Friday
Jun252004
Blessed are the disillusioned
Friday, June 25, 2004 at 10:03AM
I was pleased with yesterday's discussion on church attendance. It stayed pretty civil, which is amazing. I want to respond to two reactions I saw. One is, "This may be true of many churches, but mine is good. You should try it out." I actually deleted someone's plug for their church, complete with an invitation. I'm honestly filled with hope, because there are really good churches out there who are trying to live Kingdom values rather than just enlarging their territory (sorry, Jabez). However, I heard Ron Martoia challenge this thought at Velocity Culture. So what if your church is going great? You're part of a larger body, and as a whole, that body is not too healthy in North America. We can't afford to think the problem's solved just because it's solved for us. The second reaction I saw was something like this: "If you're disillusioned, it's your fault." I know this is true of some people, but I don't think that's entirely fair in this discussion. The issue under discussion is not style or popularity or something minor. Some are concerned that the church today is preaching a different Gospel. That's a serious charge, and it can't be made or dismissed lightly. I hope we can wrestle with this issue instead of urging people to just file back into the pews and be happy. There's a lot at stake. By the way, if you haven't read LT's paper Words or Power: What Fuels the Church?, you may want to check it out. It's a long read (about 50 pages) but it's a good one.
Reader Comments (8)
To church or not to church...that's the question that first led me to this world of blogging. I surely don't have the answer. However, I'll tell you that it's just not working for me anymore. Showing up from 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. and "doing" church has become sickening. I desperately desire to worship, to fellowship and to study the word of God. It seems as if so much energy goes into the planning of the worship service that sometimes the purpose gets overlooked. I could go on and on but I won't. I have a recent post that's titled, "Why haven't you been in church?" I went "on and on" there!
Why did you delete George's invitation to his church? Did you see this as inappropriate?
Hey Jacob: I thought about keeping it at first, and I wasn't really offended by it, but in the end I decided I didn't want the comments section to be about attracting people to a particular church.
But it may have been part of the solution to get some of your "disullusioned" readers back into the fellowship of a healthy well balanced local church...
Yea, that's what I was hoping for. I'll just have to start up my own blog:)
I've been following the posts and the comments about church attendance with interest. I grew up in church and used to be on the staff of one. At the moment, I fall into the non-church going camp. I certainly can't speak for every Christian who doesn't go to church, but I would like to make a request to church goers on behalf of myself and my non-church going Christian friends. Please don't assume that you know why we're not in a church on Sunday morning or that our lack of attendance automatically means that we're not serious about our relationship with God or don't want accountability or something. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I and some of my circle of friends stopped going to church BECAUSE we wanted to find God, not because we didn't. Their stories are not mine to tell, and mine won't fit in the comments section, but the common theme is being crazy desperate for some redemption and healing and having to look for that outside of the institutional church because most churches are not a safe place for broken people to tell the truth about themselves - especially when the church has been the thing that has done some of the breaking. I know that my alienation from the church is not ideal, but it's the best I can do right now. I am humbled and blessed by the gut-level honesty and acceptance and desire to do good of my friends and encouraged by the strange and painful ways that the Spirit is healing me at this stage of my journey. If you've found a faith community that encourages and nurtures you and helps you find God - that's great. I wish all churches were like that. Most aren't, so if you could extend some grace to those of us with a different experience, we would gratefully appreciate all the mercy we can get. We already know we need it.
The criteria we use to judge ourselves and our churches is very important. The Mormons tell people to pray about Joseph Smith and the Mormon Gospel. They further instruct that the Spirit will comfirm the truth with good feelings. Some people pray, get the good feelings, then become Mormons. Evangelical Christians might object by saying that good feelings are hardly an adequate litmus test for truth. The church does the same thing in a different way. People believe their church is good because they judge their church by certain criteria: engaging preaching, nice facilities, nice programs, lots of people etc... I honestly believe we are deceiving ourselves. Some of the things I think really matter are the gospel that is being preached, the humility and faithfulness of leaders, the character of the people, biblical knowledge, the supernatural influence of God. I work at a bible college and I see the kind of people that our churches and youth ministries are producing. Most miserably fail the bible content exam that all first years take in the first month. I did an open ended survey of what they thought the gospel was. Very few could articulate much more than "accept Christ in to your heart". I'll readily admit that there are those that impress me. What church they come from isn't usually a factor. What family they come from often is. Recent converts to the faith can also be impressive. It is not uncommon for people who have been Christians for 2-3 years to beat life long church goers in the bible content exam. The church is more people than programs/structure, but in our context you end up with both. The goal of creating an institution is to facilitate life change and enable the body of Christ to do its thing. What I often see in these kinds of discussions are people who are in institutions that accomplish very little life change accusing people who are accomplishing real change of abandoning the church. In reality many institutions have abandoned the church in their obsession for institutional success.
"Some of the things I think really matter are the gospel that is being preached, the humility and faithfulness of leaders, the character of the people, biblical knowledge, the supernatural influence of God." AMEN to that!! Jacob.