A Prayer for A New Church

I claim no divine revelation.   I am just observing of the times in which I live.    You may see it differently--that's your privilege.

The way I see it, the church as the institution I have known for fifty years is dying--or at least very, very sick. It would take a miracle to restore the American Protestant church to the health it once enjoyed.

What is the reason for its ailment?  Secularism--not the secularism of the general society (that is expected) but the secular spirit within the church.  The church  has traded its soul for secular importance. 

 The Christian church was born in the fire of the Spirit, launched by belivers who committed their whole hearts to  Christ,  and copied Him all things.  It was a disciplined network of disciples, dedicated to following his ways.  

Somewhere along the way,  it changed.  It lost its taste for the sacred.  Instead, the church reinvented itself, seeing itself as a worldly institution, seeking its reputation in the world as part of the power elite.  Instead of following Jesus' mandate to bless the weak, and the poor, and the hurting,  we became a tool of the rich, the powerful and the self-important.  

The seeds of the church's malaise was with us even in the time of the disciples.  While they followed Jesus, they badgered him wanting to know which of them would be the greatest.  Jesus answered that greatness and earth and greatness in the Kingdom are not the same. 

We're still asking this question.   We concern ourselves with who has the biggest sanctuaries, the nicest choirs,  and loudest praise bands and the hippest members.

For the first three hundred years, the church seemed more focused on the Spirit.  We were a persecuted minority. No one in their right mind would want to join a church  unless they believed in Jesus and wanted to find Him.

Then the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and everything changed.  Suddenly, anyone who wanted the emperor's ear became a Christian as a way of currying favor with the emperor. The power hungry, the glory seeking, and the opportunists flocked to the church. In no time,  the church  became just another path to success.

For the last seventeen hundred years, not only has the  church been a visible presence in the world, but the world has been a visible presence in the church--with the rich and famous on the front pew.  The church built mighty cathedrals in every town,  took part in inaugurations and coronations, had the invocations at sporting events,  and  generally became the safe, civil religion of Western society.  As a result, the fires of the Spirit burned, sharing  its space with the ambitions of the powerful.

The church is not evil, though. It has done many good things in the world.  It has evangelized much of the world,  build hospitals, schools,  universities, etc.  But  there has always been another side.  Church leaders lust for societal respectability, to be the biggest church in town, have the most expensive sanctuary,  the most important members,  the most professional choirs, and have the most eloquent preachers.  Our desire to be important requires big budgets.  In order to impress the world, we must be the world. We have adopted the worldly standards of success.   

Pride has been the downfall of the mainline church--pride in their social status and cultural suavity. They enjoyed being the big churches downtown for.  They feed the poor as long as they don't have to give up anything to do it. They share the gospel, as long as it doesn't offend.  They never saw themselves as compromised, but as sophisticates.  They became what they are supposed to be transforming. The mainline churches and denominations which dominated America today are the sideline,  abandoned  and irrelevant.

Ambition will be the downfall of the megachurches, too--the temporary successors to the mainline.  They are not bound by the traditions of the past. Instead, they are create  new power structures, no less proud or secular.   Their desire to reach a younger generation for Christ is being superseded by  the pursuit of budgets and numbers.

 The world is changing, though.  The big, powerful churches are falling out of favor with the world.  The overall rate of church attendance in America has been declining by some estimated at a rate of one percent per year. 

Every year it becomes more obvious.   The secular world is abandoning us. 

It's not all bad news,  though. There is, I believe,  a new church emerging out of the ruins of the old.  It is not an organization, but a movement. It is not the formation of new denominations,  but something that is emerging within all denominations.  It is not a threat to the power structure, but a movement that regards the power structure as irrelevant.  It is instead, simply  a desire to  get seriously  get close to God. 

Across denominational and cultural borders, there is a growing sense that something more is needed in an indifferent and hostile pluralistic society. The early church succeeded not by superior organization or publicity, but by building on the character of its followers. It invested heavily in the building of disciples.  The earliest books  outside of the New Testament reveal that the early church was far more concerned about making disciples than making converts.

This new church is not some new organization but a new attitude, where being biggest or first does not matter,  but being servants and disciples does. It does not seek to supplant the old church. It will exist within the organizational church, supporting it, praying for it, working alongside. But when the old church collapses into oblivion, the new church believers will be there,  filled with the spirit and ready to serve.  Then the church will be renewed by the Spirit of Christ, and the world will again be transformed.

Let’s pray that the church comes to its senses soon, and stops its rush to be rich and powerful.  It is a path to destruction. Instead, let's pray that God's people will seek God again, and devote ourselves to living as disciples of Christ.

Chloe's Violin

My granddaughter Chloe is learning to play the violin.

Chloe is a really delightful child, full of passion and sassy.  She is beautiful, witty, and tempramental.  She loves music;  she always has.  She comes over to my house and wants to play on my guitars. I sometimes let her plunck on the cheaper of the two, and she would say "Grandpa, do you like my music?"

One day I answered "That's not music."

She got a look on your face like I  had just hit her in the gut. "Isn't it beautiful?"

"You are beautiful," I  answered. "That's just noise."

It's fun to watch Chloe, in whatever she does--laugh, dance,  beat on a drum, play the guitar. I could watch her for hours.  Everything she does is a dance to me, every word she says is music.

But plunking on my guitar is not music. 

Now, Chloe is learning to play the violin--and she's making music and it really is beautiful--sometimes.

I am a little concerned about that.  Can a little girl with such a fire for life channel that fire through a bowstring?  Will she be enthusiastic about it for a while, until it turns into work,  and then let it drop going back into the fantasy of pretend music, or will she go on to the place where she will make beautiful music as a virtuoso violinist?  Will the music she feels inside of her own heart go out to others with  the same zest she feels inside?  I hope so. But I know for that to happen, she must work long and hard,  disciplining herself to get the music out.

When we are young, we have music  inside--we all do.  We want to let that music out, but we do not have the ability.  We plunk tunelessly on guitars and pianos,  we make karate kicks at invisible opponents,  we run marathons in our imaginations or score winning touchdowns.  Other people call it "pretending" but it's not really a pretense. It is our attempt to display the image of God we know inside.  We were made to do great things, to master the universe, each in our own unique way.

But we find we can't do it without discipline.  At some point,  fantasy runs into reality, and we give up at the difficulty of living. Unexpressed, the music dies.  As we grow older, we forget the tune. 

There is a natural rhythm in live, a kind of "donut" of passion with a hole in the middle called "drudgery." We begin a new endeavor enthusiastically.  We are eager to pick up a musical instrument, take up exercise, or to begin a quiet time with God.  In our minds, we imagine ourselves to be a great musician,  athlete, or saint. That imaginary future success sustains us for a while, and we feed off the joy of the imaginary, but it isn't real. It's not even a real hope, but a wish,  so it doesn't last long.  After a day, a week, or month, we start to get bored with it.  Our passion goes on to something else.  We get bored, and what began as  music soon becomes a mindless drone.

But we keep plugging away,  not because we want to, but because we know we should.  We make a choice of passions. We are tempted by other things which promise a momentary joy, but we do not give in to them. We deny them, because we know that all temptation is a form of adultery, a call to cheat on our first love.  We keep at it, running laps,  scratching on the violin,  reading the Bible through the "begat" chapters and the endless complaints of the prophets,  until somewhere inside the drudgery we see the glimmers of real music and real joy, not the pretend joy of the beginning but the realized joy of knowing what we are doing and doing it well. 

I heard a statement recently about practicing music, that if you really want to be good at is you should practice two hours a day. The first hour is rote repetition, scales, skill building, while the second hour is pure joy.  We can't get to the joy part without the drudgery.  A ballerina spends hours practicing forms, bending at the bar,  starving herself,  building endurance,  so that she can perform magic on the stage.  A magician practices his sleight of hand until his fingers almost fall off, and until he can't stand to look at another card.  Then he starts to do real magic.  A saint gets callouses on his knees  in silence--fasting, praying, reading,  meditating, until he can come to that place of seeing visions of third heaven.  There is no easy way through the dark night of the soul, but there is a fiery dawn on the other side. 

So Chloe is learning the violin.  One day, it may sit alone in her closet gathering dust, like my guitar did for years, her mother's viola, or that old exercise machine we were going to use every week.  I hope not, though. I hope she will be wiser than we are while she is young enough to enjoy it; that she will work through the drudgery of discipline until the music she has on the inside can come out of her fingers and amaze the world.