ht to Hubbsy for the prompt to write.

I’d like to pick on the church for a while, if that’s alright. Specifically the church in our age. Every church in every age has its problems, mostly sharing them with the culture it’s in, and ours is no exception. So I’ll go right ahead and say it:

I don’t want to be entertained in church.

Really. I don’t. It’s probably the least appropriate space for entertainment. I can live with politics as entertainment, with news as entertainment, with public debate entertainment, but I can’t live with church as entertainment. I can shut off the TV, I can vote a certain way, and I can withdraw from the public square, but I can’t stop going to church.

It’s essential, right? “You can’t have God as your father without the church as your mother” and all that. It’s the point we constantly try to make, that what we’re doing is important. We’re getting in touch with the God who is there.

So what does it say about God if we act as if people might get bored and leave all the time?

I am already entertained everywhere else. By Sunday, I am sick to death of being amused and pandered to. Everywhere I go, someone is competing for my attention. They are clever, witty, funny, insightful, and to-the-point.

You don’t have to compete for my attention in church. I’m already there. You don’t have to lure me back. I’ll come back every Sunday as long as you’re creating a space for interaction with Heaven. I’ll be there as long as it’s real, as long as it’s about something important, as long as you’re telling me the truth.

That’s a nerve not many people can touch these days.

Church can do that.

I think we’ve lost a lot of the beauty of sanctity and holiness. There’s a mystery about Roman Catholic cathedrals that suggests you are stepping into a place steeped in something other. That you could have an encounter there. That the skin between the world of us and the world of God is fraying terribly and wonderfully thin.

There’s no place for entertainment there. If you don’t go, it’s not because you’re bored, but because you know deep in that part of your brain that knows these things that if you see God you will die.

The cathedral is a reflection of that Old Testament idea that God is really big and important and awesome.

Our current church vision is that God is a bit drab and humdrum and needs some special effects to get people interested.

But we don’t need cathedrals to bring that idea across. We don’t need to throw out our screens and our guitars. We don’t even need to have a complicated liturgy. What we really need is to turn down the lights, turn down the volume, and just knock off the antics. We need to act like what we’re doing is important, because it is.

If we love God, we love the church. And we don’t come glibly before God. We don’t try to dress him up. Instead we try to strip ourselves down, get rid of the junk that’s getting in the way, and meet with him.

One last thing: Churches generally suck at entertainment. Don’t try it. It’s embarrassing and awkward.

Right now I’m part of the worship team at Churchill Meadows Christian Church in Mississauga, and I was part of the Freshwater Christian Church worship team before the two churches merged into on combined identity. For the most part, working with the CMCC team has been absolutely wonderful, and I’m really glad to have the chance to use what skills I have as part of the team.

Being part of the whole thing, though, has led me to some observations about our team in particular (observations that would probably be pretty boring to most people, on the whole) and observations about worship teams in general. The general observations are what I’m most interested in, and I think you might be too.

Most worship teams are awful. Just completely awful. They’re awful for several reasons. First, they don’t have the skill as musicians. Second, they have no concept of what it takes to make a good worship team. Third, they don’t have any concept of good music.

My personal opinion is that if you aren’t any good, you shouldn’t play. You’re going to distract from worship, not aid it. After all, isn’t that what worship bands are there for? It’s an aid, to lead in worship, to help the church as a whole worship God. What form that takes is largely irrelevant (though of course there are excesses I won’t even touch on here). The fact is, if you’re distracting people from worshipping, you’re being counter-productive and should remove yourself from the team, or be removed from the team.

This doesn’t happen often enough because team leaders don’t understand what makes a good team and what makes good music, two things I think are closely related. A lot of bands simply throw as many people as they can must up on stage and get everyone to play their hearts out. Though this might seem like a great idea (what’s better than people playing their hearts out?), it usually isn’t. It takes a lot of practice and a good deal of synergy to work as a team, to understand what each other is doing, and especially if you don’t have a lot of time to practice, to know each other well enough that you can predict the direction of the music.

That becomes more difficult the more people you have in the team. Fewer in this instance is almost certainly better. If you have a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer who are really tight, you don’t need to throw in a percussionist, a pianist, a vocalist, and some interpretive dance. Not only will this make playing together, really together, harder, it’s going to make everything harder. The more instruments you have, the more setup is involved, the harder it is to mix well, and the worse the band is going to sound as whole. It’s just really hard to have seven people making great music.

Not only that, every song has a different feel and a different way it can be played. Some songs are guitar-driven and should stay that way. Other songs are keyboard driven, hymns in particular, and no matter how you try and spice them up, they should stay keyboard driven. When you have six, seven, eight people, everyone has the tendency to play at once. Not only does this generally make an awful din, it does disservice to the songs you’re playing.

I say this as a keyboardist who finds himself almost always superfluous. We have a lead guitarist/vocalist, a backup guitarist/vocalist, another vocalist, a bassist, a drummer, a percussionist, and a keyboardists. Personally, I think that number of people is absurdly hard to make good music with. The leader of a band of that many people is going to have to be good at arranging music and the players themselves will have to practice a lot. Barring that, people are just going to have to sit out a bunch of songs. The leader is going to have to tell his band that they can’t all play at once, that some people are just going to have to sit out some songs, and that if they want a pleasing sound instead of a jumbled cacophony, they’re going to have to put some limits of who’s playing what when.

Of course, this doesn’t happen for a variety of reasons. It goes back to leaders not knowing what good music is, or leaders simply not wanting to hurt feelings or cause conflict. I mean, sure, it’s possible that you’ll find eight people in your church who can play together naturally and not sound like a bunch of monkeys beating on tin cans, but how likely is that?

Some worship teams aren’t awful, of course. If you do it right, you can make really, really good music and aid in worship at the same time. You can be innovative and fresh without being obtrusive and annoying. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, mostly at churches who have an artistic vision for their worship teams, who have a large talent pool, and who have leaders who aren’t afraid to tell some people to stop playing or dial it back.

If I could say one thing to worship teams around the world it would be this: Bigger isn’t better. Bigger is almost always worse. Think about what you’re trying to do and do that. Put some thought into it. Make a structure and build around it. Figure out what style of music you want to play and then do what you have to in order to play that music with skill and restraint. Don’t just throw people at a stage and hope that they’ll work well together. Figure out what works and go with that. If something isn’t working, don’t do it. If you don’t know what good music is, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know how to co-operate, don’t be in a band. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t lead a band, for goodness sake!

In the end I ask this: Is the tendency toward bigger bands really better than a solitary pianist or a three-piece acoustic band? If it isn’t, why are you doing it?

I’m sick to death of fighting for things. There, I’ve said it.

I’ve stood on the same picket lines as many of you have and held the same sign and fought the same battle… and gotten nowhere at all. We haven’t toppled the abortion edifice. We haven’t changed many (or even any) minds. Look: it isn’t doing any good. We’re not making any progress here.

We live in a post-Christian culture. We really do. It’s no good pretending that the culture we live in is on some sort of axis, about to tip, and if we pull really hard maybe we can make things swing back our way.

The political and social means are out of our hands now. We’re the fringe. We’re the minority. In those realms, our time is past. This is the way it is; get over it already.

It’s time to move on to something worthwhile. Something transformative. It’s time to jettison these old tired ideas that Jesus’ will can be legislated. It’s time to get back to the core of our mission here.

I like to ask this question: How does change come about? What happens when you change your mind? What makes you do that?

For me, I change my mind when I am persuaded to do so; this can take a long time, but like Paul, I can faithfully say that I have been persuaded that Jesus is the Christ. Yet in order to be persuaded of that, I had to hear about it. In order to hear about it, someone had to say it. And in order for someone to say it, they had to believe, but also personify what they believed.

It took a community of believers deeply interested in living the truth to convince me that it was in fact the truth. You know what? I don’t think this is uncommon.

When I changed my mind, I changed my lifestyle. When I changed my mind, a bunch of old stuff went out the window. I got some new perspectives.

There is this dialectic between the heart and the mind, as I see it. If we think something, our actions probably follow; if we act a certain way, our minds follow as well.

This is why I think politics and social change, though important, will never advance the faith. They reach only a certain part of a person. A sign that says that abortion is evil, which it is, does nothing to persuade a heart that life is sacred and it is our duty to protect the weakest members of our society. A sign simple says what it says. A law is meant to be broken. A government agency is a faceless agent of change.

Heart and mind change will do the trick, though. Would a nation of Christian people simply accept abortion as a right? Or that gayness is acceptable or even desirable? Or whatever other issue you could name?

So, yes, I’m sick to death of fighting for things. Is it okay that I simply want to live a life of love instead? I want to love my wife, I want to love my church, I want to love my neighbour, and I want to love God. If that makes me some sort of hippie liberal reject, so be it. I have good company, I think, with Jesus and all.

• Here we go again!
• One of the great tragedies of the modern church is that we’ve for the most part lost the language of covenant. We still have some of the ideas. But there’s hope. Imagine, if you will, the power of context and the power of covenant wedded to each other; perhaps this is an unholy union of the ancient and the post-modern, but which covenant doesn’t have context? The church and God in the context of his schema of salvation; the covenant of marriage in the context of God and the church’s covenant; these are powerful concepts.
• Share the Well is — and I hate to say this, as much as love Long Line of Leavers — probably the best Caedmon’s Call album ever. So many years and I still love CC. It’s true. I’ve listened to them longer than I’ve been a Christian.
• I’ve heard it said that if God seems distant it’s probably because you’ve drawn away; the implicit assumption is, of course, that God is static and that he always wants to be close. In light of scripture, does this seem true? Are there not many people in scripture who were desperate to draw close to God only to find him still distant? I think when we talk about God we need to remember that he’s also a person, or a Person if you will, who has thoughts higher than ours and a plan greater than we can understand. God’s not static. He moves, we move, it’s the grand danse (as you may have heard said). If God seems distant and you don’t understand why — if you want to draw near and nothing happens — all you can say is that there is a reason. It’s almost blase in its simplicity. But there is a reason. Sometimes you don’t get to understand, sometimes you do, but there’s always a reason.
• It’s hard to synthesise the appalling poverty most of the world labours in and the almost limitless prosperity we enjoy. The question is, of course, at what point does prosperity become a curse? This very blog begs ask that question: I have enough money to buy a computer and enough free time to contribute this ocean of dross that is the internet. How much time do I spend feeding the hungry and how much time do I spend feeding my own various hungers? How much should I?
• Candace is getting baptised on Saturday, which is totally awesome. Baptisms are amazing things, no matter which side of the spectrum you fall on. It’s a powerful symbol no matter how you look on it. I’m a paedobatist by preference, but anyone who fulfils God’s command to baptise is terrific in my books. I have a special bit of confusion for “Reformed Baptist” (decide which side you’re on, you freaks!) who seem to have forgotten that Reformed theology leads inexorably to the baptism of children, but hey, it’s all good.
• It seems to me that a little introspection and self-knowledge is a good thing, but a http://www.aldaily.com/lot leads to confusion. Maybe it’s because people function on a sort of quantum level: You measure yourself enough and you change. Then you have to start over again and it becomes a full-time occupation. And not a fun one.
• Beer is proof that God loves us; dentist are proof he can change his mind.
• I’m less three teeth, by the way.
• You ever have it where you say, “It can’t get any better than this?” and then it does? Yeah. I got that. It’s called marriage. I’m an incurable optimist, it’s true.
• This is probably the best thing I have in my feeds.
• It seems every nation has its legacy to overcome. US, India, China, all the big ones.

• Sometimes when Laura leaves the house to go out and do whatever, I do dishes and listen to post-rock. You know, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Mono, Red Sparrowes, that sort of thing. Right now I’m listening to This is Your Captain Speaking. It’s good stuff! If you’ve ever listened to post-rock, you’ll know how hard it is to come across truly interesting material, even by those veterans of the genre such as (and especially) Mogwai. TIYCS seems interested in being interesting. That’s good.
• I don’t like megachurches. I mean, I can see where they fit into the ecosystem of Christianity — if it can be called an ecosystem as opposed to a burgeoning, idiotic choas — but I don’t like them. I don’t think I ever will. It’s not simply that they’re generally white, suburban, middle-class and almost always utterly devoted to not offending anyone. It’s that they’re not distributed enough. They’re too centralised. Thus, one pastor boffs his secretary, the whole thing goes under, and your sanctuary gets converted into indoor soccer field. I’m pretty sure churches should be small, efficient, face-to-face, involved, local, community-based, and active. But mostly small. Enough that you can’t hide in the crowds. But also enough that if something goes wrong, and entire faith community isn’t left floundering in the shallows.
• Let me ask you this: Why do you dislike Thomas Kinkade’s art? Is it because his art is bad? I bet it isn’t. I bet you don’t know good art from bad art even if such things exist. What you probably mean to say, instead of, “I dislike Thoman Kinkade’s art,” is, “I dislike Thomas Kinkade“. That would probably be more accurate. You don’t like his commercialising of his art (but when was art ever not commercial?), you dislike his subject matter (though his paintings are quite nice to look at), and you especially dislike the types of people who buy his prints (you think they’re generally the unwashed white trash living in trailer parks somewhere, their floor and ceilings and furniture covered in linoleum). You don’t want to be one of them, because that wouldn’t be… something. Wouldn’t be cool, wouldn’t be acceptable to your peers, wouldn’t truly speak to your sensibilities and your good taste. Maybe what you should say instead is, “It’s not kosher to like Thomas Kinkade… so I don’t like him.” Because at least then you’d be a bit more honest. In the meantime, look at some of his paintings. They’re quite nice.
• This may be some indie music heresy, but you know what’s wrong with My Bloody Valentine? They’re completely and mind-numbingly boring. Sure, they came up with sounds no-one had ever heard a guitar make before, but none of those sounds is interesting.
• I hate modern classical music. I really do. Things started going off the rails in the early 1900s and haven’t gotten back on since. Once I thought, “Why have people accepted abstract art, but not abstract music?” The answer is, of course, that a bunch of different colours splashed on a canvas a la Pollock can be extraordinarily — if unintentionally — beautiful. It doesn’t hurt me to look at. Notes seemingly scribbled on a page at random, however, has the capability to make me — and from the look of it lots of people — wince. (I am abusing my dashes; I know.) Harmony and melody aren’t old social conventions meant to stifle the artists. They are a common framework in which we as Westerners operate. It may indeed be that this only a custom, but that doesn’t matter: It’s ingrained and there’s no point in the composer trying to wiggle it loose. You are literally hurting me with your atonal disasters, your craptastic 12-tone form, and your alternative rhythmic nightmare. Go write some music someone wants to listen to; see if there is perhaps something of value to be found in those old forms everyone seems to have abandoned without a reasonable alternatives. Rediscover, for heaven’s sake, the power of beautiful music. Don’t make it your mission to question what beauty is. It just is.
• My, there are far too many dishes here.

This Sunday’s sermon really hit me. Jeff preached on the fact that God is near and what that means, why God doesn’t just show up all the time, and why our human senses can’t really see much of God except the evidence of his working.

I specifically identified with the quantum mechanics and string theory illustrations: if there is that much we don’t understand about the universe, if there are things hidden from our sight and from our understanding, how can we understand where God is and what he is doing? I love physics, and I love sermons with physics in them… even if I’m the only one in the congregation that feels that way.

This is the thing I really appreciate about Jeff’s preaching; I don’t know if he’s a trained preacher by trade, but what he says is pretty much always spot on, and he doesn’t resort to clichés and pat answers to get his point across. I can always get on board with an innovative explanation, or a new way of looking at an old issue. It seems to me that saying things the same way for a long time can create a mental bypass in the listener’s mind: creativity in preaching is a great didactic tool for that reason among others.

I am really looking forward to Joel coming back from his little conference. I hope he’s preaching this Sunday, as I think he’s a superior speaker, but also a superior communicator. I especially like his exploration of the history surrounding scripture (an implicit nod, I think, to the fact that all truth is contextual). Anyone — yeah, even me — can do a surface treatment of some of the subject matter Joel has taken on, but I think it takes a better preacher to dig into it and get his hands dirty. As the rabbis used to say, scripture is a many-faceted jewel: you hold it up to a new light and get a new reflection you’ve never seen before.

I don’t know who ever convinced Joel he’s not a good preacher; I’ve heard him hint at as much. Laura and I didn’t originally start attending Freshwater because of the atmosphere or the music or the people — though all those things are huge factors — but because when Joel spoke we were both like, wow, this guy is telling the truth. And that’s really what matters.

So yeah, Joel, if you ever read this, the next time you say something depreciating about your messages and speaking ability, I’m going to (in all Christian love) punch you in the face. Okay, not really.

(Or… will I?)

–

After the service we went over to Tanya and Trevor’s palace. I mean, house. It’s quite nice. They have a sublime sense of interior. And Trevor makes a mean rib. It was nice to get to know them better; they seem like good people.

–

You know Christians are all like, “Come back quickly, Lord Jesus?” I totally get that now. So if I may, come back quickly, Tim and Candace. I hope you’ve having a nice holiday. But seriously, get back here.

Today in church we had the news passed down to us that Freshwater Christian Church of Mississauga is going to be merging with Churchill Meadows Christian Church, also of Mississauga. I say “merging with” in lieu of the probably more apt phrase, “absorbed by”, considering that they’re the much larger church.

From a purely financial point of view, it makes a lot of sense (though this is not the only point of view from which it makes sense, I hasten to point out). Churchill Meadows is about five times or so the size of Freshwater, and has reached a point of fiscal maturity and sustainability, it would seem, so much so that they’ve been raising money for the last three years for and developing the plans for a building in which to meet. Freshwater — at least from what I saw today in the budget — has not reached a point of financial sustainability, such that the church is still gobbling up its initial setup fund. Solvent as far as I can tell only because of that fund. Freshwater gains financial stability in that they no longer have to worry about going into the red all the time. Churchill Meadows gains that extra 150 or so people that will frankly enable them to reach their building goal that much quicker. From a surface view of this all these seem to be the primary organisational benefits, without considering the obvious missional opportunities that a building and a less spread out staff entail.

I footnote that paragraph with my own experience of churches going broke: The Bridge, a wonderful place while it was still up and running, before it lost most of its congregation minus of course the core that started it. The Bridge was in the process of merging with 247 (if I recall the name correctly), when pastoral and leadership concerns put the kibosh on the whole deal, leading inevitably to The Bridge’s slow decline and finally its insolvency. When The Bridge finally closed down shop it left quite a few people with nowhere else to go, including some new converts who were very fresh to Christianity. It was, on the whole, a bad deal all around. Had The Bridge simply merged with 247 or some other like-minded church, I feel they would have been able to keep their ministry alive, give the people they sheltered a place to go, and especially provided the pastoral care for those new Christians. The Bridge closing its doors was, like I said, just a bad deal. I don’t fault anyone for this, but it was hasty, with the announcement coming a mere week before the organisation folded.

This merger is a little different, of course. We’re not closing down shop, Joel isn’t going anywhere, and we’re not about to disperse into the cold night never to see eachother again. It in fact prevents those things from happening. Which is a good thing in my view. The merger is also taking place with plenty of time in the interim: the churches are separate until October, when they’ll join at Freshwater’s current location. This gives us a lot of time to work out all those nasty little human problems that seem to occur whenever two organisations of any kind merge. For instance, I’m part of the worship team right now, playing keyboards every other week, and it occurs to me that Churchill Meadows also has a worship team. We’re really good (if I do say so myself; it’s not me, really, as much as Candace and Tim), but you have to expect that a church of 500 or so people has a better base from which to draw talented people. I raise this as an issue in particular because musicians, yes even Christian musicians, are generally a little more sensitive in the ego area than your average Joe off the street. When you try to merge two groups of people who both have separate synergies, you may end up finding that they don’t work as well together as they do apart. Or at least that the time it takes for two groups of musicians to get used to eachother can exceed your expectations. This might not even be a problem of course. I myself don’t have to play. I’ve gone to churches for a long time that didn’t need another pianist. Thankfully there’s a lot of time to work through this in people’s heads: I think the time-frame the leadership teams have chosen is a wise one. If there are any bruised egos, hopefully this will give them time to heal.

I’m writing this mostly to process it for myself. It’s going to be weird, seeing how every time I start attending a church something big changes. For instance, Living Waters got a new building and became an entirely different church almost overnight, it seemed. The Bridge shut down out of nowhere. Now Freshwater is merging, sort of losing its identity. This is fine; unless Jim (I think his name is) turns out to be some sort of heretic, or the church is just downright unfriendly and doesn’t have the missional heart I love so much about Freshwater, we’ll stick around. It’s not any further out of our way than Freshwater is. A different highway.

The losing identity does sort of bother me, though. I like Freshwater the way it is, relaxed, full of great people, and with absolutely amazing music. And when Churchill Meadows comes along, it does follow that the smaller church will lose its identity to the larger one. What that identity will end up being is left to the hands of God, I suppose. I guess I also have a certain amount of apprehension about what this new church will feel like: It’s so very hard to find a God-honouring, God-glorifying church that isn’t too backwards and isn’t too cool-whoring. When you do find such a place, seeing it being subsumed in another church that may or may not operate along the same lines is a bit like gambling, it would seem. I don’t know these people. I don’t know their modus operandi.

Now, those are just my feelings after hearing about it for the first time. I’m sure I’ll read this in a few weeks and months and wonder what the fuss was about. In the meantime, there are lots of good thing about this that I feel like I’ve accidentally de-emphasised.

Have a building is a great thing, or can be a great thing. I’ve know churches to build a nice, modern place to operate out of and then squander it trying to keep it safe and pristine and comfortable. If you have a building, use the sucker! And I have every confidence that Freshwater, with a building, a bunch of extra people, and a Joel with some time on his hands, will do great things with the building. Joel mentioned a few ideas he had, all of which sounded exactly like what a church is supposed to be doing in the world, being the hands and feet of Jesus, as he says. Give Joel a building, and I’m sure he can whip something up in a hurry. (By the way, Joel, if you ever read this, I’d suggest credit counseling for the community at large; debt is a whore who won’t wake up and leave.)

The new church, whatever its name is, will also have a greater opportunity to contribute on the modern mission field by planting another church to replace the one being lost to mergers and acquisitions. And this time, they have an opportunity to get rid of this half-assed toss-the-hatchling-out-of-the-nest trust fund approach that inevitably leads to fiscal, spiritual, and physical burnout. They — or we, I guess — have an opportunity to be a real mother church, to be there in terms of money and people power, so that those labouring in the word and in the community don’t have to constantly feel like a shyster shaking down the congregation for money, a juggler with too many balls in the air, and a prayer warrior with no time to pray. Can I suggest a radically under-churched area? Okay, how about at about Bloor and Dixie? There are tens of religions and thousands of people in that area alone, and the churches in the neighborhood are old and dying out with no new blood to replace the septuagenarian blood that has long ago grown thin. That’d be a great area, only 15 minutes away, that simply begs for a minor revival. Just an idea.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I’m liking what I see so far, and Laura and I will keep the two churches and their imminent merger in prayer. The way I see it, the human interactions are like gears, and prayer is like grease. Or something like that. It’s not a very good metaphor.

I wrote a whole long post two days ago, saved it, and am returning. I kept approximately 5% of it, and if you had read it you’d thank me for my slash-and-burn editorial skills. Still, I think the post bears writing. It’s an important topic and one that is lightly addressed in scripture. Or to put it another way, there’s lots of room for opinion, pretty much the inverse of me. With these introductory comments in mind, let’s blaze on, machetes and chainsaws in hand.

Every time I get near a book on church building I feel an irrational urge to break its spine and repurpose the pages as a certain toiletry item. It’s just who I am. Sometimes I have a hard time accepting that you can do this and do that and suddenly have a successful church. The idea that you can simply follow a formula and arrive at anything but a formulaic church seems irrational.

But there have to be guidelines, right? There are a lot of wacky things going on in North American churches, mostly due to this idea that everyone can have church they way they like. I’d like to sketch out a few thoughts and see what happens.

First, church needs to be organic. Don’t be relevant, don’t be topical, don’t be with the times, don’t be postmodern, don’t be a counter-cultural ghetto. Like that awkward kid everybody’s known, the one who’s always trying to be cool but ends up a huge loser, churches that chase culture look stupid. They look like they need attention or something. Let your church be a reflection of and a reflection on the community it comes from.

Second, some churches will play hymns on a piano, some will have elaborate bands, and some will have no instruments at all. I’ve been blessed by all three. It’s not really a big deal. It’s something we have to get over collectively. Music is an important part of the human experience, and an important part of the Christian experience. Some people will simply not be comfortable with an organ. I can’t stand pipe organs; with the amount of noise they make you may as well have a rock band playing, but that’s just me. If your community happens to include a lot of people who like pipe organs, why not?

Third, an effective church does a bunch of things. It provides people a place to gather in community, it provides a clear path to God, it provides for its own members, it provides help for those in need, and it provides a bunch of different opportunities in different areas. You could write entire books — and trust me, people have — on just those statements. This means that a church needs to be scriptural and Spirit-filled. Everything that a church does flows from scripture and from the workings of the Holy Ghost. Without either of those things, none of us would go to church. There wouldn’t be a church. That means that you need scriptural community, etc. You need the Spirit because, well, these things are pretty hard to do.

Fourth… that’s it. I think I lied, though; none of these things is easy. But they are pretty simple, right?

I have a real soft spot for Reformed/Presbyterian doctrine. I’m convinced that it is the most rigorously and fully true expression of the whole of scripture. Any church would be blessed, I think, to be taught it.

Yet, I want to push past pure doctrine. It’s good. It’s right. The statements it makes are, as far as I can tell with God’s help, an accurate reflection of reality. All of this is true, and pure doctrine is still not enough.

Pure water is good, but if you don’t drink the water, you still die of thirst.

Maybe what I want isn’t to push past pure doctrine. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I want to stop choosing doctrine or practice. Maybe I’m trying to make myself less binary, less like a pendulum. This is the way I’ve thought for a long time, you see: the churches that have the good doctrine generally keep it to themselves as if to let it outside of the church family will make it fall apart, and the churches that have the great practice generally seem to think salvation is about hugs and roses and making everybody feel great about themselves.

If you recoil at this dichotomy, I don’t blame you. I don’t like thinking like that, and I’m probably not right about it.

But I’ve been to too many churches where they put a verse — sometimes even a whole chapter — about sharing the gospel and feeding the hungry and taking care of orphans and the vulnerable, but have no real corporate way to put the words into practice other than shunting some money into a basket every Sunday.

And I’ve been to too many churches that seem to be active in the community and concerned about social justice, but just can’t seem to get it that Jesus’ death and resurrection are the only reason that justice means anything in the end.

These aren’t really helpful categories, though. It’s not like every church has to choose along an axis which percentage of orthodoxy vs orthopraxy, and every prospective member has to choose which percentage they’re content with. Life isn’t like that, and hardly any churches are the gross caricatures I’ve drawn.

I want both. It’s not a difficult formula. The central message of scripture transcends both, bringing both in line. The central message of scripture is that God deserves glory and honour and praise and adoration. He does this by both saving people’s souls, and redeeming the world. He chooses to do so by means of the very people he has saved, and God help me, that decision seems a little daft some days.

The Christmas season is upon us — it’s pretty much sitting right there on top like a sumo wrestler — and it’s time to think about giving again. A strange thing to say, really, because what time isn’t a good time to think about giving? And then after thinking actually do some giving?

I don’t think I need to make much of an argument for giving, especially from a Christian perspective. Scripture is rife with positive commands to give, to take care of orphans and widows, to be generous in giving. And some of the harshest condemnation arrives at the feet of those who had the means and didn’t bother yet thought themselves righteous.

Yet I think (and this is just me talking here, feel free to correct me if you think I’ve gone off the rails) that too often the need seems far away: Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, South America, Mexico. Of course there are needs there. Great needs that organisations like World Vision, Come Over and Help, and others are making great strides in addressing.^[1]

There is a real need in the communities we live in, as well. In the church community — especially important, I think — to help those who need financial support, and those who simply need someone to connect with, and whatever other need arises. The tragedy is, I think, when giving becomes simply about money; giving can also be about helping someone on the fringes of the community feel less alienated, or it can be about just being there for someone who’s going through a bad time.^[2]

Still, there is a greater and even more hidden need in our secular communities. If you live in a city, for instance, the needs may be varied and obvious, but if you live in the suburbs (like I do), where appearances are everything and every family in every cardboard-cutout house seems just shy of perfect, these needs may be more hidden, and far harder to spot.^[3]

In burbs, your church may find different needs to address. Perhaps these people don’t as much need a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name as they do advice on how to get out of debt. Maybe they don’t need a solid meal as much as someone to consult about raising their children. Maybe they don’t need clothes, but instead need to learn to strip away the accoutrements and facades of their lifestyle and contact something real. Jesus, for instance, is real. A church dedicated to being Jesus’ hands and feet in community if real. Scripture is real. God is real. His death on the cross is real, and his resurrection is real.^[4]

Maybe what I’m trying to get at is some sort of holistic thing. We maybe can’t all go to Mexico or Mali, but we certainly can and do go the grocer and to the bank and to the hairdresser. The church has a responsibility but also an exciting opportunity: Jesus came to reconcile all things to himself, and he chose a bunch of sinners to do it, with his usual backwards logic. It’s exciting. And frightening. But I think giving can be like that, when you do it right.⁵

[1] Before you give to a charity, please do check out their financial statements and such. I singled out WV and COAH because they both dedicate over 80% of their income directly to their causes, the rest being used for administration and fundraising. Quite a few charities seem to spend a lot of time and effort and money fundraising and little time actually helping anyone. WV and COAH are wonderful exceptions.

[2] Qubit decided this would be a good time to come around and playfully bite and claw my fingers. Maybe I was making too much noise for her or something?

[3] American Beauty is a stunning film with a ridiculously stupid counter-cultural message. Yet at the heart, its portrayal of the festering rot inside those beautiful facades is spot-on.

[4] The reality of these things, I think, can so easily pierce whatever veils we (we’re human! we do these things!) put up around ourselves. It’s easy to become accustomed to the language we use to describe these realities, but coming in contact with the bare majesty of what Jesus did and is doing can rip away even that. God, after all, is pretty powerful.

[5] I used to catch a lot of flak for bitching about stuff without actually doing anything about it. I’m happy to report this is no longer the case. I’m not going to spell out how exactly, as with prayer so with giving (keep it in the closet), but Laura and I are trying to do our part.