I was just reading the story of the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. You know the story. It started with “Let my people go” and the stubbornness of Pharaoh followed by plagues. Finally, after God killing off the first born of Egypt, Pharaoh let them go. The chosen people packed all their stuff and left.
But Pharaoh had second thoughts when he realized there would be no one to build his temples, no one to clean and keep up the property. There would be no one to harvest the crops. It was a bad thing to be on the other side of that great Exodus. I can see the panic in the faces of all the Egyptians because the very people they had depended to do the menial and the mundane were moving out.
Sort of like what is happening in the American Church today. Those who have been the ones to carry the burdens are dying off, and the next generation is not there to pick up the slack. The Church looks out the palace window and only see a massive exodus.
Like the Egyptian’s, the church has seen the warnings. Great plagues of modernism, relativism, and entertainment was not enough to keep the keepers of the kingdom placated. I can almost hear the travail of the ones left behind as they see the numbers dwindle, the cash flow slows, and the talent was disappearing. Like Pharaoh, the leaders figured if we do one more program or one more campaign we can make do with what we have. New efforts are made to entice the fence sitters to become the new servants now in the desert on their way to the promised land. Pharaoh tries to manufacture passion from the shrinking faithful.
There have been hundreds of surveys, papers, books, and studies as to why the numbers are just not the same. Some would blame the culture. The all permeating, all powerful perversity of the media is poisoning the culture in which we live. When people move out, or even silently simply walk softly into the night; you think that the gays and the Muslims and the Atheists and the pop stars have so screwed up the morality of the world that everyone is abandoning faith in droves.
Church this is not the reason there are fewer seats in the pews.
The world is not the problem it is the church. The world in which the Church lives has always been bad. If anything, it is easier now than any other time in history.
So what is the problem?
First the church has imperceptibly moved from its very foundation. We have become one more infotainment venue. The stage, and the lights, and the bands, and the video screens, have all just become white noise to those really seeking to encounter God. In the effort to be more relevant we have become more irrelevant. The morning service has become no more than ear and eye candy for an hour, but they have so little relevance in people’s daily lives that more and more of them are taking a pass.
Yeah, the songs are cool and the show is great, but ultimately Sunday morning isn’t really making a difference on Tuesday afternoon or Thursday evening, when people are wrestling with the awkward, messy, painful stuff in the trenches of life; the places where flashy video displays simply don’t help.
We can be entertained anywhere. “I can get more entertainment on TV.” Until you can give us something more than a Christian-themed performance piece—something that allows us space and breath and conversation and relationship—many of us are going to sleep in and stay away.
Second on the list of problems is the very language we use is exclusionary. There is a spiritualized insider language that puts distance between the haves and have nots. And putting them on a big video display does not make it better.
Our language should be very simple. Churchy words and about eschatological frameworks and theological systems don’t help. Talk to them plainly about love, and joy, and forgiveness, and death, and peace, and God, and they’ll be all ears. Keep up the church-speak, and you’ll be talking to an empty room soon.
We need you to speak in a language that we can understand. There’s a message there worth sharing, but it’s hard to hear above your verbal pyrotechnics.
Next in my list of issues is that the church sees itself as a building. The walls are not sacred. The high tech sound system, and video displays are not the church. Hiring a children’s director because no one seems to love children is not the church. All the money seems to be spent on the things inside of the church, but the 140 some odd waking hours a Christian has cannot be met with one or two hours of entertainment in well-appointed pews with the temperature just right to keep us from falling asleep.
If our goal is to have better Jesus-stuff than the church down the street’s Jesus-stuff, then we have missed the mark. Most of the churches money, time, energy seems to be about luring people into the church instead of reaching people where they are.
The church needs to reach out, to forsake the family centers and go to the families that are hurting. The greatest mission field is just a few feet outside of the walls.
While I am on my soap box, let me tell you the church is fighting the wrong battles. I know from firsthand experience that the church likes to fight. Onward Christian Soldiers. We know you like to fight, Church. The problem you are fighting the wrong battles. The fights you choose are just not worthy of your energy. It is easier to put up a sign against the latest social injustice. Or even worse, you pick fights between yourselves in the name of theological orthodoxy. We make stands against all kinds of evil. From homosexuality to what entertainment should be viewed by the masses. And in the meantime there are hungry on our streets. Every day we see a world suffocated by poverty, and racism, and violence, and bigotry, and hunger; and in the face of that stuff, you get awfully, frighteningly quiet. We wish you were as courageous in those fights, because then we’d feel like coming alongside you; then we’d feel like going to war with you.
I don’t know where I found this but it rings true, “Church, we need you to stop being warmongers with the trivial and pacifists in the face of the terrible.”
The last reason the pews are slowly becoming empty is that church love doesn’t look much like love. It is terribly selective. The pattern of the through the ages has followed a simple formula: 1. BELIEVE, 2. BECOME 3. BELONG. You had to believe before you allowed to become a part and once you get to a place in your life where you have arrived (become) you could find a place to belong. It was spawned out of the persecution of the church where you had to be extremely vetted to enter into the church. But I would submit we need to change. Jesus did it differently.
Jesus hung around the riff raff of society. The disciples did not believe Jesus was God until the last. They saw Him as the Messiah but not until the resurrection did they finally figure it out. Jesus’ methodology was to include everyone provide them a place to BELONG. He created a place of acceptance. Belong, Believe, Become
It feels like a big bait-and-switch sucker-deal; advertising a “Come as You Are” party, but letting us know once we’re in the door that we can’t really come as we are. We see a Jesus in the Bible who hung out with lowlifes and prostitutes and outcasts, and loved them right there, but that doesn’t seem to be your cup of tea.
There seems to be an unwritten list of do and don’ts that must be checked off before you will include some. The church seems a little exclusionary. Can the church love those that cuss and drink and get tattoos, and God forbid, vote Democrat? Is there a place for the great unwashed? Is there a place for the broken family? Is there a place for those who are sinners?
Now before you get all in a huff and label me a person that just doesn’t get it. Or start to judge me for my opinions, remember that is the problem. There is no place for disagreement, there is no place of discussion. It is your way or the highway.
Even if we are the woman in adultery, or the doubting follower, or the rebellious prodigal, or the demon-riddled young man, we can’t be anything else right now in this moment; and in this moment, we need a Church big enough, and tough enough, and loving enough; not just for us as we might one day be then, but for us as we are, now.
Maybe you’re right, Church.
Maybe I am the problem.
Maybe it is me, but me is all I’m capable of being right now, and that’s where I was really hoping you would meet me.