Outside Looking In

I don't go to a church anymore. This isn't a shocking statement on its face, but for me it's fairly surprising. I've gone to church the vast majority of my life. The evangelical traditions are deep in me. I can still sing the hymns as well as the contemporary praise songs, recite the scriptures as well as the theologies of my forbears.

For at least half of my life I attended church because I had to. My parents were devoted Baptists, and for most of my childhood my father was even a music minister, so we attended a variety of small Baptist churches in and around Amarillo. But mostly we spent our time at a good-sized, respectable, growing church with two services on Sunday, one on Sunday night, activities on Wednesday evenings, and myriad opportunities to serve throughout the year.

The latter half of my life was a process of being in and out of churches. During college I didn't have much interest in church. That is until I was married and my wife and I discovered a tiny tight-knit group of Believers who met at a closed coffee shop Sunday mornings. This was a new experience altogether for us. Here was a collection of Christians who were not much different from me, but whose church experience was a world away. There was no paid pastor, no children's programs, and no  church building. Yet we relished our times together, often going for lunch after meeting, or meeting up for coffee or dinner later in the week. We loved being around each other.

Thus began my experience with attending a church by choice. While my experience with that group was short-lived - we moved away about a year later - it left an indelible mark and a desire to find another similar experience. The next four years were spent in pursuit of that experience, and while we met some fantastic people at various churches around the country, we didn't find the homespun community we had so loved and continued to so dearly miss.

Imagine our surprise then to discover in my hometown, shortly after moving back, a charismatic non-denominational church with a wide-ranging (I won't say "diverse," because that wouldn't exactly hold true) body of Jesus loving fools. We began to experience strange, surprising, and powerful spiritual truths among this church congregation. We discovered that we were broken hearted and in need of healing, and we received it over and over. My spiritual life grew and I learned that I was powerful. I also learned that God is powerful and that Jesus is powerful and that the Holy Spirit is powerful, and that all three of them are near at hand. The revelations I received over the course of several years with this church were the most significant of my Christian experience.

Suffice to say that we were "plugged in." My wife and I led a small group for over a year. We attended just about every special event, monthly meeting, prayer group, or conference the church held. We loved our church and recommended it to others. And things were going great at our church right up until the point that they weren't.

Here is where you might expect to hear about scandal or betrayal or personal pain, but you won't get it from my story. What happened was decidedly more banal and drawn out than that. The fact is we saw it coming for a good year before we left, but it took a while to realize how dissatisfied we were. We sat through some ridiculous things during this time, perhaps hoping that what we were witnessing wasn't really happening. But as our church became less and less passionate about the mysteries of God, replacing that passion with the legitimizing trappings of every other respectable congregation in the city, it became apparent that this too must pass.

In a sense we didn't leave our church, but rather our church - it's pure-hearted pursuit of Jesus and the Gospel, our collective love for one another, our foolhardy pursuit of revelations from God - left us.

But of course we actually did leave. It's been over a year and the experience of being outside of that church, which is incidentally the same thing as being outside of all church period, is very much fresh. We have learned a lot by being outside and looking in.

The most important thing I think that I've learned is just how exclusive church is. Maybe to some of you this sounds obvious, but to me it's still a jarring revelation. When I think about the Gospel of Jesus, the Good News he tells us to preach to all the world, the last adjective that comes to mind is "exclusive." And yet that's exactly how most churches are. I don't think that it's exactly intentional, and I certainly don't think that at my old church it was anything as malicious as it sounds, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

So many aspects of the church experience are insular and exclusive, from the rhythm of the service to the order of the songs. But above all is the language of church. Like every other organization, the church has a vocabulary all its own that we learn to understand and repeat almost without intent. The language of the church becomes its most powerful means of exclusivity. This is the most damning indictment I think I can make. Church vocabulary is probably the first thing you adopt if you want to fit in, usually without analyzing the words being used. This is a shame, not only because language is such an effective means of exclusion, but also because words are so powerful when used conscientiously, with purpose.

Right now you may be clamoring for examples, and I would like to give them except for the fact that, even though I'm outside looking in now, the church experience is still so familiar that it isn't yet foreign. It's not so much that the experience of church attendance is strange to me now, but rather that our continual devotion to this mode of worship is so widely accepted without question. To gather together in the name of Jesus is natural; the pull of corporate worship and shared experience is strong and deeply spiritual. What's not natural, what isn't so apparently spiritual, is the exclusive and choreographed means by which we attempt to fulfill these natural impulses.

I could point to a myriad of means, but I'll limit myself to the most confounding ones. For instance, why a church building? I have heard a lot of preachers boast of how their humble home gatherings grew beyond the capacities of those home and wound up filling hundreds if not thousands of seats in a building set aside for that purpose. But what I have yet to hear is why this is so valuable, why this is an enviable or unavoidable result of that initial homegrown passion. The assumption seems to be that growth is an indicator of favor, therefore size is a measure of blessing. This isn't often the stated goal of a growing church, but more often than not it's a problem worth having.

When your inside the church and all of your friends are also there, this isn't a pressing question. Churchgoers tend to overlook the exclusive aspects of church, and asking why you attend church in a building set aside for that purpose is like asking why you sleep in a bedroom. You sleep in a bedroom because that's where the bed is. You worship God at a church because that's where His people are.

The church experience is, at this point in history, so common that it isn't productive to challenge it. Church is as much an institution in our culture as school is, and we aren't all of us questioning the value of operating that institution outside of the home. But when you are outside of the church looking in, and all of your old friends are still there (inside looking out?), you do question it, along with the obvious related question, "Why aren't my church friends my friends anymore?"

The exclusive nature of churchgoing is bound up in going to church. When you're there you're family; when you're not there, you're to be pitied. Like the wayward nephew who can't get his act together and hold down a job, those of us who aren't participating in churchgoing activity have to come to terms with being pitiful and, dare I say, lonely. The phone stops ringing when you aren't around on Sundays to remind your friends that you are still someone worth calling.

Another burning question of mine about church is, why a paid staff? Usually the answer to this question comes back in the form of scripture - I Timothy 5:17 comes to mind. But even as much as we value Scripture in such dealings, I think we lean on tradition even more. This would at least explain why pastors of large churches, or of churches in well organized (read: well funded) denominations are paid more.

The most fundamental element of my question though has more to do with what a church should be. Should it be an enterprise? I have known pastors in various denominations, and at the end of the day they are like CEOs of their respective churches, administering budgets and planning programs, measuring progress and developing strategies for growth. And why not? I can't think of anything more American than a smart, efficient, business-minded leader overseeing a well-functioning enterprise, especially if that enterprise is aimed at the highest pursuit of man - the saving of The Lost.

Except that there is something deeply convoluted about this mode of ministry. First off, the Gospel is not a widget to be sold by the savviest purveyor. Now I don't expect anyone reading this to necessarily claim that as a motive, but enterprises (or "businesses" if you prefer) are always in the business of selling something; call it crass, but building an enterprise around the efficient delivery of a message is the definition of a marketing company. Yet we have an industry of Gospel Delivery Organizations that, while hit upon hard times of late, are more than up to the task of adapting to the current market trends.

I continue to see striking examples of entrepreneurship in Christian churches these days. From snappy logos and taglines to downright enigmatic church names meant to conjure contemporary hipness, there is a move afoot to maintain the widespread appeal of the church experience. And strangely all this window dressing is applied to organizations that, at the end of the day, are pretty exclusive places to spend your time. Save your "everyone is welcome" and "judgment-free zone" slogans for the marketing agencies; people know what they're going to get behind the doors of a church regardless of its makeover, and what they're all too likely to get are fickle friends and tepid theology.

Maybe I'm being too tough on churches, but from the outside looking in I can tell you that we're not offering a product that's in high demand. That is unless what we're offering is the real, true, free Gospel of Jesus Christ. That message of love and mercy shared openly among the rejects of religion is the only thing that anybody really wants or needs, yet it seems secondary to the slogans and stages that the church too often embodies. Jesus spent his ministry in the streets and on the hillsides challenging the established religious practices every step of the way. And what do we do in his name? We reestablish those "holy places," taking God's presence out of the street and placing it back inside the temple where we seem to think it belongs.

From the outside looking in I can tell you that God hasn't left the streets. The God of Jesus Christ, merciful and slow to anger, anxious for a real relationship, is everywhere, even inside the spaces set up purely as a means of containing that presence. You can't put God in a box or inside a purpose-built facility, and neither can you keep him out. You can't keep Jesus out of the bars and brothels and coffee shops and hardware stores. The risen savior wanders the grocery store aisles and sits at the dining room table. And the Spirit of God most certainly inhabits the homes of those who are looking for a life-changing experience alongside their friends and family. Maybe we should join him.