Lately, church culture has me wound up. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who sees the hypocrisy–but then again, most people I know who have left the church have brought it up.
As a kid, our family slid in and out of churches. Some were old fashioned, with a basement fellowship hall with kind but stern ladies, styrafoam cups of red koolaid and oatmeal cookies before Sunday school. At other times, we attended the local college ministry or met in the living room of a nursing home, rolling the residents’ wheelchair down the cold, stale halls to join us. We were non-committal–a reflection on my dad’s “question everything” philosophy. He was sincere in faith to the fault of his supposedly legalistic upbringing, seasoning every conversation with a distinct flavor of superiority. I didn’t know any different, and it was a fool’s endeavor to ask questions, even though I was always considering the whys. He taught me, wordlessly, to appoint myself judge in the courts of human affairs. As long as I kept my robe clean and remained unaffected by other people’s problems, I was on the straight and narrow path.
Although I hated walking into a new start-up church that was meeting in the old highschool gym, where our voices echoed and we sang awkwardly, huge fans drowning out our words, I knew we belonged. We were odd, and nothing was odder than walking into the school day six out of seven days of the week, setting up folding chairs, passing the communion tray in the same space where I regularly ate school lunch and pretended to be invisible.
It was a disjointed experience–turn on the Jesus on Sundays, then walk back into school on Monday and keep my thoughts to myself.
The very first time I visited a modern church–by this, picture a large, open auditorium, sound system, soft chairs, professional worship team–I was fifteen years old. I was touring with a summer music group (do not be in awe–there was never an audition, as the organizers were absolutely not judicious in acquiring singers) and it felt glorious. How ingenious to have stage lighting! How indulgent to use a sparkling restroom stocked with freebees and scented lotion! To sit on leather couches in the youth group’s very own game room and eat plates of spaghetti before taking the stage to “bless” the congregation with our choreographed musical!
I knew my dad hated this sort of thing, but I loved the idea of merging my teenage desire for meaningful relationships to fit in with the looming presence of God (and His ever burning disapproval of the world–the judge in me stood in solidarity with this notion).
The only thing that seemed to sit uneasy on my soul was the homogeneity of the church. All the cars in the parking lot were shiny and new. All the people were upper-class, well-dressed. The youth minister was cool, funny, and confident. The youth group itself was a handsome bunch of blemish-free, carefree teenagers with keys jangling in their pockets. They had the money and time and their parents’ blessing to seduce one another at Taco Bell after Wednesday night church meetings.
They didn’t look any different than the people on the outside of the church who didn’t need a god to satisfy their urge for morality. The impression was foreign to me, but it was incredibly attractive. I wanted a piece of it.
It was my introduction to the world of American Christian culture; heavy on consumerism, low on guilt. I got the feeling deep inside of me that the values didn’t measure up, but I was too enamored to care.
It has taken me awhile to sort it all out. I guess I’ve grown up. I came to the realization that my stick-in-the-mud dad was more right in his “question everything” philosophy than the “all is grace” hashtag that excuses every stray ignoble action. Maybe by God’s grace I was able to sniff out the fake.
Pretty much all of us good Christians like to secretly put restrictions on God. We like to sing things like I surrender all to you and Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee. But our hearts tag on sneaky little clauses, like if I can still make 200k or if we can still live in the neighborhood with highly rated schools and nice landscaping. We pray for all sorts of things and hope our Heavenly genie in a bottle will grant our wishes. We might even have good intentions when we begin, but our flesh is a tricky thing. It’s like a three year old–it wants what it wants, and it doesn’t like to be told no.
The thing is, we don’t see these clauses for the chains they are. We also like to sing the song, who can stop the Lord almighty? If we’re being honest, pretty much all of us are trying to stop the Lord Almighty, put Him on a leash. We want to protect our pension plan, preserve our vacation days, not get sick. We don’t want a rogue god doing just whatever He wants to do, playing us like pawns.
The disparity between following Jesus and maintaining security is a massive sinkhole. I think most American Christians are happy to dial back their faith in favor of the approval of the world. We’ve talked ourselves into this idea that responsibility and respectability are the crown jewels of the kingdom. Even the atheist, who says there is no God, will pat you on the back for counting your dimes and living such a careful life.
This is exactly the problem. No wonder we are confused.
The people we surround ourselves with tend to impact Who we choose to be our master. And as long as we seek to fit into the current mold of culture, as long as we keep our dusty Bible on the shelf, as long as we live exactly like the people around us we can avoid looking Jesus in the face. We are all very well the rich man–I speak of the American Christian. We arrogantly want our big churches, our almost-sincere words and pictures plastered on the internet to justify us. We don’t want to forfeit our comfortable complacency in the meantime.
This should rattle us no matter what side we fall on, that God isn’t joking. Our friendship with the world (and everything in the church that carries the same aroma) isn’t an Amish-friendship bread type relationship, but a pimping out of our souls.
Who was the Lord talking about when He referenced Isaiah–
“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me:
They worship me in vain;
Their teachings are merely human rules.”
(Matthew 15:8-9)
Does my need for independence, self-care, comfort–you name it–trump my life-as-a-living-sacrifice worship?
Privilege is the advantage of being able to look away and remain unaffected. Entitlement is the shoes it wears, the art of escaping reality. I hate to be the one to say it, but we are mostly all living, breathing, entitled brats.What troubles me most is our flagrant inconsistencies within the church. We want little more than a casual experience yet our expectations are extremely high. We require theater seats, flawless music, pats on the back. We’ll get riled up over the color of the walls or disrupted flow of service. We don’t readily admit it, but we are becoming (have become!) lovers of selves, not lovers of God. Do we realize we ourselves will be judged by the holy, righteous, God of love–even when our pencils want to erase the part about Him being holy and righteous? Has our scepticism so muddied our convictions? Has our pride so leveled our rationale? Are we just plain ignorant?
J. Vernon McGee articulates this, speaking of the attitude of today’s American Christian culture:
“‘Let’s do as little as we can, have as much fun as we can’…If you’re going to follow the middle of the road, remember to have plenty of money. And actually, I think, today the rich have moved to the middle of the road. That’s the ground that they want to take. They want to be liberal and they want to be conservative. It’s the middle of the road.”
(Thru the Bible Podcast, Ecclesiastes 10:11-11:10)
This is what is filling our churches, and God hates it because it mocks Him.
Christians, take note! We must not use entitlement as a security blanket. The church was not made for social ladders.
It blindly treads right into the dangerous tepid waters of the church in Laodicea. They were warned:
I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot or cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Revelation 3:15-18
If that doesn’t scream American church, I don’t know what does. Ours is a culture that values cheap grace because we don’t want to compromise on comfort. We don’t practice denial or abstinence in practically any form because we’ve convinced ourselves to “come as we are.” Indeed, Jesus will take us with all our warts and mistakes. We just go ahead and figure it will be alright if we go on hating one another, gorging ourselves, doing exactly what we want.
Let’s not forget that when we come to Him, we are submitting our old selves to crucifixion. He is not playing a petty where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years life coach. Jesus wasn’t joking when he promised his disciples “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:25)
He urged his would-be followers to first count the cost of pursuing discipleship so that they might not be worthless, lipstick-on-a-pig, salt-lacking-saltiness jokers. (Luke 14:25-34) He’d rather us be ice cold–not even interested–than lukewarm pretenders.
What a difficult truth to process! What a soul-wrenching reality! Perhaps we don’t want war because we love peace, but because we don’t want our comfort to be threatened.
The wealth of the rich is their fortified city; they imagine it an unscalable wall.
Proverbs 18:11
I have met more life insurance agents and investment advisors in church than anywhere else. I find this so funny, but isn’t it telling? We have so departed from God’s promises that we welcome hedging the risk of trusting our Creator. We buy newer things with warranties, we save up for retirement–as if this life was our main goal. As if the parables Jesus told about talents and wages and were about financial peace and not Heaven.
Should we never give up comfort? Will we wrestle this beast to the grave?
How many of us pretend to care about recycling and conservation and global warming yet will only live in a brand new or remodeled-to-Gaines’-perfection house? We step on our own toes with the best of intentions because we are incredibly short-sighted. We will never look as far as Heaven when we think we can DIY it here on earth.
God’s wisdom confounds us because it isn’t in our frail nature to step out in faith. Rather we like to take a peek at what everyone else is doing and stick with the majority. We understand things only by our five senses–we don’t have any other guarantees–and so, to preserve our mortal selves, we almost always decide that the most secure place is with the masses. We sure don’t want to rock the boat too much. But even this is a departure from God’s Word:
Put off your old self, which is corrupted by deceitful desires…Put on the new self, created to be like God in righteousness and holiness…speak truthfully to one another.
Ephesians 4:22-25
You see, we must speak up and call one another out on our faithlessness. Otherwise we are just pretenders, wrapping ourselves up in so many false securities that our lives don’t seem attractive to unbelievers. And believe me, we were made to be attractive. Not in a youthful, aesthetic way, but in a magnetic way. The Bible says we will either be an aroma that is life to those being saved or fatal to those living in the dark. Magnetism. We draw or repel people with salt and light, the unashamed proclamation that God made us for more.
I’ve always wondered about John (the baptist) preaching repentance. What, exactly, was the purpose in this? It’s occurred to me that in “preparing the way for the Lord” he was breaking fallow ground so that the seeds Jesus was to plant would land on tilled, fertile soil. Weedy, overgrown hearts wouldn’t readily receive the Word himself, wouldn’t even recognize a Savior if he was standing in front of them. John garnered a following early on simply by preaching repentance. He was firing up the rototiller, preparing the way, and there were people in the vicinity ready for a fresh start. They didn’t know how, they didn’t know Who, but they knew their lives needed to be uprooted. The heart of stone sitting in their chest was too heavy to keep dragging around. Before they knew of a replacement, they realized they must have the dead rock uprooted.
Aren’t we living this very moment on some hard ground? I wonder if these days we haven’t let our soil become overgrown with zealous thistles and dandelions. It radiates out from the lusts of our sinful nature, and I’m not talking about the obvious offenders. I’m thinking of the American church where the lobby looks like a gratuitous Starbucks and the man or woman on stage could be giving a TED talk. Something is terribly wrong if we are trying to look more like Hillsong than Jesus. Jesus, who touched lepers and liars. Jesus, who gathered twelve misfits and called them his friends. Jesus, who died alone on a cross.
Have we lost this spiritual instinct that life cannot be whole when we always get our way? That life cannot be ruled and regulated into happiness? Do we open the Word with the expectation of being sifted, dividing our bone from marrow, a regular tilling of the flesh? If we don’t, we are in for a rude surprise. More likely, though, we’ve stopped opening the Book altogether.
I am the Vine, you are the branches–remain in me, He said, and we grabbed a pair of garden shears and began sawing ourselves free. No wonder our Spirit fruit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control–stopped growing. We try and duplicate it with our fancy church talk, our insincere “seeker-friendly” welcome and false piety, but it doesn’t add up. It is a lot like biting into wax apples. Hungry people prefer the real kind.
Hungry people want to know the man-God, Jesus, the bread of life. They want to devour the Story, to eat the Word–something to fill up their starving, empty soul. This is all that we, as Christians, have been tasked to do. “Go into the world and give them the good news,” Jesus said before he departed.
We must give the world something better to chew on.
