I have had enough time to digest the treasure of inspiration I received at the “Simple Church” Conference held recently at our State Ministries Camp Ground. Author, Tom Rainer, did a marvelous job of challenging us to revisit the simple picture of what it means to be a New Testament church. As he repeated several times to his audience,…he was not promoting a “new” way of doing church or some new program. He was showing us nothing “new”, but instead was re-introducing us to the simplicity of being a vibrant church. The day was too short, but the conference set me to thinking about church, and how we go about it. And, I thought maybe I would share some of my thoughts today.
When Jesus was asked to provide the cliff notes version on how to be a Christian, He said “love God and love each other, cause that’s what this thing is all about.” RJVT (Revised John Vaughn Translation). I believe that most would readily agree that Christianity, in its purest form, is pretty simple. But we often seem to make our faith and practice a lot more complicated than we would like it to be. Maybe it’s spiritual A.D.D., but we tend to quickly lose sight of our primary focus as believers… loving God and loving others.
Our addiction to maintaining order and traditions of how we do what we do every Sunday morning, can make the clarity of our mission seem muddy. Somehow, because we’ve been basically doing the same things the same way for the last several hundred years, we now associate singing songs and listening to someone talk for 45 minutes… with being a believer. What has happened to us? The result is that many have come to the point of merely attending church as a non-essential spectator. In turn, we’ve created a false perception of what it means to be a Christian.
We’re not really living life as Christians anymore. What we are doing is we’re singing songs about it, and letting the preacher tell us what it might look like if we actually did something about living as a Christian. But, I submit to you that Christianity is not an event that we passively attend,…it is a life we must live! And more fundamentally, Christianity is about a real being that we must get to know as a friend.
Before we can truly love anyone, we must have some form of up close and personal interaction with them. But, we’ve been trained to interact with God vicariously through the songs, teachings, and well written and even sometimes entertaining books of others. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and I’m sure it would seem pretty strange to early Christians.
Much of what we’ve come to accept as our expression of faith is no more than a routine that we do each week, because apparently we lack the motivation to try something else. But, the essence of our faith is relational in nature, not ritualistic in nature. And, there lies the problem. Our culture has trained us to put more effort into our events than we do our relationships. Now, we can assemble together in a friendly manner...but, too often we are not friends. We were created to live out our Christian lives in the context of a family and a community that would allow us not only to function as a community, but also to actually enjoy ourselves in the process. It seems that much of Christianity today has become more about our meetings than what our meetings are supposed to be about…which is developing life giving love relationships with God and others.
Even in our service setting, looking at the back of each other’s heads while listening to a speaker, though it serves its purpose, is clearly not relational in nature. Don’t get me wrong…before you prepare to stone me…I’m not saying there is no value in gathering on Sunday mornings as we do. The point is that we have often invested a greater percentage of our time and energy in our meetings, and not nearly as much as we should in each other and our individual interaction with the Lord. Genuine relationship, whether it is with God or others,… is costly. It is time and energy consuming.
I have watched as godly men and women,…mature in their faith…full of godly thoughts and actions…(and, if they wouldn’t be stared at they would be comfortably dressed in white linen)…who were going through some of the most heart wrenching, and difficult life struggles. I expected at any time to hear them blurt out, “I’m mad at God!” And, I would not have been shocked. As a matter of fact I would appreciate their relationship with the Lord. Because at the very least, even in the frustration of the moment, their reaction would be real, and it would be honest… the way genuine relationships always are. Sometimes we get mad and have to give each other a piece of our mind. “I don’t like the way you’re treating me!” “Why’d you do that?” “Sometimes I don’t understand you!” If we ever find ourselves talking this way with God…it’s probably a pretty good sign. Intimate relationship requires truthful, gut wrenching vulnerability more often than not. And frankly, that’s probably more at the center of the real issue.
Most of us are so emotionally wounded, that we have great difficulty achieving much heart to heart intimacy with God or anyone else for that matter. Life has occasionally been rough, whether we’re willing to own that fact or not. I don’t care how spiritually mature we think we are, we are deeply emotional beings and most of us could benefit greatly from some inner healing. And, as much as I hate to admit it…sometimes it’s the most visible and influential church leaders who are in the greatest need of emotional healing. Many of the leaders and even pastors I’ve known would love the opportunity to be truly vulnerable with someone, but they are afraid go there for fear of character assassination.
All of this has led to much of the masks that cover what is going on outside our church life that we experience currently in churches across the land. Hey…Pastors are people, too…cut’em some slack! I don’t in any way mean that we should turn our heads when there is moral failure. Our feet must be held to the fire. But, we simply must allow our leaders to be transparent without fear of being publicly destroyed. We can't forget that every moment of our lives we dwell in the middle of a full on, bare knuckled brawl in the supernatural realm. As a believer, we have an enemy whose greatest pleasure is sucking all the peace and joy out of our life here on earth that he possibly can. One of his most successful strategies is to simply get us to focus on one another’s weaknesses or mistakes so that we remain in a state of offense toward one another. Or, he just gets us to start doubting the Lord’s goodness and love for us, and as a result we become offended at God. Proverbs 18:19 says, “An offended brother is more unyielding than a fortified city.” That sounds a lot like battle language to me! If we don’t allow emotional wounds and offenses to heal, both have the potential to keep us from honoring our two most essential directives…to Love God, and to Love Others. We can’t love God or each other at a distance. We need transparent, face to face interaction for it to work.
If you think about the definition of “love” provided in 1 Corinthians 13, you will realize that very few of these concepts are easily apply to a large public gathering. True love must be always be expressed in the context of relationship,... and most often to an individual. So,… loving God and each other can be difficult to do well in a crowded room with someone singing or talking through a microphone. Maybe, we need to re-think this thing a little. How am I to express love to you if I’m afraid to even look at you when you’re sitting right next to me? I mean, God forbid we distract one another and miss some crucial moment of the performance on stage. Is it just me, or is there really something wrong with this picture? Why are we so afraid to get out of our seats and mix it up a little?
Truthfully, it’s not just the rut we’re in on Sunday morning, it’s the overall shortage of joy and our inability to simply ENJOY our relationships with one another and the Lord. We’ve been so busy doing the church thing that we’ve forgotten how to BE the church. How we interact with our friends, our family, and our fellow man is a much more accurate indication of our spiritual maturity, than how well we understand and can articulate the latest and greatest teaching methods. Paul called this being “blown here and there by every wind of teaching.” (Ephesians 4:14)
Many of us still think that if we can just get our friend to the meeting… if they just hear the right message,… they’ll “come to the Lord.” Here’s an idea,… why don’t we make an honest effort to take the Lord to them? He’s in us isn’t He? I don’t know anyone right now who would say they suffer from too much kindness being shown to them, or having too many friends who really care about them. Jesus was known as a FRIEND of sinners. Sometimes just being a good friend may be the most spiritual thing we can do for someone. That also applies to our relationship with the Lord.
Slowly I’m coming to the understanding that God wants us to see ourselves as more than His child or His servant. Just like us, He wants to love us as friends love each other. Jesus likes it when we just hang out together, no agenda, no pressure…just being friends. Honestly, we need to learn how to be a good friend in the Sunday morning environment,…both to the Lord… and to others.
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