It Was All That I Hated About Church

I need to ask this question. WHY ARE SO MANY PEOPLE WASTING THEIR TIME AT TERRIBLE CHURCHES??? It just makes no sense to me why that happens so much! No offense to anyone reading this, but Christians who really want their beliefs to be taken seriously need to stop being completely ignorant idiots in their method of thinking.

I no longer wonder why so many people hate the church. I heard Proverbs 3:5 taken out of context recently and I think it clarified why so much of today's church is absolute stupidity! "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." It's a verse about faith, but not until now did I realize that it's the license by which hoards of Christians justify being ignorant. There are piles of the rotting remains of discarded brains cast away by people who heard the words, "lean not on your own understanding," and went, "Oh! Then I guess I won't be needing this anymore!" And since we don't make sense of our own faith, we have nothing of substance to show to those who really are desperately trying to find truth and meaning in this existence.

But there's just no excuse for this! I'm making it an exercise now to try and view a service as if it was my first and only introduction to Christianity. It scares me how badly we represent Christ. I walk into some of these places and think, "Has nobody taken a step back and looked at what outsiders would think of this?" Maybe someone has, but didn't care enough to do anything about it. It can be none more than guilt and codependency that would influence someone to repeatedly subject themselves to thirty minutes of the worst music they've ever heard followed by an hour of the most useless and pointless babble ever spoken. If reading this makes you feel defensive, this probably applies to you.

"Good news, everyone!"

Let me tell you from personal experience, if the only service you're attending each week hasn't seen a fresh face (that hasn't run away screaming) in 20 years, you're just as well off as if you didn't go to church at all. There is just no reason why anyone should keep coming back to a series of rituals that merely has them leaving feeling oppressed rather than liberated. Not all churches are created equal, even within the same denomination. If you're at a bad church; for the sake of your own spiritual health, please find a better place to worship! Souls will still perish if they're always told 'how' to live but never 'why' to live. I'm not speaking against accountability: I'm speaking against omitting in our liturgy what should be our prime motivation to live sanctified lives.

It made an ass out of you and me

"Everybody loves parfaits!"

Did you read about going "back to the basics" in my last post? It's that important! Everybody who has not heard the Gospel needs to hear it. Everybody who has heard the Gospel needs to hear it again! Why is it such common practice to just assume that everyone is going to understand the meaning behind all of the weird rituals we do throughout the course of our church services? We need to stop teaching theology like we're adding layers to a parfait. I know that everybody loves parfaits, but if you leave out a layer of a parfait, it's still a parfait. The whole of Christian faith is a lot more like a wheel with Christ's death and resurrection at the center of it. A bicycle wheel can function missing many spokes, but remove the hub and you have nothing more than a mess.

Without context, the very idea of Church itself doesn't make sense. I have nothing against the charismatic worship style with people dancing through the aisles because I think it's Biblical. But what I don't want to see people doing is dancing for the sake of the experience! Does that make any sense? It's not worshiping God if you treat praise and worship like a drug experience or 'getting your fix.' We can't and shouldn't plan for the euphoria that we may experience when the Spirit truly moves. When it does, then we should express it outwardly in whatever way is natural and edifying. Don't dance in order to feel the Spirit, though: seek to be moved by the Spirit and then let your dancing be an outward response to the truths that you have internalized.

Worship leaders also need to select songs that are theologically relevant and accurate. I stopped asking God that I might feel His presence when I realized that I had come to depend on that feeling in order to act and think with integrity. The reality is that we only feel His presence sometimes. Pretending that we can feel the Spirit or taking the "fake it 'til you make it" approach is harmful to the people who are in times of darkness during which they can't feel His presence. Many people walk into the doors of the church thinking that spiritual arousal is the sole indication of authentic worship. As a result, those people think there's something wrong with them when they can't 'get it up' in worship.

The truly impactful Christian will seek God's presence to fill their character, not their feelings. Christ did not die on the cross so that we might feel good when the worship band starts playing. Nobody is entitled to a weekly or even continuous "mountaintop experience." So if you've stopped feeling God's presence, He's probably telling you that it's time to grow up. Your faith is nothing more than a drug addiction if the entire purpose of your devotion is to be regularly caught up in a wave of awestruck emotion.

omg... so worshipful!

People tell me that they can tell that I'm really filled with the Spirit when I sing. In reality though, I rarely feel the Spirit. What you hear from me is not God's anointing: it's the result of thousands of hours of relentless tenacity in honing my vocal and instrumental skills. I'm a dedicated artist but a lousy worshiper. I sing with expression because I know my duty to give life to the text I sing, but my heart is often still jagged and jaded. I'm ashamed to say that it's seldom that I approach the throne with my spiritual life well-tended. Thankfully, God is not handicapped by my brokenness and He has managed to use me in spite of myself.

Every act of worship in our lives should not be for something or in exchange for something we wish to receive from God. Doing that is a setup for disappointment and an attempt to manipulate God. Instead, the worship we give Him should be for all of the things that are already a done deal. By making it a discipline to recognize the gifts I've already been given, my vision is sharpened to notice the blessings as they come which may be harder to see.

Today, you can find churches that are stuck in meaningless tradition, stuck on a verse or principle that is good but not central, stuck in sensationalism, or stuck in idolatry. People of influence will be territorial, dogmatic, or even blatantly ignorant. Absolutely no church body is perfect. But there's nothing new under the sun, here. This is no new doctrine or game-changing divine revelation. These are not problems that just now sprung up in the last few decades. Christ needs to be the foundation upon which the Church is built. Morality and rituals are meaningless when not founded upon the Gospel. If it's not good news, it's not the Gospel.