Love

Bizarro Church, and What We Can Do to Save American Christianity

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Bizarro SupermanI grew up in an age of comic book superheroes. Spider-Man debuted just months before I was born, and as a child, I endlessly watched the old George Reeves Superman TV show.

About four years before my own debut, at a point that can only be considered a creative nadir, the writers of the Superman comic came up with an anti-Superman called Bizarro. His powers were the opposites of most of Superman’s, and though he was none too bright,  he gave the Man of Steel fits.

Bizarro hailed from a square planet, Bizarro World. Later, as is wont in comic books, publisher DC kept enhancing Bizarro World, adding Bizarro copies of favorite DC denizens Batman and Wonder Woman.

To me, there’s nothing more idiotic in comics than the whole Bizarro idea (well, if you ignore all the desperate comic book universe reboots and their inane explanations).

Sometimes, I feel like I’m trapped in Bizarro Church.

At the beginning of 2012, I wrote about the organic/house church movement and my frustrations with even finding an existing church in that mode in my area, much less one that seemed vibrant and growing (“Is the Organic House Church a Myth?“). That post eventually generated 100+ comments, as many shared my frustration or felt they needed to comment on my rightness or wrongness.

Unlike some bloggers, I don’t close my comments after a period of time. You can comment on a post I wrote a decade ago, if you wish. Over this past weekend, a reader commented on that older post that he shared my frustrations with the oddities and rarity of the organic/house church.

Now let’s discuss the brouhaha that erupted by bringing in the “Gentlemen.”

When the post first came out in January 2012, Gentleman A commented on it and seemed to be an organic church leader. I’m not sure how, but the sudden, recent activity on that post’s comments by that reader commenting sucked in Gentleman B, who, out of nowhere, wrote a screed against Gentleman A, claiming A was some hellraiser bent on destroying the real organic church and its leaders. This was followed by Gentleman C, who often decloaks from nowhere and comments. In this case, Gentleman C wrote to the reader and repeated the annoyingly frustrating organic church habit of sharing how organic church is thriving like crazy in every place where the reader (blog owner included) does not live. Later, Gentleman D, also out of nowhere, wrote me a personal email, noting how Gentleman A is slandering him all over the Web. Evidently, Gentleman D was tipped off to the presence of the seemingly innocuous comments of Gentleman A because of what Gentleman B wrote. And, with a little research, it seems Gentleman D and Gentleman B are connected through the same organic church organization.

In short, a few organic church “leaders” swarmed in and started accusing each other or making the usual unhelpful comments.

Adding to this, my post on Christian singles from a few years ago (“The Christian Singles Mess“) saw a reader comment turn into a diatribe against younger Christian men and their inability to grow up, make good money, and become a proper husband for the commenter.

I’ve been a Christian going on four decades, and I’ll tell you honestly that sometimes I just want to chuck the whole enterprise. And I’m not talking about my blog.

How did the Church in this country get to be such a mess? From the Bizarro behavior associated with this organic/house church fiasco to the Bizarro “everyone else is a loser but me” kind of commentary, it all seems so idiotic as to strain credulity. You begin despairing that whatever it is that Jesus started, we’re not anywhere close to that organization in any way, shape, or form. We instead seem to be practicing a Bizarro form of church that exemplifies everything that is wrong in the world.

Worse, when Bizarro Church grabs the spotlight, immediately we get its apologists, who claim that it’s impossible for sinners to run a decent, sensical church—an idea I reject in toto.

How is it that so few people can see through all this obfuscating garbage? Why is it that no one seems to take basic, commonsense Christianity to heart?

How do we fix this Bizarro Church behavior and get back to the main and the plain?

1. Folks, we are dust. So is everyone else. And dust shouldn’t have such a high opinion of itself.

Here is what Jesus said:

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
—Luke 18:10-14 ESV

I am sick to death of the lack of humility everywhere I look in the Church. If we don’t repent of our pride, we are wasting our time being the Church, because we won’t be, no matter how much we tell ourselves we are.

2. We think we have a handle on life. We don’t. Time to grow up and experience a reality check.

Here is what Jesus observed:

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
—Matthew 9:35-36 ESV

I will repeat what I have said often elsewhere on this blog: Most people are just trying to get by. Do we have compassion on them? They may get by in a sinful, stupid way, but they are trying to get from Point A to Point B in any way they think is possible. What stupid things are you and I doing to get by? Because I can promise you that we are sheep too.

3. We say the harshest things to and about each other. We should stop. Now.

Here is what Jesus said:

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
—Matthew 5:21-26 ESV

Later in the Scriptures we are told that Christians are ambassadors who have been blessed with the ministry of reconciliation. Are we acting that way? Is reconciliation at the heart of what we do as believers? If not, why not?

4. What we learned about Christian practice as children seems to be forgotten in our “maturity.” That’s an enormous loss.

Here is what Jesus said:

“Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
—Mark 10:15 ESV

Also:

“And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.”
—Luke 6:31 ESV

Really, how hard is it to ask oneself before any interaction with others, Is this how I would want to be treated? I mean, didn’t all of us learn The Golden Rule when we were 3 or 4 years old, even if we never stepped foot into a church? If so, how is it that we treat others so atrociously?

5. Whatever it is that is wrong with someone else, what is wrong with you and me is probably bigger. How can this not sober us?

Here is how Jesus said it:

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.”
—Luke 6:41-42 ESV

Nothing amazes me more—or frustrates more—than people who read their Bible every single day without a miss and yet they’ve never incorporated into their lives the most well-known and obvious passages. If that’s the case, stop with dutiful Bible study, because it’s not penetrating that cold, dead heart, and we’re just wasting our time unless the Holy Spirit gets ahold of us and we repent.

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I’m sickened by all this immaturity. Really. None of us is listening to what the Spirit is saying to the American Church. We are all self-righteous prigs, and we seem satisfied with our state.

Stop it.

Bizarro Church sucks. Period. And yet it seems to be what we’re perpetrating on the world.

Some are searching the skies for Superman to appear and fix everything. Here’s a clue: You and I are Superman. But only if we stop living in this Bizarro World of our own making and start living the way Jesus can empower us to.

Onward, Christian Hermits?

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And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
—Acts 2:46-47 ESV

After church yesterday, a friend and I discussed the reality that for many people, their primary source of human contact is Facebook. Alone at duskIn truth, the discussion was more of a lament for what has been lost.

All the small groups my friend and I were a part of are defunct.

I’ll let that sentence stand by itself because it serves as a testament to where we are in our society today. Social media have been a boon for connecting people who are distant, but it seems to have become detrimental to relationships within driving distance. We no longer meet face to face but instead enjoy the distancing mechanisms of technology. Our high-tech gizmoes help us keep up with others to the level we feel comfortable, and they give us the ability to walk away on our time schedule without feeling bad about disconnecting.

Our time schedule.

The early Church decided that meeting together every day mattered. We envy their closeness to the Holy Spirit. I wonder if there is a connection. Hmm.

The Acts passage above said that the number saved grew rapidly. You wouldn’t think that hanging out together would be evangelistic, but some synergistic sharing of Christ happened nonetheless.

The Acts passage notes that people thought positively about the Church because of its strong emphasis on connecting with others and being obviously friendly and social. How different from the PR the Church in America “enjoys” today.

Of course, there was also that “iron sharpens iron” thing. I guess the modern replacement is flaming each other in an online post’s comment thread. Less a sharpening and more a tempering, I guess. Temper, temper…

I think if you really pressed Christians today, few would be able to give a spiritual reasons why getting together daily is worthwhile. I think most see wisdom only in meeting once a week, twice at most. Wouldn’t want to overdo a good thing.

That reticence makes me wonder, though.

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
—2 Peter 1:5-8 ESV

If God is love, and love is the highest expression of a complete Christian life—as noted in the Peter passage above—how is it we can barely stand to be together once a week? What does it say about our effectiveness and fruitfulness in Jesus if meeting together once a week is all we can muster?

Perhaps for all our talk of community and brotherly love and affection, we don’t really like each other all that much. If we truly do, wouldn’t getting together more often be a priority?

More and more Christians think we are in the last days of The Last Days. A verse that speaks to that:

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
—Hebrews 10:24-25 ESV

How is it then, if the Final Day is indeed drawing near, that we seem to be getting together less often rather than more? Does our reticence to meet actually reflect a willful disobedience? Have we all secretly fallen under the spell of the “powerful delusion” the Bible warns of, with our lack of meeting a physical expression of our mental dissonance?

Talk of mental health issues have dominated the Godblogosphere in the wake of the suicide of the son of noted pastor Rick Warren. I wonder how many mental health cases could be healed without medicine by the simple act of people fellowshipping more regularly.

Can we admit that something is wrong with the way we interact today?

A different friend confessed to me a couple years ago that he felt a greater kinship to the people with whom he plays board games. That affinity group bore each other’s burdens better and dispensed more grace than the Christian small groups he had been part of. What a sad indictment!

I can think of no greater distinguishing mark of the Church than the idea that no collection of individuals exhibits deeper love for its members. So, is this the case?

We wonder why people are increasingly eschewing Church. Perhaps our community and fellowship issues are ground zero for revival.

Another Dan, Long Ago & So Very Far Away

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We shared first names. While I’ve known a lot of Dans in my life, I’d never met a fellow Dan like this one.

Something about an unusual question draws me. I don’t know what it is about the asking of something otherwise left unsaid, whether by ignorance or by purpose, but when someone asks THAT question, I notice.

This other Dan asked those questions. Relentlessly. And he thought about the answers. You could see the wheels whirring.

Dan and I worked in ministry together. He was a seminarian, and a year or two older than I was, but it seemed like more. Not from an age standpoint, but from a sense of wisdom. Even in my 20s I was naive, but not my fellow Dan.

That said, he seemed always to be searching, and when we talked, the conversation went deep in a heartbeat.

One day, he called and asked if I wanted to go for a drive.

And some drive it was.

We met up where he was staying in town that summer. I hopped in his old, yellow Beetle, and we took off around I-275 in Cincinnati. Just driving. Talking about deep things, the kind of questions and answers you delved into only when the night was pulled down like a cover around you. Yellow VW Beetle But for these two Dans, neither needed the protective cover of darkness.

So we talked. The Ohio River and Kentucky loomed. We crossed and kept on driving. We crossed them again.

I can’t tell you the details of the conversation. It was 25 years ago. But it was epic. And so was the drive, as we kept pulling that slight arc to the right that took us through the loop of Cincinnati’s encompassing circle highway. When the end became the beginning, Dan just kept driving. Two hours? Three?

Did it matter? We were young. We had ideas. They were good ones too. Dreams that could change the world–if only the world would listen to two Dans in a VW Bug looping around the local metropolis on a hot, late-summer day, the windows rolled as low as they could go, the radio silenced by the ongoing brilliance.

We felt like we’d only brushed the surface, but eventually we ended up back at his hosts’. We still had things to discuss, but they would wait.

Evenings were spent at Pizza Hut with some of the other crew our age on the ministry team. Even when the job concluded, we got together.

If Dan were a baseball diamond, it would consist of nothing but left field, which was why his dry, bizarre sense of humor had us rolling on the floor, laughing, always. Leave it to Dan to say the funny thing no one else dared to utter. And the dude could drink Mountain Dew endlessly, as if the caffeine simply evaporated before it hit his lips.

When he left town for his final year in seminary, we vowed to stay in touch. We did. Just like that I-275 crawl, we would talk long distance for hours. When I eventually moved to Wisconsin, he was one of the few who supported financially my ministry work there. He called regularly too. And the hours on the phone would trip by effortlessly.

It’s like that when you talk to someone interesting, a person overflowing with a tangential way of looking at those aspects of life most see only head-on. Whenever Dan talked about ministry, he saw what others missed. He wanted to know how we got locked into forms and programs that were so obviously ineffective, and what we could do to fix the problems. He challenged the status quo.

Dan got me thinking about the Church in ways  I’d not considered, and I loved that about him. He was that friend who never shied away from “going there,” no matter where there was. You’d be shocked for a minute, and then you’d be glad for the release, because something heavy had gone away in the process.

Heavy accompanied Dan.

We got together when we could. Distance was an issue. Still, there was the telephone. (The Internet was something still in the clutches of the military and braniacs at that point.) Never failed to enjoy the talks.

I think it was at a wedding we both drove back to Cincy for when we agreed to meet up for Christmas at the church for which we’d worked. Agreed on a time and place.

He liked Dum-Dum lollipops and handed me one. He said the name was apt. “A Dum-Dum for a dumb-dumb,” he noted. “Will keep you humble.” Already loaded with enough sugar from the wedding cake, I stuck the sweet in my trenchcoat pocket. Maybe later.

I’d been dating a girl seriously. We met at the Christian camp where I was working full time. One of those infamous camp romances, but it lasted beyond the end of the season, and though she was summer staff and I was year-round, we kept dating.

We planned to drive to her folks’ place for Thanksgiving. I’d never met them, so I was a little anxious. That changed to frustration when she announced the night before that I was “just too nice,” and she was ending the relationship. Out of town, no idea what to do, I drove with her to her folks’ anyway, with me attempting damage control most of the way. I met her folks, we had a tense meal, and I bolted back to Cincinnati to see if I could still make an unexpected showing at my family’s Thanksgiving and nurse my wounds.

The drive back to Wisconsin afterward was interminable.

Checking into the camp office, I had seven phone messages that had come in over the long weekend. The phone number was the same.

The message on each gradually changed as the days passed. The first was a “What’s up?” The middle was “Let’s talk soon.” The last one was “Please call.” The receptionist at the camp had underlined the Please.

I called Dan back. No answer. Left a message. Two, three times.

I figured it had something to do with our Christmas meetup. A change of plans. Something like that. If that were the case, I’d hear in time.

The drive back to Cincinnati at Christmas was a long one. I still hurt from the breakup. Being the nice guy no girl wants is a tough row to hoe. But hey, I was resilient. Besides, I was looking forward to hanging with the crew over the Christmas break. Women, who needs ’em?

On Christmas Eve, I went to church for the evening service and waited on the back stoop as scheduled, under the pale yellow bulb that cast a halo overhead. Snow had begun to fall, tender flakes doomed to vanish when they hit the warmer ground. Inside, the first strains of the organ sounded and others lifted their voices to God. Christmastime was here. Happiness and cheer.

But no Dan.

The first carol ended, and the intro of the second wafted through the door of the full church.

I wasn’t the only one who would enter late; my friend Jeff walked up the back entrance.

“Waiting for someone?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Dan and I agreed to meet here. He seems to be late–as usual.”

Jeff hesitated, and the look on his face lost all meaning.

The snow came down, lighter now. The yellow light tried to warm the scene but instead cast harsh shadows on two men standing alone in the cold.

“Don’t you know?” Jeff said, his eyes betraying an emotion inscrutable to me. “He killed himself a few weeks ago. Over Thanksgiving.”

Please call.

I could feel that Dum-Dum in my right coat pocket.

For all our time spent talking about the deep things of life, I didn’t know Dan was engaged to be married. I didn’t know that he’d just gotten the job he’d always wanted. I didn’t know he had a chronic illness he struggled with.

I didn’t know.

I keep the Dum-Dum in the pocket of the trench coat. I still have both. I didn’t know, but I don’t want to forget.

We are fragile, each of us hoarfrost, vanishing in the warmth of a sudden spring breeze.