Many years ago I wrote a stupid little song expressing my dissatisfaction with churches. Each one seemed to be saying that, really, only their church was really worth attending, and in my experience, exactly the same obnoxious stuff was going on (and identical real-life stuff not going on) at any church you could care to pick. And people were denying this clear reality. So it was a case of "Yes, our church has some fairly serious problems we're not willing to discuss with someone considering throwing his lot in with us. C'mon. You have to go to a church, and although all the churches seem to have problems and don't seem to work for you, you won't find a perfect one anywhere, so you might as well come to ours."
Well, the refusal to discuss the problems, and the characteristic acceptance of the problems as things they weren't REALLY going to bestir themselves to fix, really ground my gears. Just saying "You're looking for The Perfect Church and you won't find it" didn't entirely obfuscate the clear fact that they were accepting their own lack of reality, lack of integrity and surplus of various bad things.
There is a legend that a guy named Canada Bill (seen here) was playing cards and it soon became clear that the game was fixed by the house so a player simply couldn't win. Bill kept playing. When asked why on earth he'd keep putting his money down on a game that he couldn't possibly win, he allegedly replied "It's the only game in town."
That's what I was thinking as to why people feel they need to join and attend some dodgy church or other, simply to deal with God and Christians, and I was also spoofing the cheesy use of card or dice metaphor in so many songs by tossing in random, mismatched bits of other game and sports terminology and equipment. So I called the song The Only Game In Town.
This recording is from back in the day, so it is sloppy in the extreme. In particular, the computer made just enough random rhythm problems in playback and recording, that it makes each part slightly wander in and out of time with every other part. My new system doesn't do that so noticeably.
Addendum:
After I'd written this, someone on Facebook put a "our churches sure are different, aren't they?" kind of post up. People posted "Yes! Awesome!" responses. I put what attempted to be a more balanced approach one, saying essentially "they can be very good and very bad, yes." Suddenly, because I'd said some could be very bad, a chain of events I realized I'd seen many times before immediately unfolded:
-I was dismissed as being negative. Pointing out "they can be very good and very bad" isn't negative. It's balanced," made no difference. I was being negative.
-I was dismissed as being "bitter" and had verses about bitterness quoted at me.
-It was pointed out that I had been guilty of being negative and bitter before.
In other words, a facefull of ad hominem. I realized that this was an attempt to (in impugning me) dismiss the "and very bad" half of my sentence as either not being real or not being important. It was a clear attempt to sidestep the discussion that was begging to start, as to what kind of bad was seen in the churches in which we grew up. They felt that talking about the various kinds of good was balanced, but even raising the topic of the kinds of bad was unbalanced and dastardly. You see, we are supposed to "just know better" than to do that.
So, I raised the topic of what was real. The good? The bad? Only one or the other? Both? I said that only allowing the discussion to deal with the nice things didn't make it very real. I was accused of only talking about the bad things and had my sentence parroted back at me, in true "No, YOU smell bad!" playground fashion. "You're only talking about bad things, and THAT'S not real!"
So, I asked if the respondents trusted me to get the "bad" information straight. Did they trust me to give an accurate and balanced account of problems that characterized the movement, and to have some sense of proportion as to how widespread they were? They said they didn't know me well enough to trust me or not. Didn't even know if I was really a Christian or not. (and goodness knows, someone who isn't a CHRISTIAN certainly couldn't be accurate about things that are wrong with church groups, could s/he?) My behaviour certainly didn't seem Christian. (Christ-like, sure, but Christian? Verses about "grace" were quoted. Things Jeremiah doesn't seemed to have worried himself overmuch about)
I said that I trusted them to get the nice, good, fun stuff straight. I asked again if they trusted me to get the problems straight and know how widespread they were or weren't, and if they were important or not. They wouldn't answer at first, and then tossed me the Dr. Phil: "How's describing the experience and the movement only in bad terms working out for ya?" I had to point out that they were still claiming to be the balanced ones, while I was only saying negative things, while actually they were mentioning no negative (unpleasant) things at all, while I was mentioning both sides of the coin to a greater degree.
Ultimately, if you shoot down, ignore, forbid, shame and punish any attempt to discuss problems in any open way, you are giving up hope of anything changing for the better, as you are clearly not ready to repent of ANYthing that might be a bad idea.
Addendum:
After I'd written this, someone on Facebook put a "our churches sure are different, aren't they?" kind of post up. People posted "Yes! Awesome!" responses. I put what attempted to be a more balanced approach one, saying essentially "they can be very good and very bad, yes." Suddenly, because I'd said some could be very bad, a chain of events I realized I'd seen many times before immediately unfolded:
-I was dismissed as being negative. Pointing out "they can be very good and very bad" isn't negative. It's balanced," made no difference. I was being negative.
-I was dismissed as being "bitter" and had verses about bitterness quoted at me.
-It was pointed out that I had been guilty of being negative and bitter before.
In other words, a facefull of ad hominem. I realized that this was an attempt to (in impugning me) dismiss the "and very bad" half of my sentence as either not being real or not being important. It was a clear attempt to sidestep the discussion that was begging to start, as to what kind of bad was seen in the churches in which we grew up. They felt that talking about the various kinds of good was balanced, but even raising the topic of the kinds of bad was unbalanced and dastardly. You see, we are supposed to "just know better" than to do that.
So, I raised the topic of what was real. The good? The bad? Only one or the other? Both? I said that only allowing the discussion to deal with the nice things didn't make it very real. I was accused of only talking about the bad things and had my sentence parroted back at me, in true "No, YOU smell bad!" playground fashion. "You're only talking about bad things, and THAT'S not real!"
So, I asked if the respondents trusted me to get the "bad" information straight. Did they trust me to give an accurate and balanced account of problems that characterized the movement, and to have some sense of proportion as to how widespread they were? They said they didn't know me well enough to trust me or not. Didn't even know if I was really a Christian or not. (and goodness knows, someone who isn't a CHRISTIAN certainly couldn't be accurate about things that are wrong with church groups, could s/he?) My behaviour certainly didn't seem Christian. (Christ-like, sure, but Christian? Verses about "grace" were quoted. Things Jeremiah doesn't seemed to have worried himself overmuch about)
I said that I trusted them to get the nice, good, fun stuff straight. I asked again if they trusted me to get the problems straight and know how widespread they were or weren't, and if they were important or not. They wouldn't answer at first, and then tossed me the Dr. Phil: "How's describing the experience and the movement only in bad terms working out for ya?" I had to point out that they were still claiming to be the balanced ones, while I was only saying negative things, while actually they were mentioning no negative (unpleasant) things at all, while I was mentioning both sides of the coin to a greater degree.
Ultimately, if you shoot down, ignore, forbid, shame and punish any attempt to discuss problems in any open way, you are giving up hope of anything changing for the better, as you are clearly not ready to repent of ANYthing that might be a bad idea.
8 comments:
Mike one of the problems I have with your critique is that you don't communicate with a concern for making church better. So you can get the problems right, and I think you do get some of the problems right, but why should anyone committed to the idea of church bother listening to you? I don't mean that to be rude - but honest. At the end of the day you have the privilege of walking away and seem to assume that is they way everyone should feel. Many of us cannot share that position - and it isn't because it is the only game in town it is because the church has demonstrated something worth living, and even dying, for. For me, for instance, my commitment to the Vineyard comes from seeing the best of what it could be reaching out in a way that demonstrated God's love to me (a broken Pentecostal minister at the time). They showed me the love that never gives up (like God's) and likewise I have refused to give up on the Vineyard - even though my experience is broad enough to know it is far from perfect. So while I offer a critique as well - it comes from my commitment to make Vineyard better (or at least for Vineyard to call the best out of people).
I am not sure how you go about building that concern into your communication. I don't doubt you belong on the margins and that you have something worth saying to the Church as a whole. I am just pointing out why I think you have so much problem interacting with the pastors who you could really be a help to.
Well, I'm doing only step one of what OT prophets did: the "here's what the situation looks like" part. The second part is, "If things don't change, then ________." The third part is, "If you rethink what you're doing and make changes, then _______ will happen."
so:
Part One: church is a niche thing nowadays. It's for people who already like (or are about to find they would actually like) that sort of thing anyway. It's a predictable part of a consumerism-sick society selling itself to itself. Churches are too much about selling themselves to themselves, about preaching to the choir because no one else is there to listen, because no one else thinks preaching is worth getting up for. The church movement in general does not allow open talk about what's wrong or how to change things. Establishments are established, and then sit like beached whales, no longer able to move.
Part Two: if this does not change, churches will continue to shrink in diversity. Churches will be more and more for a very specific fringe element in society. God will lose interest. He will confound the jargons of the various workers until they can't even understand each other, let alone work together. One could argue this is already the case.
Part Three: if churches genuinely "grow out of" the fear of being challenged, and the need to silence or remove dissenting voices, they will find all kinds of normal, everyday people who don't want to "do church" will suddenly want to form connections to church people and to what they're doing. And they will have valuable insights to give.
Actually my research has shown that there is incredible diversity in the church, much of which is response to consumerism. Everything from missional communities (like Simple Way) to high liturgy in peculiar places. A lot of it looks nothing like what is traditionally thought of as church. And a lot of it makes traditional church people (those committed to status quo for instance) very uncomfortable. Some of it has church structures and familiar aspects (like worship music and even preaching) but not all of it. I did my masters research investigating what is happening at the fringes of the evangelical church and found it incredibly encouraging.
So where do they fit in this?
And is success seen in a greater percentage of the population showing up or taking an interest? In my experience, even having religious discussions in a pub yielded some results in getting nonChurch attenders interested and comfortable. You can change the externals cosmetically quite a bit, but if it still feels the same as regular church, it doesn't work. If it doesn't feel like regular church, I can see it working.
also, I'm talking about diversity of people and views and so on. Are you talking about the structures of the fringe churches being very diverse, or that each is very open to a broad group of personalities and views having a place, rather than deciding "what's right" and "what we do"?
Success is such a dirty word Mike.
In answer to your second question - both. In fact one of the critiques that gets levelled about the churches that simply duplicate other emerging groups is that they have just made it a new form. The better of the emerging experiments emerge from a dialogue between the culture and the Christians who recognize a disconnect between their existing forms and the culture. Although some would probably be more syncretistic (becoming so much like the culture that they can no longer be legitimately called Christian) than was intended, the majority comes out of a concern for having a testimony to God that can communicate in the specific cultural setting in which it is situated. I've noted that most of these churches are urban in nature - but there are some interesting semi-rural projects down East that are worth looking at too.
The point about success is that success as a category places the church directly in the consumerism paradigm. Most of these churches actively look for ways to challenge this paradigm. Even when you shift the meaning of success it creates problems. I wrestle with this a lot because there is a pressure of what a "successful" church looks like that I'm convinced completely misses the people I feel most called to spend my life on.
As for "changing the externals" in your response. Works for who? I would like to challenge this idea you have the church doesn't work. It seems like a reaction to the claim that church should work for everyone if they just give it a chance. Both are extremes and I think both are wrong.
Think about government. Government is broken, but it works. In fact it works well for some people - too often not the people it should work for but that is a justice issue not a functionality issue. Should government change - absolutely. Should we give up on government? We give up a lot to do so. Government is a structure, it is a set of tools that should serve the people. Without those tools it becomes very difficult navigate the growing complexities of a globalized society.
In terms of churches - the problem I see is that the structure doesn't always match (best serve) the reality. In larger congregations you need more structure (institution) to allow the necessary relationships to happen. Structures do not make such things happen - but they can distribute the necessary functional responsibilities so that things like community can happen. And there is also a much needed power critique that churches would do well to heed. But if there is a power issue removing structures will not fix it - because they will not go away. Sadly, I've seen this dynamic. Structures are what were needed to actually help fix that situation - eschewing them just buried the problem.
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