How does your spiritual life intersect with the rest of your life?
I was raised in the church and the basic message was often that physical things were bad while spiritual things were good. I don’t think they would have said it that simply, but the message was clear.
Sex is bad. Worship is good.
Beer is bad. Prayer is good.
Secular music is bad. Christian music is good.
Secular jobs are fine, but if you’re really serious about God you’ll be a missionary or a pastor.
There existed a strange chasm between world-stuff and God-stuff. We could yell at each other in the church parking lot, but as soon as we entered the doors of the church we had better clean up our act! Respect the holy place. Dress nice. Stay quiet. Then on Monday, once again, it’s back into the dangerous world of school, swearing and teachers who hopefully will not teach us about evolution.
How did our relationship with normal life become so antagonistic?
In this short series of blogs l am raising some important questions about church. I suggested in the first of these blogs that church has a basic function—it is supposed to help us reconcile four relationships:
With God.
With ourselves.
With each other.
And…with our world.
For many of you, church is NOT helping you flourish in these four relationships. Something is off. But what should you do about it? Complain? Leave the church? Reform the church? I’m writing to help you process these types of decisions. In this final installment, we look at the final relationship—our relationship with the world.
Many Christians and churches have a fear-based, othering, or even combative stance toward the world. Maybe you already know this to be true. Maybe you aren’t convinced yet. Honestly, I didn’t realize the extent of our problem until I was exposed to another religion.
My in-laws are part of the Baháʼí faith. Through my wife’s sister and her husband, we have experienced a religious system with a fundamentally different approach to the world. I disagree with many of their core beliefs, but all I can do in the area of how they relate to the world is to observe and learn what the Christian approach is supposed to look like in action.
My brother-in-law is a Harvard educated surgeon who is a world-leader in the area of vascular anomalies—veins growing in abnormal ways, producing red marks or more severe cases with giant growths that can be fatal. He is starting vascular centers in several third-world countries and saving the lives of countless people. They live generously, opening their home to religious refugees. They are pillars within the Baháʼí community serving as what we would call elders.
In their community gatherings, they eat together, participate in spiritual practices and discuss community business. The spiritual practices are led by many different people and consist of various prayers, songs and readings. Similar to what Christians do, but less formal, professionalized and showy.
Last time we visited them in Boston, we stayed at their home across the hall from a Baháʼí man who had to flee Iran due to religious persecution and who is now doing research into causes and cures for diabetes. On another occasion, one of their community members (one of the world’s foremost RNA specialists) gave my family a private tour of his Harvard biology lab.
What does this have to do with a Christian’s relationship to the world? Everything.
In the Baháʼí community it is very normal to affirm education, scientific advancement and efforts put toward relieving pain and injustice in the world. They talk about it. They do it. It is normal. They are raising their kids to be leaders at the forefront of research and technology.
In my experience, the Church as I have known it is designed for something quite different. Now don’t get me wrong; churches and Christians have done great things in the world. But what does our system itself often promote? Our system is designed to affirm people who preach really well or lead worship really well. Those are our heroes. We primarily celebrate those who leave their world behind and invest all their time and energy in the church system.
Why do we do this? Because our system is focussed on professional Christians leading services in religious buildings, all of which are disconnected from normal life.
Baháʼís are able to promote education and justice because they are not led primarily by professionals. They are led by community members who themselves have normal jobs. They don’t spend all their time worrying about running great services. They spend their time talking about things like racism in the neighborhood and how to deal with it in the schools.
When we have churches led mostly by pastors who have never worked normal jobs, we can end up with a culture that thinks it’s more spiritual to preach on a stage than to pursue a career in the sciences, or the arts, or politics, or engineering, you get it.
Let me be clear—it’s not that pastors or church-goers are bad people with bad intentions. The point I want to make is that the form and structure of our religious experience isn’t conducive to the results most of us would like to see.
This is a problem.
In Eden, we were created good in order to steward God’s good creation. Imagine for a minute that Adam and Eve lasted in their purpose a few generations longer than they did. The immediate task of gardening would have spread as people spread. The purpose of stewarding creation would have required people skilled in construction, city planning, law making, botany, commerce, marketing and more. We would have eventually developed artists, fine wine, and well-roasted coffee. In other words, our original job description was actually quite varied and interesting. And it all revolved around living in and caring for our actual blue and green earth.
If that’s the case, how did we end up so fearful of our world—so committed to running a church system dedicated to separating people from the world? Was is just the fall of Genesis 3? If so, wasn’t Jesus’ victory over death, the tearing of the temple curtain, supposed to reconcile the whole world back to God? Isn’t that our whole mission?
Where did we go wrong?
We can point the finger at a lot of factors. Platonic dualism created a culture in Western thought in which spiritual things were good but physical things were bad. True. Early Roman Catholicism created a church structure which separated the sacred from the secular. True. The protestant reformation, and especially Calvinism, emphasized our fallen condition so much that we forgot we were originally created good. True. Evangelicalism focussed so much on heaven that we forgot about earth. True. Puritanism and later fundamentalism created a culture in America where we were afraid to drink and dance. True.
There are a lot of reasons we are in the situation we are in. Awareness is important, but the bigger question now is, what do we do about it? If you find yourself in a church that seems detached from reality, what now? If you feel like your leaders only care about running great religious services, how do you personally live out a better Christian ethic?
Here is a little bit of advice from my experience for how to survive a church culture that hasn’t yet realized that Jesus tore the curtain in two.
1. Be aware of the black hole called church volunteerism.
It’s never enough. The minute there are enough children’s volunteers, we need more greeters. More worship team members. More sound people. For many pastors, the goal is simply to grow their church bigger and better. Lots of them have good hearts and good reasons for doing so, but if that’s the goal, there will never be enough time, money or people to satiate their desires.
Help your institutional church with the time you have. Give what you are able. But don’t let it consume you. Don’t let it tear you from your work, family and neighbors. God has given you unique gifts and placed you in his garden to help cultivate something beautiful in and through you. Don’t miss it due to a guilt-trip from a Christian leader. I suggest that if you’re volunteering at your church, but don’t know your immediate neighbors, you might consider changing your focus.
Here’s a hard truth for people pleasers—you may have to disappoint your pastor. If he or she cannot understand that they exist to empower you in your world and instead want to suck up all of your time into the black hole of volunteerism, don’t be afraid to say no. You don’t have to be mean about it, just communicate clearly what you are able to do and set limits. Know they likely will not set them for you. And it’s ok to stop after a while. Volunteering for a season does not sign you up for life.
If you can, volunteer for things that are going to connect you to real people in normal ways. If I can suggest anything, it’d be to lead a small group in your home. Trust me, you don’t have to be that spiritual to do it, just available. You will make a huge positive impact on your church and you will also have the opportunity to empower people to be amazing gardeners in their own world. You can affirm kids not just for singing Jesus Loves Me, but for their passion for science and math! You can check-in on people’s jobs and help them connect the dots between how they spend 9-5 and God’s original design for the world! That’s good stuff!
Stop trying to be volunteer of the year and start letting God use you where you already live.
2. Reform what you can
Are you a pastor or leader in your church? I’d suggest getting your team together and doing a fun project to reflect on the messages inherent in your systems. Think about what you are communicating and whether it speaks the right message. Here are some ideas:
Do you say, “welcome to the house of God” on Sunday morning? What does that communicate about where God lives?
Do you call your big room a sanctuary (holy place) or a worship center? What does that say about the rest of the world?
Who do you call up on stage? People who are good at singing and speaking? What does that say about what you value? What could you do to affirm people with other professions?
Do you regularly announce the need for volunteers? How could you balance that message by affirming people who don’t spend all their time at the church building? Do they know you actually value what they do outside the building other than simply as a means of generating money for their tithe and offering? Say it! Tell them what they do matters!
If you are a pastor, do you have people come to your office for meetings? What if instead, you went to their office? Get to know their world. Get to know what they do all day. It will open your eyes AND it will make you a better preacher.
3. Get out more!
I wrote the book Out of the 4th Place to describe how the church ended up leaving culture’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd places for its own place—the 4th place. The 1st place is where people live. The 2nd place is where people work. The 3rd place is where people hang out—coffee shops, pubs, parks, and more.
Are you involved in your community? If not, why not?
For some, we commute out of our community in order to spend all of our time with church people. What would it look like for you to reverse this? What if you invested your life deeply in your own neighborhood—local politics, schools, arts, kids, sports, etc. What if instead of commuting to the church building, you built community right where you live? As you do, you are bound to notice local needs. A hurting family. An opportunity to serve. A park in need of repair. Isn’t this what it means to be a steward of God’s beautiful earth? To restore to life things that are dying. To put back together things that are broken.
God has given you a unique place in his creation. Nobody else is like you with your combination of personality and gifts. You were made for healthy relationships; with God, with yourself, with others, and yes, with our world! If your experience of church is discouraging to you, do something about it! Get into the world in which you live. As you do, you are bound to find that God was never really partial to the religious building anyway! He is already at work in your neighborhood and you get the privilege to join him and others as we together take part in his never-ending desire to create beautiful things through his people.
Thank you for reading. As always, I love good dialogue. Send me your thoughts and reflections!