CHRISTIANS ARE RUNNING WEARY

So many Christians are running weary. I am thinking primarily now of adults, young parents who responsibly raise children and teens with team sports, chauffeuring to school and church activities, volunteer to teach, lead, govern, and exhaust all their discretionary time. They have no time for themselves. They have carved no time in a day, maybe in the week for personal debriefing, assessment, reflection, time alone with the LORD. They feel busy but dissatisfied. They have cheated themselves. And then comes Sunday. They have to show up again.

Your bum on a seat at Sunday church is not a good measure of your spirituality. Being there does not insure you are being fueled. It may be just one more event that eats up your time. Being seen at Sunday worship should not be equated with worshipping. You and scores of others will actually worship corporately when each person has met with God in earnest relationship before the meeting. Intimacy with God does not begin at the formal meeting with a call to worship, with a rousing song. A heart tug and a stung conscience from a stirring sermon will not ensure behavioral change.

Too soon, you may conclude as so many have, that the church is not meeting your needs. The pastor's material is not connecting with you. Perhaps another alternative can be found, another church, larger perhaps, some place to get lost, a place to take the kids off your hands for a couple of hours, a place where when you say "no thanks" to an invitation to participate, no one will care. And some time later, your children lose interest because your own experience is not encouraging them. And you drop off and drop out.

It will be preferable that you take responsibility for yourself. Your personal spiritual development is your concern. Ultimately it is a relationship with the living, loving God in which you are interested. No one can give that to you or nurture it for you. Some people can be a resource, that's all. You yourself must take control of your schedule and your priorities to know God and talk over life with him, and become excited about what he is doing in your and around you each hour of each day. As the amazement increases and the enthusiasm mounts, you may want to find other believers with a vital walk with God, and together worship with a passion you thought was possible but never knew.

RETHINK WORSHIP - NOSTALGIA VERSUS POPULAR

I am unsure whether I am being realistic. Perhaps you can tell me. Worship and church have been synonymous but what we have been doing with worship deserves examination. First, we have lately presumed music is equated with worship and this has led to silly tags like worship CDs, worship leaders, worship bands, and worship teams, effectively omitting scripture reading, recitations, preaching, prayer, offering, testimonies and silence from a definition for 'worship.' As composers have produced creative and fresh hymns and spiritual songs there have also been attempts to accommodate the range of reactions. Many churches have provided options, that is, dissimilar worship services. Traditional versus contemporary is the pitched tension. Old versus new is a dichotomy that I view as needless and unhappy. Nostalgia versus popular? Baloney.

Who wants this? Pastoral staff members do not want additional preps and toil. Medium sized churches agonize from splintered relationships when trying to imitate the professed success of wealthier and grander churches. Segregation by age breaks the spirit of the Body. An older generation does not need to worship alone. Seniors don't need only music composed before or during their own youth. They must participate and witness the enthusiasm and involvement of younger generations. Children, youth and young adults need to experience worship together with elders to understand the corporate identity of this people that Jesus has redeemed. We should consistently be incorporating new songs into the best songs of previous generations. What is indispensable is a theological filter within each congregation to insure that the theologies do not differ between newer and older material. 

And then there is this peculiarity. When an expectation is provided that people deserve choices of worship styles, they are offended when their selection is altered or removed, so they leave. Of course an individual can worship privately, but that is not to say worship is about the individual. We are not a community of consumers. God also calls his new covenant people to worship together with others as a distinct group of those who share a salvation story. Am I being realistic or sticking my head in the sand?

THEOLOGICAL BANKRUPTCY in church should be a concern to us.

Across the spectrum of church affiliations and denominations the church population is becoming theologically bankrupt. That's my assessment and also the result of surveys. It concerns me.  Several observations leave me disturbed for Christ's church and the believers who comprise His Bride.

Church and Christian life disassociated from theology for many people.

Today I heard a pastor assert that over the past 14 years at his church, 20 couples who were married there, have divorced. It breaks his heart. There can be numerous factors is such staggering dissolution but try this one on. Theology is often considered to be academic and intellectual and unrelated to the 'more important' church activities and weekday programs. This assumption means theology is meaningless to so much of life. The life of God is road blocked. If a relationship with God (theology) is foundational and drives a life and service and other relationships, surely the word about God is relevant and needs to be well-defined and understood. Theology and the average person should be synonymous and not relegated to seminaries. Truly daily linking to, yielding to and loving God in his sovereignty, sanctity, purity, holiness and power will affect all of life inside and outside church.

Eisegetical preaching and teaching (application) is trumping truth.

It is troubling that pastors, Bible class teachers, and spokespersons often lack training and gifting needed to let the Bible speak. It is the difference between eisegetical and exegetical interpretations of scripture. Eisegesis reads into the text whereas exegesis extracts and draws out from the text. What does it mean to you rather than what does it say? A text is not understood solely by answering what it means to me. We may force God's word to say something unintended when we seek to make it meaningful rather than to disclose what it means. That's why Christians are struggling and divided over the acceptability of gay and lesbian lifestyles and living together before marriage, and so many other controversial issues.

Exclusive association of worship with music.

One's life should be worship, the whole of it. It is concerning enough when Christians believe that worship applies only to one hour on Sundays. A step further and theological reduction is demonstrated by our terminology when worship is equated with only the music portion of that hour. We begin with a time of 'worship,' that musical portion led by a 'worship' leader or pastor. Followers of Jesus who are not fully devoted 24/7 may result from compartmentalizing something as basic as worship.  

Christians unfamiliar with their Bibles.

We have all witnessed the shift from text-based learning to image-based learning at home, in school, and now in church. Beginning with acetate projections and then PowerPoint, the technology has an unfortunate unintentional outcome of dissuading people from knowing where in the Bible the projected texts can be found. People do not know their Bibles very well. Shallow Bible knowledge, and thin preaching leads to superficial faith.  Less than 20% of professing Christians have a biblical worldview, according to a Barna survey. Less than 50% of them believe Satan is real, or believe in absolute moral truth. Only 62% believe Jesus was sinless.

What do you think can be done about this? What needs to take place in homes? What shifts must occur in churches? What disciplines must individual Christians adopt?

LET’S HAVE A SAFE AND OPEN TALK ABOUT PEOPLE LEAVING CHURCH

There are Christians who remain theologically evangelical but who have journeyed philosophically from being comfortable within church as the one way to live church. I suspect that I cannot talk about this in an open way in most of the church circles in which I am known. To suggest that some people may actually satisfy their spiritual hunger outside the church, may be perceived as criticism of church, which is not my target. Yet this is among the issues with which Christians and churches should engage. A trickle of people have stopped going to church over many years. The trickle is a stream according to some reports. I am certainly aware of numerous friends and acquaintances who no longer attend church. They still love the organized church for the foundation it provided to them when they were young and when they were growing up spiritually. They have found, however, that they are uncomfortable within the culture of the westernized church. They require something else.  

I have been advocating that Christians inside churches should work at understanding rather than at suspicion. I am not convinced that all of those who leave have taken or are taking steps appropriate to spiritual development. It is easy to become lethargic. If spiritual disciplines were lacking while attending a church, they will not easily emerge outside it. So while I advocate to the insiders, I implore the outsiders as well to act on the conviction that allowed them to leave - namely, church is not the main or only place where we worship God. 

RE-CHURCHED? IS THAT BETTER THAN DE-CHURCHED?

I have been writing about people who have stopped attending church. My friend Marvin left a question on the previous post, asking whether the term 're-churched' serves as a descriptor for people who no longer attend church? The prefix "re" has several meanings. It can mean “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition. Repetition doesn't work here. These people are not leaving one church after another. They have stopped attending church. That's it. However, if the preferred intent for the prefix is "again,' then the expression "re-churched' can apply to a small percentage of non-attenders who for some reason decide to go back and try again. However, they may not appreciate being labeled "re-churched."

Today's comment spins from my recent blog chat in which I used the term 'de-churched' but later found this was inappropriate because "no longer churched" people are still connected with God's definition of Church. They are not "de-Churched" (capital C). They are detached from a local church. They believe in Christian theological essentials and they live Christianly. They have not abandoned faith. They practice faith outside of the organized church, and they worship privately or within their family or a small affinity group.

If a Christian stops going to church and is heard to say with relief, "Ohhh, finally free." That person is not likely to return to church any time soon. The term 're-churched' cannot apply to them without some linguistic stretching. Maybe they are churched 'again' or re-churched in a manner dissimilar to any conventional model but nonetheless connected to the concept of fellowship, service, worship, reading of scripture, prayer, giving to others, support of missionaries, nurture of children, all of that which identifies with church.

GOING BACK, FAR BACK, FOR THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH

I believe that Christians need to be provoked to re-examine our practice of faith in the context of church as we have either invented it, inherited it or as we perpetuate it.

When I was a boy and throughout the early years of my own pastoral ministry career, Sunday church consisted of Sunday School classes for all ages, followed by a one hour conventional church worship service containing three hymns, beginning, middle and end, a prayer, an offering, a sermon. The sermon and the spoken Word were paramount in evangelical churches. That was it. Within evangelicalism, this model was a departure from liturgical ceremonial worship in mainline churches. Why did we do it that way?

Twenty-five years ago a contemporary worship wave began in charismatic circles and swept most evangelical churches. A team of worship leaders with guitars and drums occupied platforms and led standing congregations of worshippers in singing praise choruses for 20-30 minutes. This gave the congregation greater expressive involvement modelled by music forms they listened to every day. Why do we do it that way, still?

Some believers ask this question because for them, personally, some aspect of worship is absent, reverence, solemnity, awe, or earnestness. They must name it. Their souls long for something perhaps approximate and unmet. Finally they leave church.

They begin to think that maybe they should go back to the future.

Going back far enough takes us into the presence of Christ sitting with his disciples. He spoke about church to them. Examination reveals that church as he envisioned it was enormous and in practice it was modest, simple. Church would be an applicable term to embrace countless disciples throughout the world in every generation until the end of time. Church would meet in homes, caves, forests, prisons, refugee camps, schools, and buildings constructed by Christians specifically for their gatherings. Wherever they met they invoked the presence of God, were filled with the Spirit of God, praised the Lord Jesus Christ with muted or exuberant voices depending on circumstances, and then went forth to live by faith and to give a reason for their belief to everyone who asked them.

Maybe we should go back to the future. The trip back could become our future. Maybe it should be the future that we seek. Maybe the Church needs nothing more than to be filled with the Spirit and satisfied with Christ.

SERENITY & GRIPPED BY GOD

Today I will continue yesterday's refrain.

It pleases me when anyone says, "I just love my church. There's so much happening. I get so much from pastor's messages. Lives are really being changed. I love the worship music, it's so uplifting, enthusiastic, and all genders and generations are active and helping out. We have weeknight small groups and ours is closely knit and loving, like a family. "

That speaks of an environment that is conducive to adoration, teaching and learning and service. Who could want anything more than that? How can you improve on that? And yet, some people have sensibilities or needs that are not met there.

WORSHIP IN THE TRUEST SENSE

Worship, within the culture of the present church, comes down to, how well did certain performers do during a specific period of time on Sunday. Worship in the minds of many churchgoers is understood as that which certain people with certain skills do, even when what they do is designed to involve churchgoers. Worship is then evaluated in terms of how well the worship time was planned, how singable and intelligible were the songs that were chosen, how well the musicians played and sang and appeared, and how well the preacher communicated.

Worship is different from that and so much more than that when scripture is the resource for a definition. When scripture describes angels in heaven worshipping and when ancient patriarchs and peoples worshipped, and when early New Testament saints worshipped, that worship clearly related to the person who is the object of the worship rather than to the quality of human performance. Worship in this scriptural sense, has to do with the worth of the object of worship, to be worshipped. God is worthy of worship. Inherent to who God is, is this obligatory response from every created being. There is a natural relationship between God and all that he has created, between the Creator and creation, creatures, mortals, individuals. This normal relationship should naturally compel the created to worship the Creator. The requisite response to worship God has been suppressed and repressed in some of creation, blocked and inhibited, confused and misdirected, intellectualized and redefined or ignored altogether. When something so right as worship, goes so wrong, the only explanation is sin as scripture defines and describes and condemns it. When sin is eradicated from the human through human faith in the reality of Christ's atonement, which issues in divine pardon and renovation of human loyalty, then the Creator once again receives the worship suitable to him, the worship God deserves, the worship the creature yearns to give. Such worship is not prescribed by specific days and times. It is relevant always and constantly appropriate. All that we think, say, do, see, and imagine, shall be to the glory and praise of God. Such concentration insures purity of thought and action.

CHRISTIAN SONG LYRICS - GIVE US SOMETHING MORE

My spirit desires lyrics to newer songs of worship to God, to appropriately reflect his excellence, his holiness. I need songs that incorporate theological truth. I can accept that songs should incorporate the vernacular and speak to newer generations using new idioms, yet I question what seems a default composer habit of converting transcendence to familiarity, privilege to banality. Some songs typify this for me. Even a good composer like Chris Tomlin puts out a song like 'In The Secret,' that assumes through capitalized pronouns that we should know to whom we are singing, although there is no reference to that person.  And yet we sing the chorus of words, "I want to know You, I want to hear Your voice, I want to know You more. I want to touch You, I want to see Your face, I want to know You more." And I cannot escape the feeling that I am singing about adolescent love. Perhaps it's just me, yet I hope you can understand my preference for thinking of the sovereign 'otherness' of God and of Jesus, the uniqueness, the distinctiveness.

If I never sing the lyrics of the emotion evoking, 'One thing Remains,' I can be content. The refrain is, "Your love never fails, never gives up, Never runs out on me," to be repeated three times, after each of three verses, and likely a couple of more times for good measure. The thematic content is something that I myself have prayed with thanksgiving to God so the lyrics are not fundamentally flawed. The song itself is simply thin theologically and not worth my time, specially when married to the tune which becomes vexing, because it is repeated so often. Yet, that's why many people love the song. So, again, perhaps it's just me. It feels to me like discount worship, bargain stuff.

As a balance to my view, I am quoting a friend who has written recently a counter point. I am impressed. Bryan Swash "The ever ending critique and misunderstanding of current worship expression. 1. As for repetition ever read Psalm 136? 2. As for no mention of God. Ever read the book of Esther? The context of those songs is the worship service. If someone's mind goes to their teenage crush it says more about them then the song. 3. The purpose of the song is to engage a left brain encounter, a part of us that Jesus drew attention to in Matt 22:37. 4. No one song says it all. Like no one scripture says it all. Again balance is important. The psalms often declare one aspect of a truth but need further scriptures to balance the truth out. 5. Let's rejoice a new generation is seeking to draw near to God (James 4:8) and discovering he is drawing near to them. A very sacred desire and privilege. Is Psalm 134 a ditty? 3 verses only! Blessings all…."