The Unknown Churchman
I have a confession to make. I’m not a big fan of people in general, on occasion and in small doses, I love a gathering of friends, but to be honest most of the time I would rather spend my time in the workshop or in a good book. I know I am not alone, maybe you feel the same, like if you hear one more “Hey brother! How are you?” Conversation, where they call you brother only because they can’t remember your name. Or if must bear one more small talk session about sports or the weather, you are going to chuck it all and go live in a cave somewhere.
There is a reason we dislike these conversations, if they can even be called that, in many cases, they are the result of guilt, or trying to fill the silence, rather than the result of genuine curiosity, or care. We want to be known as loving and want to practice that unity and friendship thing, but we don’t really know how to do that as we pass each other in the hallway, or in the minute and a half before the church service starts. The American culture is afraid of silence, it makes us feel like we are wasting time, or that we should be doing something to be moving us forward. Silence also leaves us alone with our own thoughts, which can be a scary place if you are not happy with who you are and the way your life is going. So, we fill the silence with anything we can think to say, which is often shallow, because we haven’t taken the time to come up with depth and meaning, because that would mean setting in silence for a time before speaking.
Church is the number one place I have this type of interaction. This is because we have no practical necessity of deeper relationship. I see this person sitting across the room from me for 30 minutes each week, and pass each other in the hallway, but outside of that there is no goal for working together, and we have no idea about the other person’s life, so there is no common ground to get excited about. At least at work, you know what the other person’s role and function is and you can go to them for resourcing or assistance, and you get to see them as them, not just all gussied up and on their best behavior. Church fosters these shallow conversations, because we feel like this is church, we should be talking about “spiritual things” or nothing at all and since many of us are not really sure how to talk of “spiritual things”. We decide to talk about nothing, it’s just too bad we decide to use so many words to do it.
The Heart of the matter is this. God calls us to be unified, with our brothers and sister in the faith and to love each other and build each other up. But we don’t even know each other. I have another confession; I have attended a church gathering for months where I didn’t know the name of a single person other than the pastor. I knew his name only because he kept referring to himself in the third person his name was on the bulletin and sign out front. Many people go through years in this condition. They fill a seat, because that is what they are supposed to do. But they really don’t know anyone.
I blame both the people and the structure of the gathering. People often yield to the sinful flesh, and that is why God’s mercies are made new every morning. We are lazy. We don’t want to do more than we have to unless we can see an immediate benefit to ourselves. And we prioritize comfort over, connection. We would rather be passive observers than active participants in our faith. The system of church we have now accommodates those desires.
When I was young, I would run through the woods on the farm, sometimes for fun, sometimes I was hunting, sometimes I was chasing an old cow, but I realized that I would chose the path of least resistance, around briar patches and up ridges almost automatically and often doing that would lead me to a cow path or animal trail, where the creatures knew the easiest path, the default path, it was an exciting realization, because it felt like I was working in sync with God’s design of the woods. It is in our nature to do the easy thing. And this saves us a lot of trouble, after all when we push on the “pull” side of a door and it won’t open, we don’t just keep pushing on it because we know it might break, we take the difficulty as a sign that we are working against the design of the door. And so, we change our strategy and try pulling the door instead. The trick is that when we meet with resistance, we must distinguish if it is the result of foolishness, working against God’s design or of wisdom; working with God’s design and there is just a bunch of rubble from the fall that we must push through. We can distinguish, using what we know of God’s nature, and His commands for us from the Bible. If He commanded it, then it is wisdom to follow. We can also ask the helpful question of “What would it have been like in the garden?”.
It is obvious from the scripture that we are supposed to be unified in a body of believers that meet regularly for celebration, instruction, encouragement, building each other up, worship, and pushing each other on to good works. Since this is the case, the resistance that we feel must be trying to push through the rubble of the fall. Which means it is all the more important, since in pushing past the sin and destruction of isolation, sloth, and division, we get to live more like the Kingdom of God knowing that this is God’s will that we pray for on earth as it is in Heaven.
How do we manage to push through the rubble? It seems like a mountain. When everyone is already well entrenched in their rut. How can we move past the small talk of anonymous church attendance and on to unity? Two things need to change, we need to redesign the way we do church and we need to change the attitude from one of consumption to one of contribution.
The maxim: your system is perfectly designed for the results you are getting. applies well in the situation of the church. What are the components and factors at play in our system that cause it to yield these results? The components are the people, the place, the format, and the expectations and attitudes.
Our biggest problem is that we have let the culture of the world influence the way that we do church instead of letting the Kingdom of God manifested in the church go on to transform the world. You do things differently in the Kingdom. In the following blogs, I will outline some difficulties the church is facing in mixing the world with the gathering and I will allude to some options for addressing them. They will be elaborated on in further blogs.
The world says busy is good, that if you are busy or at least look busy that you are valuable and important, but in the kingdom, we are valuable and important because we are made by God in his image and valued so much that He paid the price of dying on the cross for us. In the Kingdom you don’t worry about tomorrow, since each day has enough trouble, you don’t have to rush all the time to please God. In fact when we slow down we demonstrate trust in Him and take time for the eternally important work of fellowship and edification.
In the church meetings we re-enforce what the world says, by filling all the time with business and busyness. Even in the most beneficial time set aside for discipleship, Sunday school, we have come to disregard where people are at and what they need in their life and stick to a regimented reading from a curriculum. Filling the time at the expense of discipleship and unity. It is the same throughout the meeting: now we will sing the first second and fifth verse of three songs. Now we will shake hands for 45 seconds, now we will be generous with our money for 25 seconds. Now we will pray for no more than one minute, now a professional will lecture you on an infinitely important topic for 25 to 30 minutes, now we have the time it takes to sing three verses for you to make the decision to be saved or not. And now we can shake hands as you leave the building, because it’s time for lunch and the guy who locks the building wants to go eat just like you.
I don’t think any of these things are bad in themselves, (apart from skipping the third and fourth verse. There are some great third and fourth verses out there!) but when we call this church. It does not meet the basic requirements of being united in love and building each other up.
Imagine you are going to spend some time with your friends, so you decide to go ice skating, but once you get there you find an event that is planned out and directed. You spend five minutes, practicing a spiral formation, two minutes spinning, one minute giving to local skate program, and then you sit down for 30 minutes to listen to someone talk about skate theory. You would be disappointed that you did not get to spend more time with your friends or more time skating and it is questionable if you would have gotten better at skating if you would have just spent the whole time with your friends helping you and you helping them. We need unstructured time to have individual edification. The greatest scientific breakthroughs happen when you have multiple scientists talking or working together freely bringing their one work and perspectives, not in the classroom or lecture hall.
The world also teaches that we are to be self-sufficient. This is an attitude that stems from pride. Especially in the United States where freedom and independence have been idolized. We tell ourselves that we are to be independent, because others will slow us down or if we need help then we are weak or we have a character issue.
So, we bring this mindset into the gathering, each person puts on a show of having it all put together, and those who need help won’t share because, they don’t have the space or relationship, but also because they want to be seen as strong and capable.
Though our culture has shifted dramatically in recent years, where we now have a significant population that believes the system is supposed to take care of their needs. It is evidenced just how perverse sin is in that a person will be lazy and rely on the government for their livelihood, but are too proud to confide their need to their brother and be unified as Christ commanded. One way we can combat this is to build in time on Sunday for people to really talk at depth, it is more difficult to keep up appearances the longer you are around other people and it becomes even more difficult when you are working on something together. And almost impossible when you are working on something together in each other’s homes. If we as a church were regularly in each other’s homes, it would bring all our pride down to a reasonable level, when you see a person in their own home, it is one step closer to seeing them as God sees and it is an encouragement to them to have a better home life and it is humbling for us to be someone’s guest and be served. This is why God called us to practice hospitality, it clears the way of all pretense, calls us to better lives, and builds truth into the body.
The next problem comes with the sermon itself. The sermon though varied in it’s content sends the same message week to week: The preacher is the expert and you are not, and not only are you not qualified to teach others, you are not even qualified to study yourself, or that the way you learn about God is to have an expert tell you. Either way it takes the ability and responsibility away from the individual along with the motivation to be engaged. If I will never have a need to teach others, why learn? It is this guy’s job to know all this stuff I can just refer people to him. I’ve got my salvation, that’s all I need. Therefore, if the layman in the church attempts evangelism it consists of “inviting someone to church” not actually sharing the gospel. By delegating the responsibility of our spiritual growth to another, we become lazy, entitled, and we bear the identity that the sermon assumes of ignorance. Or we begin to resent the fact that we are being told week after week the things we already know and either stop attending or tune out altogether, especially tempting options for men who tend to be more proud and less verbal.
There is a place for sermons in church gatherings, but I would argue that it is not every week and especially not as the focal point of the gathering, I do not believe the sermon although present is biblically central. The main reason, we should move the sermon to the periphery is because it does not accomplish the right goals for the church, but I will delve deeper into this topic in a later blog.
Society has an unhealthy focus on the individual. This is evident in the constant appeal to the emotions we see in all the “what do you want?” questions we have growing up. “What would you like to be when you grow up, what do you want to eat, what superpower would you want to have, what is your favorite color?” These questions would have seemed ridiculous to our ancestors who faced, one possibility to take up the craft of their father, and to eat the food that they had, and the others were just pointless diversion that had little practical use. There attitude considered the fact that other people live in the world too.
Today we have made the inner self god over all, even to the point where we ignore truths of reality and declare something as true simply because we feel it is true. The Bible talks of those who’s god is their bellies. We are them. We let our feelings and emotions; dictate how we live. This is foolishness, because a wise man looks to reality, God, and the external world, aka truth, to see the way to live according to the pattern God established.
The culture fosters our emotions and emotional response because an emotion driven people is easy to control. If I always give in to my impulses, I will buy the fast-food hamburger on the commercial that looks so good, even though I know that I could go to the store, buy the ingredients and make three hamburgers, of better taste, that would be more healthy, and better quality, for the same price.
If I give into my emotions, I will vote not for the betterment of the county for this and future generations, but for what immediate benefit I can get from a particular politician, making my vote easy to buy. And fulling the decline of our country and economy.
We have been isolated from others, penned up in some cubical like a diseased cow that must be kept from the heard. This is by design (man’s or devil’s, I know not, neither does it matter) if we are alone, we are easy prey for those who would manipulate and exploit. The father it the family (the provider of strength, protection, leadership, and discipleship) was taken out of the home and put in a factory or cubical, the children were taken from the home, and split into separate classrooms, the mother was left alone at home for a while, but now she is driven into the workforce too. And finally in the few hours we are all together at home in the evening or weekend, we are submerged in screens. A world of constant instant gratification and distraction. Where we can receive our “regularly scheduled programming”.
The strategy of separation and isolation is even more evident and extreme in recent years. Everyone is told that we can not be friends of we hold different views, have different skin tone, have different culture, etc. and so this nation and it’s Christians have been even further fractured and the government response to covid-19 has been a direct attack on Christian unity by stating fist that we are not allowed to gather and second that if we do gather we must do so in small groups and remain six feet apart. But this is not the most divisive problem. There are so many strong opinions about what the correct response to the virus and accompanying restrictions that is has effectively shattered the church. Some believe the entire thing is a hoax and we should continue life as normal, others say that we are all going to die from the virus and no one should leave their homes ever, and if they do, they should wear 12 masks and gloves and bathe every fifteen minutes and gargle hand sanitizer. Then you have everything in between. Christians, especially in the Bible belt, have been one of the most homogeneous political groups in the country, but the beliefs about covid-19 have done more to scatter the church than any persecution we could have faced. It is a devious attack. Everyone has some fear of dying, but Christians are to model Christ in giving up our lives for others. It is for this reason that Christians have ministered to those dying of the plague or lepers when no other person would help for fear of dying. But with the way covid-19 is portrayed now, we have a convenient excuse for giving into our selfish fear of death by saying that we are really caring for others because we might be unknowingly transmitting the disease. They are playing off both our fear and our virtue to keeping us in isolation.
The attitude of isolated individualism has been taken on by the church. It is almost laughable to say that the church is unified, with our constant bickering over points of doctrine among the clergy and the fact that the only activities we engage in together are to sit in the same building for an hour each week and race each other to see who can get a table at the restaurant for lunch.
In the garden of Gethsemane, just before He was taken to be killed, Jesus prayed that we would be unified in Him as He is in the Father. It is that important that Jesus was praying for it in His last hours before death. How are we to gain unity? Firstly, be in Christ, secondly, be in proximity, thirdly, be on mission. There can be no unity unless we are bound together in Christ. He is our life, and He is the head of the Church, it is from Him that we get our mission, and direction. In following Him we will be united in aim. But proximity, though it seems so simple is so often overlooked. How can we be exhorting, edifying and equipping each other if we never have actual relationships. The oft half quoted Heb_10:25 “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” Points out that we are to have a purpose of building each other up when we gather not just to gather.
What is the solution to this isolation in the church? I have three suggestions to try, in order of difficulty and effectiveness that I will elaborate on in further posts. First spend more time in a setting where members feel at liberty to talk and share. Second, spend time in each other’s homes, third work together helping each other to set and accomplish Kingdom goals. These are not a cure-all and they would take intentional direction and leadership, but the result would be a group that had no masks and deep integration into each other’s lives.
One final way that the culture has mixed with church gathering in deadly fashion is by adopting an attitude of entertainment. Rather than community. The idea is to show up, “be fed” and go home. Without contributing one whit to the betterment of others. It is a selfish idea and we are blindly fooling ourselves to say this is what God meant for the body to be doing. Many things have contributed to this assumption, In large part it is the format of the meeting. The only difference between the church and the theater is that instead of engaging stories and elaborate scenery, we have the homily. But the expectation of involvement is the same. We are a culture of the amused. We spend most of our waking life in front of a screen consuming some form of media, looking for a burst of shallow emotion. Not learning or lesions or betterment, just a laugh, or something exciting, but we don’t want these things in our real life, because that is risky. And our culture is extremely risk averse.
I know that some of my thoughts sound harsh and judgmental, but I feel they reflect the standard mode of doing church in my experience. Of course, different gatherings reflect different problems in different proportions, If you have experienced something better, I am very glad for you. I hope this still holds value for you as you seek to build up your fellows in God’s church.
