Oddities

Misfits of the Church

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This post has long been in the queue. Though it has been ruminating in my heart, I haven’t wanted to hurt anyone or to run the risk of being too personal or too specific, which might have repercussions and would make life harder for me and the people I love.

But I have to write this anyway. It’s just taken a few months, and I can’t vouch for the results. YMMV in whether this is a worthwhile post or not.

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The people in my church whose homes I have visited have been leaving. While the church itself appears to be growing, familiar faces, the ones I most look for, are gone. The tables in the church café once occupied by those who were ready to talk deep things now sit empty. I look for those people whose thoughts I most appreciated, but they aren’t there.

Empty pewI note the fact that I have visited these people’s homes because it says something about who they are. Sure, I’ve visited the homes of a few others who are still around, but the disproportionate number of leavers still says something about who those people were to me: my best church friends.

Gone. And they’ve taken something vital with them.

People leave churches for different reasons. Church shoppers will go on about one or two things they didn’t like that became dealbreakers, but when longtimers leave by choice and their reasons for doing so vary widely, one wonders if a more systemic problem exists.

When I reflect on the people I have known in my Christian life who have left churches, they all seem to have something in common: they are square pegs in round holes.

This is not to say that no square hole exists for them anywhere, only that they will always stick out from the crowd. Not only do they tend to be the 20 percent who do 80 percent of the work, but they tend to be the least acknowledged for it.

And this is because the Church in America has no idea what to do with them.

Something is broken in our churches when it comes to some kinds of people. I’ve encountered too many ultragifted people who ended up as so much church-created roadkill because church leaders either had no idea how to utilize that gifting or they resented or despised that person’s gifting.

Some would argue that this is all sour grapes, but the list of names keeps growing of good people I’ve known who were either used up by a church and discarded or ignored altogether.

The one who creates beautiful art but who is told she can’t display it in the church building.

The one who hears from God but who is told such words are not appreciated.

The one who can see the roadblocks preventing growth and ways around them but who is despised because he is not ordained.

The one from the “rough background” who is forever limited by those who cannot put aside what he once was and did.

The one who failed once and will never be given a second chance.

The one who doesn’t agree with every denominational position and so will never be considered for leadership.

The one who warns people, who prefer the status quo, of the dangers ahead.

The one with great vision who is surrounded by those with little or none.

The one with many flaws but who loves people abundantly and unconditionally, just like Jesus did.

The one who is always serving, though not with the imprimatur of those in charge, and who makes them look bad for doing so.

Those are ten such “misfits” of the church. Many more exist. You may be one of them.

I keep encountering more longtime Christians who are giving up. They’re not abandoning Jesus; they simply don’t know how to fit within the typical church. And it’s not for trying. I know these people have tried. But they’re weary of always receiving the left hand of fellowship, and they despair of ever contributing their God-given gifts because The Church™ does not want those gifts or it places ridiculous qualifications on their use that have no basis in Scripture and every basis in human selfishness and pride.

We talk, talk, talk, and talk about community in the Church, but what kind of community do we really have when someone is told to stop being the person God Himself is making him?

The Kingdom of God is filled with misfits, so how come our churches aren’t?

Is the Organic House Church a Myth?

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Over the course of the last six weeks, I’ve been working my way through Frank Viola’s series of books on organic church. I’ve completed Pagan Christianity, and I’m now reading Reimagining Church.

In those books, Viola does a stellar job of sharing stories about how near and dear to the New Testament these naturally formed and free-form, Spirit-led organic churches are. They supposedly embody all the positive characteristics I wrote about yesterday in “I Had a Dream.”

Having been around churches all my life, with a degree now called Spiritual Transformation (once Christian Education)  from the top Christian college, and a keen sense that something is definitely amiss with the way we do church, I am dying to see a church like the one Frank Viola describes in his books.

I wish it could prove to be more real, though.

My son came home from school last weekend totally enthralled with the musical The Music Man, which his music class at school had shown. That it’s my favorite musical—and I own the soundtrack, though not the Preston/Jones movie, sadly—made it all the more a father-son shared experience, since we played the heck out of the soundtrack last weekend, driving my wife bats with our mutual singing of the question of how can there be any sin in sincere.

That said, sometimes all the sincerity in the world can’t necessarily change reality.

I can’t shake the feeling that Frank Viola comes off a little like the infamous Professor Harold Hill of the musical’s fame. Just as Hill paints a marching band as the cure for every moral ill confronting the youth of River City, Iowa, so Viola lauds the organic church as the only viable answer for Christians who long for a more genuine experience of community in Christ than the “pagan-inspired” institutional church offers.

While I don’t think that Viola intends to skip town with anyone’s cash like Professor Hill did, the comparison is still apt, since both the marching band and the organic church seem more mythical than real.

House among the mistsI say this because the more I attempt to locate the type of organic/house church that Viola says has been blessing his life for the last few decades, the more it seems like the fabled destination of another famous musical, Brigadoon.

What my search for the organic church has yielded:

  • I emailed Viola’s organization for more info, which landed me on a mailing list to receive more stuff from Viola and his cohorts, yet none of it yet addresses the main question: Where can I find an organic church in my area?
  • I’ve visited the websites of numerous top house church and organic church organizations that tout access to church locations and resources. What I’ve found are moldy, old sites filled with broken links, out of date church info, dead and buried churches, and all the wrong kinds of impressions that such organizations want to make on someone looking to connect with them. In short, visiting organic and house church websites is akin to hanging out on MySpace or Friendster.
  • What does it say about the rosiness of organic church when you discover some of these churches no longer meet because the people who started them left to go back to paid, institutional church ministry?

I live just outside a metropolitan area of 2.2 million people that is heavily churched. When Christian pollsters and church resource magazines publish info about influential institutional churches, this area contains a disproportionately large number of them. Which is why I continue to scratch my head at the utter lack in such an area of anything resembling Viola’s ethereal organic church. Hasn’t anyone burned out of those institutional megachurches and fled to the supposed refuge of an organic church?

Reading the testimonials of organic church members included in Viola’s books makes my heart ache. But like so many tales one hears in the American Church today, it seems like those beautiful stories are happening in some hazy, distant place, almost like Narnia, except even harder to find.

UPDATED NOTE TO ALL COMMENTERS—Please read:

If you are NOT a regular reader of Cerulean Sanctum, please do not use this blog as a means to carry out a long-running battle between advocates and critics of Frank Viola or any house church organizations affiliated with him. I don’t care if you are defending or attacking, NEITHER TYPE OF COMMENT BELONGS HERE. I am both saddened and appalled that this blog has been drawn into some ongoing feud between Christian brothers and sisters who are so ruthlessly concerned with getting the upperhand in that feud that they’ll hijack this blog to do it. Simply put, doing so is not Christ-like. Please take your feuds elsewhere and know that I’ll delete any comments that even remotely seem abusive.

Really, as a rebuke from a fellow Christian brother of some experience: Grow up.

This is not to say that people can’t comment about their positive or negative experiences in house churches. But please refrain from scandalous attacks on any named person. And please, no comments allowed from “hired guns,” truly hired or merely self-appointed.

Because, frankly, I’m tired of it.

Usurping the God-Shaped Hole

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Bliss?When I was a younger Christian, I heard a great deal about the “God-shaped hole” that existed in each of us. Only God could fill that hole. Left unfilled, the hole drove people to despair as they tried to fill it with one inappropriate plug after another. Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, riches, power, fame…nothing can fill that hole but God.

At least that was what I was told.

Now that I am older, I wonder. It seems to me that perhaps that hole still exists, but it also seems just as true that people are satisfied with whatever usurping item they’ve used to plug their personal hole. So close does the phony plug resemble the real patch, at least in their experience, that people go on just as happy with the fake as with the real thing.

Perhaps ours is the first generation so overwhelmed with godless plugs that we can endlessly try one after another, getting just enough jolt from a new patch that we’re sustained until the next one comes along. Ours is such an entertainment-based culture that the ennui of daily living that once plagued mankind enough that it sought for greater answers may no longer exist amid the endless amusement park of this 21st century.

Fact is, I don’t encounter as many people who seem unhappy with whatever plug they’ve chosen to fill the God-shaped hole, inappropriate or not. Ennui hasn’t set in like it once did. An XBox, Netflix, a decent paycheck, a stocked liquor cabinet, a hobby or two, an occasional descent into a beloved vice, a few positive thoughts, and some mumbled prayers now and then seem to cut it for a lot of people. No sense of the God-shaped hole even exists for them. Sure, psychoactive prescription drugs abound, but doesn’t everyone take them? Whatever gets you through the night is all right, right?

It makes me wonder how small we Christians have made God that the lost look at us and find such simple, yet total, substitutes for Him.