (Acts 5:14). Consequently, “the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7).

Nor was this merely a Jerusalem phenomenon. When Paul and Barnabas preached the gospel in Pisidian Antioch, “almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord” (Acts 13:44). By Acts 17, their movement had become so popular that, according to its critics, it had “turned the world upside down” (v. 6). Paul’s ministry in Ephesus reached so many people that “all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:10).

“God goes where he’s wanted”

What early Christians experienced and what Christians in many places of the world today are experiencing reminds us that the word of God is always “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). The same Spirit who “filled” and empowered early Christians is doing the same today.

Here’s the key: as Philip Yancey noted, “God goes where he’s wanted.”

A desperation for God always precedes a transformating relationship with him. God both warns and promises us: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).

By contrast, from Eli’s sinful sons who “lay with the women who were serving at the entrance to the tent of meeting” (1 Samuel 2:22) to clergy abuse scandals today, it is clear that religion is no guarantee of righteousness. And changed lives change the world.

When others see that we have what they want, they will want what we have.

People want to be forgiven for their mistakes and failures as much as when Adam and Eve committed the first sin. They want to know that they are loved and that their lives have meaning. They want to live in community and to serve with purpose. This is because we were made by God to love our Lord and our neighbor (Matthew 22:37–39).

And nothing but the gospel of Jesus Christ brings the transformation our souls long to experience.

“Do the one thing you can do”

Let’s close by remembering what Neen Williams advised: “Do the one thing you can do and do it the best you can do it and don’t worry about doing a bunch of other things.” The “one thing you can do” as a Christian is to know Jesus so intimately that your life and words make him known to the world. 

This was Paul’s “one thing” (Philippians 3:13–14). It can be ours today.

St. Augustine observed,

“To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.”

Do you agree?