I have a hard time with church. I have grown up with church all around me. I have been a “Christian” nearly all my life. I have been the staff youth pastor at a church. I have read the Bible cover to cover. We lived in Africa for 9 months doing mission work. I have an awesome marriage and two wonderful kids. I have a hard time with church. It just seems so pointless most of the time. The mission statements always sound nice. The people seem friendly at church. Some church goers even go out of their way for each other, but that is where most stop, or at least hesitate.
I have a hard time with church. It doesn’t seem like this is what it is supposed to be. I just don’t see a match when I look at what I read in the Bible and what I see when I go to church or when I look at The Church. I’m trying to get my mind around what it is but I can’t. If I can’t and I have been around this whole thing my whole life then I am sure that intelligent people that haven’t been raised around it will have an even more difficult time seeing the point of the whole thing. I think this is why it is so easy to wake up on Sunday and think to yourself that you would get more productivity done by mowing the lawn than by going to church (which take about equal amounts of time).
So, I guess the point of church becomes a chance to learn more about the Bible (or repeat the same stuff) so that we can go and tell other people about it. It reminds me of something someone once said and it goes something like this ‘you go out and find someone and convert them and then once they are converted you make them worse than you are about reflecting God’s purpose.’
I have attended churches all over from small (50-75 people) churches to mega-churches (10,000+ people) and though the cover may be different they all seem the same under the hood.
Ultimately, it is not exactly church that I have a hard time with (the buildings are usually pretty nice). I have a hard time with what the church looks like to everyone else (the people, not the building). There is a reason why we are the ugly sibling in the room. We must be missing the point when we don’t even look right to ourselves anymore. That’s why I started writing this blog. I’m tired of cringing every time I hear a Christian on TV. I’m tired of the phoniness that we feel we have to pay each other when we show up together at church. I’m tired of the face that we put on when we know that others know we are a Christian.
I want us to re-imagine a church that looks good to everyone because we are actually making a real difference to this world we live in. I want us to be doing things that are making things better and not just taking that route when it’s convenient. Let’s stop the “God hates fags” BS and direct our time to real problems (i.e. poverty, violence, war, depletion of the Earth’s natural resources, pollution, hunger, education, HIV/AIDS, world health etc.)instead of ones we make up. Mother Teresa should not be a unique person but yet she was because it is so rare for someone to devote their lives to fixing the broken pieces of this world (and I don’t mean metaphorically). If the roughly 80% of people who claim to be Christian in the US were devoting their lives to BEING the Christian instead of talking about being Christian, then maybe we would, quite literally, change the face of God and get some real things accomplished in our communities.
Let’s raise our eyes from the Bible for a moment (you know what it says) and stop pretending that we don’t know what to do and just go do something. Fix this world with confidence knowing that God’s restoring this world with you and the work you do won’t go to waste.
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