Why People Hate Church ...

There is a movement today both in and outside of the Christian community to separate the “spiritual” nature of man from “organized” religion.  “Religion” itself has somewhat become a “bad” word.  I would love to be able to write this off as a mere matter of semantics or misaligned definitions, but there is far more to it than that.  The weekly routine of “going to church” has become a practice in itself with the ability to predict behaviors, outcomes, and projected attendance.  Youth tend to fall into two categories, the deeply passionate minority, and the largely apathetic majority who simply “hate church”, but not God.

So what happened to ‘religion’ that made one of its central practices such a chore, or worse?  Let’s begin by looking at the fundamental problem in any church service – traditions.  While everything else in humanity, including even Christian doctrines, have evolved and matured over time, so much so that they would be hard to recognize by someone from the late 1700’s; church has not changed much at all.  In fact, our misplaced pilgrim friend would be largely at home in most of the traditional churches across North America.  Even more so, in the far more conservative churches of South America, Africa, and the former Soviet Union.  Why you ask?  Not much of a church go-er hey!?  Because the typical church service is based on traditions that have not kept pace with the times since 1790.  It is like we somehow came so far, and then got frozen in time.

Tradition, upon closer examination, is really nothing more than a particular kind of worship style.  A predefined list of activities, in a predefined order, with a predefined genre of music, and a predictable speaker.  There of course many variations of the style of preaching, and the style of music in a service – but they ALL stick to a predefined list of items that generally last about 2-4 hours.  The “modern” churches emphasize much less on the formality of clothing worn to the service (i.e. read jeans or shorts are acceptable); usually offer contemporary sounding worship music styles; and have a youth-oriented speaker.  Traditional churches can be a wonderful affair with full blown pipe organs playing Bach during the interludes, formal attire, and ordained speakers offering traditional fair.  Country churches are smaller, poorer, and more down to earth; they wear suits from Sears, and J.C. Penney; they greet each other by name; they sing hymns from hymnal.  All different styles, all different parishioners.  Two things in common mostly, traditions they follow, and their memberships are usually in decline.

Yes, I know people seem to be leaving the older more traditional churches for the newer ‘modern’ ones, but this is like updating your music collection from 1890’s hymnal to 1920’s big band.  You moved along, but you are nowhere near where you could be.  And speakers are trying to recapture the youth by becoming more youth-aware.  But this is as acceptable as me, a white man in his forties, walking into Harlem to hang out with my “bro’s” attempting to speak eloquent Ebonics.  I figure to be dead in ten minutes.  But in fairness, I will have lasted longer than most youth listening to misguided speakers trying out “their” language.

So what is the secret?  How about a little REALITY!!!  No, I don’t mean buying more land and making bigger buildings.  Nor do I mean setting up a Survivor meets the Great Race, meets Kitchen Nightmares experience during the services.  What I mean is how about the “church” which is really made up of its members, getting back to the idea of making a real difference in their worlds in the here and the now.  What if coming together on a weekly basis was less about tradition, and more about service to others.  What if it were about planning, coordinating, and acting on mission’s right here in the local neighborhoods and communities.  What if church went from a meaningless set of predefined activities to a place where anything could and did happen that benefited others.

Youth do not need someone who relates to them, they need someone who relates with GOD.  They need a genuine speaker whose life is being changed by the power of God; not an eloquent speaker who has no clue who God really is.  Genuine.  Authentic.  Real.  Do these words ring a bell?  Youth are not looking for a perfect person, they are too smart for that.  They already know that no-one is perfect (yet).  They are looking for someone who can both admit it, and then talk plainly about real solutions to real problems that make your real life better.  This is what not only the youth of America crave, it is what everyone in the world craves – real solutions, to real problems, that a loving God is alone capable of providing.

But instead of this, or perhaps because the folks in church have no idea what I am talking about, we get wrapped up in making the “worship experience” all it can be.  We integrate multimedia to stimulate the senses, add instruments to spice up the music, tune up our lighting gear, engineer our sound boards, focus our TV cameras, and get the whole experience out on the WEB for viewers to see.  Very soon our words reflect our priorities when we start saying really stupid slogans like … “we were made to worship”. 

Really!?  Our loving God created an entire species capable of independent thought, the ability to pro-create, invent, and reason – so that our entire sole divine purpose of existence would be to … worship God and like this.  Nonsense!  Worshipping God is a RESPONSE to His love, not a pre-requisite.  Worship is something we do from the recognition of who God is.  But we have elevated its purpose to become our all consuming passion.  And in so doing we have replaced service to others with our “worship experiences”.  We crave the momentary high of worship over the down and dirty act of service.  Hmm … can’t imagine why?  Maybe because yet again we are thinking primarily about self, even within the confines of our Christian religion.

You want to worship, do so at the homeless center – AFTER you have made a real difference in someone’s life.  Do so in the car on the way home from the food bank after you make a deposit.  And if you think you do not have enough money to give to someone else, then give something of far greater value, give of your heart.  Be a friend to someone everyone else hates, and is hard, I mean HARD to love.  After all, that is what you may look like in another’s eyes.  Give of your time.  Give a child just 30 minutes of undivided attention, no TV or movies to entertain, just you and them and your imaginations, the nature that surrounds you, the Word that gives you meaning.  Can’t hang in there that long with a kid, then give them 10 minutes.  Five.  Anything?  Why is worship more meaningful, than anything I just described?  Why not replace 2-4 hours of euphoria with 2-4 hours of service that might actually impact someone else this week?

Nothing about Christianity as it is practiced today looks real to anyone.  We claim a real God, but do not really follow His practices, or share His heart.  Instead we offer words of judgment and often condemnation but offer nothing of hope and redemption.  We guard our sacred times, and holidays, so that we can spend 2-4 hours back in a building that reminds us of nothing but our own guilt.  We seek tradition more than service.  We seek the internalization of “worship” more than service.  We seek out music and speakers that make us happy more than service.  In short, we seek self more than service, and it is plain for everyone to see what we seek.  We announce it on loud speakers in the lives we live and the words we utter.  There is no REALITY in Religion anymore.  There is no fundamental change and apostleship anymore.

The apostles of old cared about their churches, meaning they truly cared about the needs of the people who comprised the church.  They cared about those who knew Christ, and those had yet to know Him.  And because they cared, they planned, they coordinated, they pooled resources, sent envoys, collected for the common cause.  Church was about the building of the brotherhood and the strengthening of the faith, less so about the testimony of a selected predefined speaker.  People listened to Peter and Paul, both young and old, because they were REAL.  They related to God, even if their language barriers prevented them from relaying as effectively with everyone else they met (i.e. the reason why the gift of interpretation was poured out on the early church, now known as the gift of tongues). 

Instead of trying to find meaning in the repetitive nature of songs we sing every week until they become just words with pleasant tunes; how about if we search for meaning in building real relationships with those we claim a common bond with.  How about if we just begin to get to know who it is we are ‘worshipping’ beside.  Maybe we can make a difference in the lives of those closest to us.  Maybe we can restore reality to our religion, and turn church back into a focal point for service, rather than an auditorium for self…

Heart Break ...

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Baptism ...

One uniquely Judeo-Christian tradition still in practice today besides Marriage, Communion, and Ordination is Baptism.  This public act is meant to acknowledge a love for Christ, and a dedication of sorts towards good and away from evil.  The symbolism of being submersed in the water represents death to the world and the evil within it, within us.  Followed by the resurrection (coming back up out of the water), which represents the new creature renewed and recreated by Christ symbolically in this process.  Death to evil, re-birth of life to good.  But what is the point of continued symbolism in the 21^st century anyway?  Why bother?

The all knowing God we have talked about thus far surely knows the intents of our hearts, He knows if we love Him, and if we are trying to serve Him; far more than any singular public act could ever convey.  If the heart is what matters to God they why go through with a 2000 (appx) year old tradition?  And if it is the life we live that defines us as Christians, or followers of good, then our daily example should immediately identify us as Christians; far more than a singular act could ever convey.  True Christians love everyone in an unconditional way, this characteristic is their hallmark, not a one-time dunk in a tank.  Besides should we not seek the humility of anonymity rather than the spectacle of public pronouncement?

And of course just to be practical, getting Baptized seems the quickest way to put the evil bulls-eye target on our own foreheads.  Getting the evil forces of this earth even more bent on our destruction hardly seems the prudent thing to do when trying to avoid evil all together.  Ratcheting up the motivation of the enemy is not the potentially wisest move you can make when you are already outgunned and overmatched. 

Lastly, we don’t even practice the tradition in the way in which it was intended.  In the days of Christ, baptism was designed for the remission of sins.  It was a way of publicly confessing sins, and renewing your stand against them in future.  This was the mission and ministry of John the Baptist who appears before Christ in the limelight of old Judea.  After the establishment of the Christian church, Baptism became a way of publicly confirming that you were a follower of Jesus Christ as the Son of the Living God.  No other doctrine was required, merely that you believed in Jesus.  If you did, you got baptized.  It was not to join a particular sect of the protestant church, within a particular denomination, or to a local church body – it was a declaration of your Christianity, nothing more.

All this reasoning stacks up against the idea.  But the creator of our world, our bodies, and originator of our souls, knows us better than we know ourselves.  The symbolism embraced in baptism is not dead, or meaningless in today’s world, in point of fact it has even more meaning and carries more weight.

Publicity.  Movie stars crave it.  Common folk dream of their own 15 minutes of fame.  Most of us like the idea of our names on a billboard, or on the bottom of an executive payroll check.  But to publicly identify ones self as a follower of a living creator God, who sent His own Son into the world to save the world – is to publicly surrender the idea of self-reliance.  The very act, combined with its publicity, strips one of the right to argue their own dominance of their own salvation.  It is an act of surrender.  It is an acknowledgement that I need salvation.  That one needs a creator God to save them from themselves, as they will be unable to accomplish this task.  The publicity of this tradition, signals that the priority of the baptized is not on themselves, but on the God they serve.

The end of embarrassment.  One cannot remain embarrassed by the practice of Christianity while making a public statement as to our acceptance of it.  We are NOT ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is the way of Salvation.  While every future action or future failure we endure will not always cast the best light on our service to God, it will not deny us from making a pure public announcement of whose team we wish to be on.  I may make a poor ambassador for my God, but I do not fault my God for this failure, and refuse to identify who I serve because of my own inadequacies.

The death of evil.  Yes, think of the symbolism here, it has many meanings.  First, that evil will die.  It will not be permitted to exist anywhere forever, including within us.  Evil has a life expectancy which does not include forever.  Good will reign forever, evil will be terminated at some point. 

Second, we are completely filled with evil of our own accord.  There are those who blame God for our condition of sin.  Those who are angry at genetics, heredity, and the environment which they are born into.  They resent God for the condition they choose to embrace, and for their own natural inclinations.  But inclination is not destiny.  Genetics and heredity can be overcome though it is hard.  And the proper use of surrender, in the process of salvation, could find one walking as Enoch walked – with God, and ready for translation without ever seeing death.  Sin is ultimately a matter of choice.  And though we are born to it, we are not bound by it, because of the victory we can have from Jesus.

Third, the death of evil within us, will require the death of us.  Think this symbolism through very carefully.  Our own inclination to sin is so strong, that our human nature is too weak to extinguish it.  To get rid of the evil within us, we must die to self.  An end to all things labeled self.  Ego.  Self-reliance, self-assurance, greed, pride, lust, self-confidence, self-obsession – All of it must go.  To kill it, we must kill us, the self of us, the self in us.  When all that is self is dead, when all that we prize is sacrificed, we arise recreated with an absence of self-obsession, and a focus on service to others.  The rebirth of us through emersion is our recreation with Christ at our core, or love at our core, instead of a mirror in our core.

The wages of sin is death.  Baptism symbolizes the death of us.  The only way we could be saved was the death of our God in our place.  The meaning is both profound and no less relevant today than it was 2000 years ago.  While the symbolism is quick, the process of truly dying to self seems to elude most of us for quite a while.  The act of surrender is not one we are taught to embrace anywhere in our society.  American education teaches compliance but not surrender.  American attitudes embrace self-determination not the abandonment of self-control, surrendered to an invisible God.  Indeed surrender of the will is portrayed as tantamount to death itself.  Is there any wonder there are so few Enoch’s walking in the world today?

In point of fact dying for the cause of Christ is easier than living a life of complete surrender for the same cause.  At least in death, the experience is singular, immediate, permanent, without any further memory of pain.  But to live in a state of constant surrender of one’s own will to our God.  Allowing our God to recreate in our mind’s eye the things we desire, the things that make us happy, the music we like, the media we watch, the opposite sex object of our affections we treasure – just how far are we to go with this?  All the way.  Full surrender is holding nothing back.  Full surrender is re-crafting the core of who you are.  This process begins with acceptance of Christ, is acknowledged with Baptism, and continues every day of life you live, until you finally see God.

I encourage those who think Baptism is no longer relevant in our day in age to take a closer look at what it truly means.  I would encourage all those who are reluctant to be publicly identified with a Savior God to perhaps re-examine their reasons for reluctance.  There is no silver bullet to end the evil in our existence.  But there is a God we trust to do it, we embrace to do it within us, why exactly given the depths of change we require in the core of who we are – would we exclude this old tradition?  Perhaps the reluctance is merely another diversion of evil, meant to keep you from experiencing the power of this symbolism.  Perhaps when you experience this power for yourself, your own vision might be changed …

Generic Spiritualism ...

Recognizing the need for a God, or the existence of a God, can sometimes get clouded by the variety of claims of who or what that God might be.  The Bible presents a wonderful love story that identifies how we came into existence, how evil entered our world, and to what lengths God was willing to go to save us from our fate.  But in the Bible, are other stories and historical accounts, that are not so pleasant to read at first brush.  Telling truth sometimes without a filter, can be the hardest words to hear or accept.  This has led man to look outside of the Bible to find out more about God.

In his quest to avoid the unpleasant, man starts taking the best of the teachings of other religions, and combining them into a new picture of God.  Morality itself becomes unhinged from God or really any objective standard and is simply taught as a goal to attain to.  Imperfection is not only tolerated, it is put on a pedestal as some sort of mark of honor.  In this way man seeks to use his wisdom to overlook the superstitions of the past and evolve himself to new higher plain of consciousness.  What used to be a literal love letter to man, the Bible is them positioned as nothing more than a mere series of allegories for the Jewish people.  Christ goes from savior, to substantial prophet.  His teachings are so pure they are not condemned, but His divinity is put aside completely.

Having bought in to this new found spirituality, the new believer unencumbered by superstitions of the past is now free.  In point of fact, free to become God himself.  The goal of this thinking is not slanted anywhere near service, but to introspection.  Self awareness, and self fulfillment, become the end goal of mixed truth spirituality.  Giving to the poor as Christ taught becomes a moral value, but is not carried out for the benefit of the poor, but merely to prove oneself moral under these new enlightened terms.  There are no hard standards or truths in this conglomeration of thought.  When you reach any thing that displeases you in one venue, you simply switch venues and adopt a competing thought on the topic.

In this way it is possible to become a spiritual person by blending Catholicism, Protestanism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddism, Islam, as well as unusual native religions or philosophies from around the globe – what some might call Paganism.  Add in some quantum physics, or modern psychiatry, blend in a little modern philosophy and the result – a new man, a new 'spiritual' man.  And of course the appeal of this thinking is 2 fold.  First, you can pat yourself on the back for being so wise and free from superstition, i.e. you are evolved.  And second, you can still be a spiritual person who believes in God and have found your own back to Him.  No thought of losing the afterlife, just an expansion on what the afterlife might be.

But the problem with this entire line of thinking is the fundamental denial of truth it is based on.  To embrace many different religions one must be willing to ignore the conflicts among them.  Those conflicts are usually fundamental to the picture of the character of God they espouse.  Writing them off to superstitions is a cop out, and avoids the picture of God's character their teachings would espouse. 

People trapped into this new line of thinking usually head there because they do not want to take the Bible literally.  The Bible makes too many demands on them, that they wish to avoid, or tells too many stories that do not end happily.  Lets discuss the first objection for a moment.  For a person who embraces his cocaine addiction, and really really loves his cocaine, he will likely not recognize the negative effects his addition carries with it.  The weight loss, health decay, theft for means to buy more, and the absolute focus on his next fix, more than on loved ones, career, or anything else in life – none of these mean anything to the cocaine addict.  Trapped in an addition he likes what he finds.  Sure he does not like everything, but he likes the cocaine enough to ignore the rest.  So it is with men who profess to love the sin they embrace.

No matter how small the negative effects of a sin may seem to the addict, no matter how harmless the situation may appear to be, it is in reality creating a toll of damage in its wake that can hardly be undone.  The sinner seldom sees or recognizes his own state.  They see the damage of other's sins but do not see their own.  The 'demands' of the Bible to forsake this damage are read as arbitrary commands to give up pleasure, rather than desperate warnings to avoid pain.  The love and care of the author is presumed to be control and dominance, in short the character of God is misread, as a result of the love of the addiction of sin we have embraced.  No one who has rejected the Bible can claim to be exempt from this thinking.  The conflicts between man's natural character and inclination to embrace his painful addictive behaviors stands in sharp contrast to the clear truth of the Bible which would have man forsake his addiction and embrace a new life without such chains of pain.

The second objection to the literacy and authenticity of scripture comes from reading too many harsh stories, or stories without happy endings.  From entire civilizations of people God instructed the Israelites to kill completely, to bears coming out of the woods to eat children making fun of His prophet, to a flood that destroyed the entire world.  The consequences to our imperfect actions from time to time have resulted in permanent punishments.  This is a concept men do not want to accept.  We are fine with the concepts of forgiveness and long suffering, almost to the point of abusing them.  But to know that evil will one day be made extinct.  To know that someday those who have chosen to embrace evil rather than allow God to change them will share the fate of evil.  To know that death does follow separation from God.  These are the less pleasant truths the Bible does teach.

We are not qualified to judge the character of God as these painful punishments were doled out.  But we are more than able to see His patience with sinful men throughout all of scripture, and in our own lives, and therefore can conclude that if God did elect to take permanent action He must have had an overwhelming reason to do so.  This trust in God can easily be established if the Bible is read in its entirety, from cover to cover, not ignoring the hard parts, but understanding the purpose of love throughout every text.

There is one last danger that comes from attempting to embrace rule-less generic, enlightened spirituality.  It is the replacement of the divinity of Christ with the divinity of self.  Ultimately these philosophies and lines of thinking, glorify the wisdom of man above all else.  Ultimately the conclusion of these new forms of religion is to evolve man higher and higher on the food chain till he becomes a god himself.  Sound familiar.  Lucifer wanted to become 'like the most high'.  Even he knew he could not become greater, but the same was his aspiration which he never achieved.

Just looking logically at this premise for a second, it is easy to examine one's own life and see all the mistakes, misjudgments, and pain we have caused both to ourselves and to those who love us.  If being honest, none of our lives are worthy of imitation.  Yet compare your particular existence with that of Christ.  Whether you accept His divinity or not for a moment, his life was perfect.  He never caused harm to others, but sought to save them.  He served only others never himself.  He dies a martyrs death for the love He believed in.  He could have easily been king in this world, which he rejected willingly teaching the value of the next world.  He is the only person in written history to have a clean historical account.  Even under torture he remained true to His teachings of love.  Even in death.  Given that account, and looking only at your own life in comparison, are you so sure that He was not divine, and that you are a worthy candidate to be divine?

Christ reveals in human flesh the character of God.  Christ reveals the only true God as only love could exist forever, evil will not.  Christ reveals the redemptive character of God, willing to do the work for us, so that all we need do is accept it.  It is not an exclusionary phrase to say that only by Christ can one be saved, it is a statement of fact.  He is the ONLY God to die to save his creations.  It is His sacrifice that reveals who the ONLY true God is.  Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, and the Pope cannot make such claims.  Nothing in Hinduism or any other world religion teaches that God came to save us from ourselves and our bondage to evil.  Only Christ.  This may seem like a hard truth to some, but it is the beginning of real freedom, of real redemption, not just for a mystical afterlife but for here and for now.  Generic spiritualism is nothing but an illusion, next to the truth of the power of love that Christ alone represents and can affect in your life today …