Meet M, a good friend of mine.
He’s a thoughtful guy and a good preacher. Recently, over
breakfast, he talked about how he’d left his church. His comments were
carefully and thoughtfully expressed. I felt he put words to what a lot of my
wife Jeanette and my older Christian friends (and some younger) have been
saying about their church experiences around NZ.
M’s comments are not mean-spirited, nor is he bagging the church.
Quite the opposite.
Please understand I love the local church. That’s why I am doing
the work I do (WillowNZ). But I think we all agree we can do better, and in
most cases most of us want to do better. I hope and pray this short and honest
story will be instructive and give us all something to think about and perhaps
be less judgemental of the literally tens of thousands of good people in NZ who
are now known as the ‘Dones or Church Refugees’. Alan Vink
M
is husband and father. He and his family have been members of their church for
20 years.
For
four of those years, M worked an associate pastor role. In his two final years,
M created and led a group for Intermediate boys.
“Why am I leaving my church after
20 years?”
I wrote that on a serviette at my local
café. I expected answers to flow because (a) I’ve had years to think about it,
and (b) I’m usually good at finding the right words to frame my thoughts. But by
the time my second coffee had come and gone, I had nothing on the napkin.
So I squeezed out some words. “I’m bored and uninspired.”
As soon as I
wrote this, I knew I had hit the dartboard but without threatening the bullseye.
I was kind of right; my church
problem was like boredom and like uninspired, but these were symptoms whereas
I was trying to locate the cause.
Three coffees in, I folded my near-blank
napkin and left.
Weeks later, I came back to it. Same
napkin, same café, but not the same approach. This time I took on the easier
task of describing how church made me feel.
I figured that if I could name a specific emotion, the follow-up question, What is it about church that makes you feel
this way? would be instructive.
What I often experienced at church was the feeling
of being perplexed. In its milder
form, it felt like mere frustration.
But at other times I was genuinely disturbed,
even angry. So what was it about
church that made me feel this way?
The
songs? Yep, sometimes the words were shallow and weak,
or the tempo dirgeously slow, or the band too performance-driven (should we
elevate musicians on platforms?).
The
sermons? Yes, sometimes they were confusing, or
worse, were boring, or worse still, served no discernible purpose.
The
long Mission talks? The forced ‘high fives’ with
congregation members? The lengthy notices and after-match biscuit chats?
Yes to all of them.
But why would they leave me feeling
disturbed to the point of leaving my church of 20 years? What was it that linked
them all?
Dissonance.
Dissonance is the conflict that happens when things that ought to work
together, don’t. It happens in music when
notes are at odds. It happens in fashion
when clothing doesn’t fit the body. Or in politics
when someone’s actions contradict their words.
Wherever dissonance occurs, there are always
at least two things involved: This in
conflict with That. In my church, what
was the Other Thing that so often
clashed with the sermons and the songs, the notices and the biscuit chats?
It was the profound truths I had come to believe.
I believe that the world was intentionally made, not haphazardly
formed. That the One who invented the universe was infinite and good and wise
and was involved with His creatures. I believe that this good God so loved the
broken, wicked world that He gave His one
and only Son and that this Son, being in very nature God, somehow made
himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in
human likeness.
I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is this
incarnate God and that in his human form He
was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities and that
the punishment that brought me peace
was upon Him and that by His wounds I
am healed.
I believe it all.
And not only I believe it, but others do as well; the whole church, in fact. So
when we gathered together as God’s rescued kids, we expected, maybe
subconsciously, to be part of something that resonated with the profound things
inside us.
What we got was a clash.
Our small slice of Eternity / HIM were
mixed with the words of songs that seemed driven by the need to rhyme more than
the need to express deep, living theology. These lyrical clichés were, in a
technical sense, completely true. But in being devoid of depth and insight, they
were also terribly false.
The Profound
Truths often clashed with the sermons.
Having preached a little, I truly respect (and
feel for) anyone who takes up this responsibility. Feed My sheep is a daunting task, which is why not many should teach. But if we’re going to take the stage, I
think our speech should be of the Emmaus kind. On the road, Jesus spoke words that
compelled His listeners to say, “Were not
our hearts burning within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the
Scriptures to us?”
Hearts burning.
Scriptures opened.
That kind of preaching harmonises with the Wondrous Things within us. In fact, such
preaching even heats the Wondrous Things
up. I have experienced sermons that were like air blown over the coals of my lukewarm
convictions, making them hot again.
Boring / shallow / humanistic messages can’t do that. At
best, they clash with our sense of God’s bigness and cause us to be glad when it’s time for coffee and
biscuits. At worst, they shrink our
sense of God till we begin to think that HE is like the messages we keep
hearing.
Sometimes that leaves me angry and
perplexed. But mostly I feel very little, which, in the end, disturbs me more. That’s
because I’m prone to mediocrity and self-indulgence. I’m nowhere near what I
could be as a disciple and cannot afford to stay in a place that allows my
weaknesses to go unchallenged. What I want – what I need – is to be in a community that calls better things out
of me, that helps me feel a better kind of anguish – the anguish of feeling God’s
greatness and wishing that I loved Him more than I do.
So I’ve left my church of 20 years.
Where to
now?
That’s the
other question I’m invariably asked: “Where
are you going to fellowship now?”
The truth is, I don’t know.
I’m interested in exploring other ways of
gathering with believers, ways that aren’t the theatre model of seats facing a centre stage. But I’m not gung-ho
about that. I could happily take my family to a church that does the standard
approach well.
For me, the key isn’t 20 people vs. 200 or Seats
in a Circle vs Seats Facing Forward. What
I need most is a sense that the things we’re doing together are cut from the
same momentous cloth as the things we believe, as the God we believe in.
Blessings
M
