THE YAWN AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

I feel really passionately about this, as I’m sure you can tell.–mh

A couple days ago, Zygote had some things to say about the church experience the way a lot of people remember it:

We were told what to do, and what not to do, but it wasn’t backed up with any concrete lessons. We had the 10 Commandments, those were the biggies, but then there were 1,000,000 other little rules that nobody could explain to me.

I was told once that if I didn’t attend Sunday School I would be going to hell. When I asked for the scriptures that referenced the danger of Sunday School truancy I just got that cold stare.

Sunday morning services seemed more like a fashion show than a celebration of Christ or God’s grace. That aisle down the center of the church was more like a runway in Milan than a walkway in a house of worship. The cars were always clean and the suits were always pressed — as if God was somehow taking notes for the pearly gates.

[. . .]

There was never a sense of celebration or of joy during the services. It was a very somber, solemn event. I never got that. We weren’t going to hell! We weren’t going to burn forever and ever because God’s kid decided he would take the rap for everyone. Let’s be happy! Let’s sing. Let’s dance. Let’s get down!

Instead it would be an almost hour-long lecture about evil in the world. Yeah, we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Got it the first 5,000 times I heard it. Can we move on now?

Zygote’s insistence on knowing the Scriptural basis behind Sunday School attendance qualifies him as at least an honorary Lutheran, although Uncle Marty would have said that the Third and Fourth Commandments pretty much made it mandatory for good little Christian kids to show up for Sunday School.

Still, he’s on to something that puzzles me as well. Namely, if the Bible is true about Jesus (and obviously, I think it is), then Sunday worship should be the most exciting and vibrant thing imaginable. But if Jesus is really raised from the dead, why does it seem that we try to re-bury him every Sunday with dreadful, doleful services that would bore any reasonably normal person to tears? Why is it that the best news anybody could ever deliver so often comes wrapped in such a wet, wet blanket?

Part of it is the impossibility (or at least inadvisability) of “doing church” according to a Dark Ages-to-late-medieval model in such a clearly post-Modernist world as ours. That is changing slowly as we all begin to embrace the diversity of personality types with which God has blessed this world. Personally, I would love to have an artist painting during our services, as Mattingly describes in the article linked above. But not everyone has embraced post-Modernism, and that’s even more true in the church. (If I get one more flyer promoting a conference about the “dialogue” between science and religion, I may barbecue it and eat it for lunch.) Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are plenty of theologians and church historians who know that culture can turn on a dime, so they’re not likely to embrace post-Modernism as the lasting philosophical influence I think it will be.

Too, the task of the established church is complicated by the mind-boggling numbers of constituencies to which it must appeal. You tell me one other place in our culture where 15-year-olds and 85-year-olds intersect on a regular basis. That’s something which pretty much only happens in churches anymore. Now try to imagine the difficulty of trying to design a worship service which will appeal simultaneously to people who can type 40 WPM with their thumbs on a Blackberry, and people who remember the day their family got its first radio. That’s what I have to deal with, every week. It’s that sheer, almost-insurmountable difficulty which has led many denominations to throw their hands up and start Balkanizing their congregations along age, racial, and socioeconomic boundaries. (See the Mattingly article for examples of this.) Starting from a blank sheet of paper cures the different-constituencies problem in the same way decapitation cures a headache.

But there’s times it’s tempting. When my 30somethings get forlorn looks in their eyes as they talk about the praise songs they sang at their sister’s church, and my 80somethings complain that “On Eagle’s Wings” is “too rocky-rolly” for them, it’s very tempting to decide that we’d be better off narrowcasting a greater number of services, instead of trying to bring all these disparate elements together under one roof at the same time.

It’s tempting, but it’s not very incarnational.

And that’s the real value of Zygote’s comments. I get the sense there’s a lot of cultural sins his church committed which he might have forgiven if only anybody had bothered to consider the fact that he was there in the first place. He knows the Bible is full of exciting stuff. He knows that the message of forgiveness ought to produce some sort of joyous response in people. And he knows that his church erred by trying to meet people on its own terms instead of meeting them where they were really at. I have no doubt that Zygote’s got a lot of faith in spite of the fact that his boyhood church let him down severely by breaking what I think is the Prime Directive of ministry at any church with any kids in it whatsoever:

Children are not “the future of the church.” Children are part of the church right now. And, as such, their needs must be considered in planning worship. It is always a sin to bore a kid in church.

A child’s faith can and will survive if pastors and other leaders violate this Prime Directive. But the child will forever remember that church is for somebody else.