What Is Church For?

"Prophet" Jeff Jansen says that Jesus was a real man and complains that the church today has become "almost homosexual." At his church, Jansen bragged, the ushers all carry guns and won't hesitate to kill you if you try to start something: "Just kill 'em. Just shoot 'em dead." pic.twitter.com/9eCXdztT5I

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) April 10, 2021

I read an article somewhere (Google found it for me; not among my usual haunts) where a pastor tried to give insight into what's causing the decline in church attendance (lowest Gallup has ever recorded, but Gallup hasn't been polling the question ever since 1776, so large amounts of salt should be kept on hand).  Some of those were familiar, especially since we were introduced to the issue in seminary where it was already old news (late in the last century, for me):  sociological matters, like the decline of unions in America, decline of team activities (one book title I vividly remember was Bowling Alone), etc.  One of the complaints the pastor had was the yin-yang of American Christianity:  on the one hand, the ardent evangelicals and even more ardent pentecostals; on the other, the earnest do-gooder "liberal" Christians.  The former, he said, were sanctimonious but also interested mostly in power (look at their devotion to Trump); the latter, he opined, were so interested in social justice they ran religion right out of their churches.

Well, the UCC has been labeled "Unitarians Considering Christ," but that's not as true as it appears to be.  It's more a description of Cleveland (where the church is headquartered) than of the congregations of the church.  But still, the perception is the problem; but not the only problem.  The base problem is the vocabulary of American Christianity, the narrative we tell about it.  And that narrative allows for only two sides (like the two political parties, one conservative, one liberal), and the default setting, the baseline, is "conservative."  So we can only speak of Christianity in America as evangelicalism, or what isn't evangelical.  The evangelical side is always too insistent on it being the only "true" version (that's the narrative, I mean; not necessarily the reality) and the "liberal" side is always portrayed as:  not conservative enough.  Sure, we like Jesus better when he's nice rather than judgemental ("Jesus loves me, but he can't stand you" is a sure-fire caricature of fundamentalism), but we don't want Jesus to lead us to be too concerned with what mascots sports teams have (an issue for the UCC in Cleveland; still).

You can pick "extreme" examples (and how you define "extreme" defines you, as well) for either side, but there can be only two sides.  The conservative side is doing something right: witness their large, well attended churches.  Well, not so much now, but....  And the liberal side is clearly doing something wrong, because, well...no large, well attended churches.  Except for the ones where the pastor is too crazy for anybody to take seriously, as with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, late of the UCC church Barack Obama famously attended (I would say more about his "attendance," but that would be a distraction; and probably very un-pastoral of me.).  Everybody agrees Jeremiah Wright was too "extreme" to be a pastor deserving of any regard at all; well, everybody except the UCC pastors I knew, but again, that's another story.  Rev. Wright's church was large enough to be considered a "mega-church."  Still, it doesn't count.  

But what do we have between these two?  Church as country club/social gathering?  That’s not far off the house churches of Paul, except those were family affairs: literally.  One of the problems with church today, as the pastor properly noted, is that life together is messy; and life on-line, by contrast, is clean.  You can ignore this blog if you like, or whole sections to Twitter.  You can watch only the TV shows you like, too; watch only the movies you want to watch.  You don’t have to voluntarily associate with people so different from you.  That is something you have to do in church.  That’s why some portion of the congregation, of the church, always hates the pastor, whoever the pastor is.

Church is also a snake pit of vituperation and power struggles.  Can be; usually is.  If you’re not aware of it, you’re not plugged into the people complaining about the new pastor, or the new carpet, or the new organist, or the hymns used in worship, or the way worship is conducted, or....  There’s always a group complaining, always people leaving and others coming back and new people leaving and returning,.  This is as true for large churches as for “family” congregations.  The terms are ecclesiastical, not arbitrary; but I don’t bother to define them (the scale is size of membership) here.  You get the idea.  Church is another struggle to have, and the world offers so many ways to avoid struggle.  Watch TV you want to watch, or movies (streaming; or purchase).  Read news/ideas you want to read, ignore the rest. Chat on-line with people who think like you do; ignore the rest.  Church involves rubbing elbows with people who may drive you crazy, and it’s completely voluntary.  You may not like everyone at work, but the rewards usually compensate for that.What does church provide?  How does it compensate you?

This is, understandably, one sided.  But the decline in attendance is not really due to “liberal” or “conservative” thinking.  Sure, Trump is a repellant figure.  But Asa Hutchison only vetoed one bill in Arkansas of three that address a problem Arkansas doesn’t have:  what to do about trans students.  The message to Millenials is clear:  some people we care about, some people are, well, less than human.  Yes, that’s as American as cherry pie (Columbus made slaves of the natives here as soon as he landed), but Millenials find it reprehensible.  And while bans on trans kids in sports (I’m simplifying here to make a point) is not necessarily religious in basis, the whole “offense” of the trans is easily linked to “conservative” Christianity.  Which is not to say “liberal” Christians win this one; this isn’t an either/or situation.  People don’t ping-pong between the two poles of American Christian churches:  they just bow out, or never come in the first place.

We’re back to a question I asked a long time ago:  what is church for?  Is it for supporting and buttressing “conservative” social principles like “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”?  Or not letting Eve become Steve? (If my shorthand here offends, forgive.  Again, I’m trying to make a quick point, not solve a complex problem.) Is it for conducting workshops on “consciousness raising” and finding new sources of injustice before we have solutions for the old injustices? And is God in the solutions? Or in the greater awareness of the problem, and the seemingly endless discovery of new problems?

I keep coming back to this issue because it remains evergreen, prompted to life once again by some new poll that re-states the obvious to all but the media narrative (where we are all still in the post-war (WWII) church boom in "Middle America", still donning our white gloves and our best suits and driving our 2.5 children to a white (building and people) suburban church with a pristine green lawn).  As I say, we were studying the decline in church attendance (and so, growth) when I was in seminary, and that was at the end of the last century (20 years ago is a long time if your my not-yet-30 year old daughter, or no time at all if you're staring at 66 just over the horizon).  The post-war period saw a boom in church attendance that distorted all expectations about churches in America.  That was the aberration, not the norm; but Boomers, especially, took it as normative.  Of course, Boomers also fled the church in droves to pursue gurus from India and religions from Asia, anything that didn't smack of American Christianity at all.  And then we flocked back to church when our children were born, only to abandon it again as soccer games on Sunday mornings became an accepted part of the weekly schedule because it was the only day left in what becamse a jammed schedule for our children (my childhood was relatively unstructured, but then it was lived in post-war suburban America where every adult was roughly the same age, and all had children of roughly the same ages.  Those days are long gone.  Organized games and other activities are the only way to get children away from the TV.  There's almost no one out on the street playing games anymore.)  So if society has changed radically (again) since Boomers were kids, why hasn't church changd with it?

I used to wonder why my church couldn't offer worship on days other than Sunday, and at times other than Sunday morning.  I was looking for ways to bring in people whose lives were busy, but church had become just one more thing to do, and it was voluntary, and the social pressure of being seen there had evaporated.  Worship at any other hour on any other day was not really a solution to that problem.  Besides, "we've always done it this way" is the lead weight around the ankle of many a church.  Which is not to say the alternatives are any better.  Aside from churches that are built around one leader who is revealed to have abused his/her position (more likely men than women, when the abuse is personal rather than financial.  Why is that, do you suppose?), there's just the fact that "mega-churches" thrive so long as they are advertising and bringing people in.  The rule of thumb is, they lose as many people as they bring in new, so the congregation appears to be in a "steady state."  (These losses are permanent. More traditional congregations just see who attends shift with the new pastor; mega-churches never form that kind of community, as they focus almost solely on the pastor.) But that's the problem with judging the health of congregations and churches solely by numbers.  What appears on paper is not necessarily what appears in the pews, and one of the prime purposes of churches is to provide an ekklesia, (yeah, I've written a lot on this topic), a Greek word used in the Gospels that, according to the authority on New Testament Greek, is "a popular meeting," meaning it is "called out."  "Called out" here simply means "announced," and "popular" means people want to attend.  Ekklesia is the word used for gatherings of Christians in the New Testament, so church should be something people want to attend, a popular meeting. But popularity is a rather simplistic measure, especially these days when it means how many people paid to see the movie, watch the streaming series, or downloaded the song/album.

I saw this morning on the freeway a new billboard for the "mega-church" Baptist church here in town.  They have at least two campuses, so I think that's what this was advertising:  "I & II Houstonians," and the smiling, familiar visage of the senior pastor who has been in that position longer than I've been living in Houston (going on 22 years now, if I calculate correctly).  Nothing wrong with pastors staying put in churches, but it does create a certain cult of personality, even in the smallest church.  His job, from what I've heard, was explicitly to grow that church, and he has.  But advertising is a huge part of that effort, and I do wonder how much of a community that church has, and how much is just churning, as people come in the front door while others slip out the back.  If they aren't keeping up with their losses anymore, does that mean churches are in historic decline?  Or does it just mean the charm of "New and Improved!" has finally worn off?

Christian author renounces his faith in emotional video: 'I love myself for the first time' https://t.co/7ga2XuOSaY

— Raw Story (@RawStory) April 13, 2021

I'd say the Christianity he walked away from is one I walked away from, too.  Except I never subscribed to what I presume his Christianity was.  I say that only because he taught at Moody Bible Institute and because his book (according to Amazon) is about a rather extreme and perverted form of Calvinism championed by institutions like Moody Bible Institute.  I’m familiar with it; but I never confused it with Christianity as a whole; just as one interpretation among others. Still, this is not another datum proving the problem of Christianity in America is right v left. This is just the story of a person setting aside what I am so bold as to call false doctrine. I’m not too keen on any system that is just a system of control (in my childhood that was described as the "Thou Shalt Nots", and it was already fading in my Calvinist (Presbyterian) upbringing).  Where is the joy in life that Jesus exemplified, in being afraid of being alive?  Anyone who loves themselves for the first time (good for them!) by giving up Christianity, was not doing Christianity right.  And I don't mean by that to blame this man for not being Calvinistic enough.  I mean the Christianity he was taught was false doctrine.  Period.

So maybe that's the problem with Christianity in America.  It's the conclusion I come back to, time and again.  There are perversions of the teachings of Calvin and Luther and Augustine and Aquinas and Paul and Jesus of Nazareth out there; and they all go under the guise of "Christianity."  But complaining about that on the intertoobs is like complaining about the CDC pausing the distribution of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because not enough people have had rare blood clots to justify such a pause.  A)  not up to you to make the decision; B) you don't know what you're talking about, and C) nobody really cares what you think anyway.  So rather than add to the chatter, wouldn't it be better to help with the solution?

But the problem, the end, is not theology; the problem is ecclesiology, and the central question of ecclesiology is:  what is church for?  Only human beings can answer that question, and if the answer doesn't arise from their individual lives, it won't arise at all.  Perhaps we are in an interregnum.  Perhaps we are at the end of a very long road.  I think it is both, and a little bit of neither.  The Romans, I understand, used to build cities precisely so many miles (or however the Romans measured space) from a previous city.  As the new city grew, at some point another, farther away, was established.  They were all connected by roadways, all planned as to where they would be, all subject to the central authority of Rome.  The comparison to the Roman church, to the central control of churches which some Protestant denominations also have, is not accidental.  The other model is less structural, and in the extremes of Congregationalism (or most Baptist denominations, which are largely congregational in polity), very loosely connected indeed.  At the far end of that are the mega-churches that claim no denominational fealty.  All have, in their time, served people; all have come up in a culture which supported them, and if it does no longer, they will wither away.  Will they be replaced?  Yeah, I think so.  

There is a theological issue here, still.  More accurately, a soteriological one.  Good works was once a touchstone of Christianity, but for a number of reasons it was set aside (kinda, sorta) by the Reformation.  Too soon it became associated with "Popish" ideas, because anything Roman Catholic became anathema to Protestants.  To this day, as I mentioned above, the emphasis on helping people as Christians can be seen as squeezing God out of the church (because good works do not assure salvation, and isn't the point of being a Christian salvation?).

We just can't imagine what the replacement will be, yet.  It will depend on the ecclesia; the calling out to a popular gathering. To return to the question:  what is church for?  It is for people, ultimately.  It always has been.  It has to be.  Who else, after all, would it be for?  God?