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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.

Bait & Switch, Or How People Go to Church for Jesus But Get Something Else

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I read about these churches with satellite campuses, where people watch a pastor by closed-circuit TV. I hear about these churches where the worship teams operate from iPads. I know of these churches where people fret over the brand of stage lights used or the sound systems.

And yet the cry of the human heart remains: “Show me Jesus.”

And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
—John 17:3 ESV

All that we do in a church must go back to one reality: Knowing God and His Son. That’s it.

Authenticity has become a buzzword in Christian circles, and it’s almost humorous to witness the highly manipulative means we use to achieve authenticity. Yet the fact remains: We want a deep, abiding intimacy with God free of dross.

Our problem is that we keep erecting barriers to authenticity for the sake of creating that intimacy. I think this is because we no longer know what it takes to become intimate with God.

I’m convinced that many church leaders are out of touch, if what we see of a Sunday meeting is typical. The church meeting revolves around the mistaken assumption that people are self-feeding. I don’t believe that should be assumed. I think a lot of people come to church hoping to achieve intimacy, but church leaders assume they already have it, leaders don’t help usher people into it, and then folks go back home having not found what they came for. Then they are expected to build off a foundation they do not have.

Or worse. The church gives a foundation, but it’s all built on a show, a performance. People came looking for Jesus, but they got Ringling Brothers instead.

Church as entertainmentA life experience:

I know a pastor who is a solid man of God. He genuinely loves people and loves Jesus. One Sunday, he got up and said, “People keep asking me when we’re going to go deeper, but this is as deep as it gets!” And he said it with a broad smile on his face.

A year later, that pastor and his staff were convening a whole-church meeting to repent for the dog and pony show the church had become.

You see, the people in the seats were starving to death. The leadership assumed people were feeding themselves properly, and they weren’t. The people didn’t know where to find spiritual food, and the leaders of the church weren’t giving them any. Those people in the seats knew it too. They knew they were dying. They came to church looking for Jesus and instead got a pale imitation.

While this doesn’t excuse the people in the seats for not being more self-sufficient in their own feeding, the problem remains. Every Sunday in America, people are going to church hoping to encounter Jesus, but they get something else instead.

We Christians like to reserve the following verse for our foes:

Claiming to be wise, they became fools…
—Romans 1:22 ESV

Do we ever consider that in thinking we are wise about human nature and what people need we have instead become fools and substituted a genuine intimacy with the Lord for something else? Something that doesn’t satisfy and never can?

There is nothing so sad as a church that keeps piling on the show while people sit in the seats and wonder why it is they leave after an hour and still feel empty. Five minutes outside the church door, the entertainment’s buzz has worn off, and again the reality of life has rushed in to fill the perpetual void.

Authenticity may be a buzzword, but people are dying for it nonetheless.

What if we stripped everything we do as a church down to its core? What if we pitched the amped worship band? The PowerPoint presentation? The CCTV? The theater-like church building? The one-hour show?

What if we went back to prayer? What if we opened our services for people to stand up and share their needs? What if we ate a real communion meal together and took our time doing so? What if the people in the seats were given free reign to use their gifts to minister to others in the body during our services?

What if we talked about Jesus and not just about ourselves? What if we held Him up in such a way that awe came back to the people because of who He is and not because of the new light bar we got for the stage?

What if?

It’s not just the young believers who are dying for real food. These are tough times. Some of the people hit hardest are those who have been walking with Jesus for the longest time. Satan hates those people, and he will do everything he can to discourage them, because if he takes them down, the young in Christ will go down too.

I can think of nothing sadder than a person who comes to church desiring Jesus but who instead receives trifles.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Time to purge everything that hinders.

The One Reason Kids Leave Church (A Response to Jim Daly’s “Ten Reasons Kids Leave the Church”)

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Over at Focus on the Family, someone is thinking. That usually spells trouble.

Ha! I jest.

Jim Daly wrote a piece about why young people abandon the Faith (“Ten Reasons Kids Leave the Church“). It’s not a bad postmortem. Many of those reasons are decent secondary excuses. They play well.

What doesn’t play well is the real reason why youth leave the Church:

Kids today look at their parents’ Christian faith and see that it changes nothing.

That one’s not in Daly’s list. And probably for a reason. Because it asks those of us of parenting age to change the way we live because of what we say we believe.

Kids are not stupid. Because we live in a therapeutic culture where everyone is aware of the world’s, the nation’s, the state’s, and their own individual problems and the need to address them, kids are constantly aware of talk vs. walk. Constantly.

Every Sunday, kids go to church, hear about the way we’re supposed to live as a Church, and then they go home and witness not one iota of that message being lived. Nada.

Sure, mom and dad may pray and read the Bible, but what part of their life is actually changed by doing so? In what ways are their Christian lives at odds with the World at all? In what ways does anything they believe change their community for the better?

Kids are highly aware of B.S. This generation can spot hypocrisy like no other generation. We live in a cynical culture that is always taking a look at reality versus talk and applying a hammer to it all. Anything that survives a bashing is worthy of a further look. Anything that doesn’t, well…

Sadly, Christianity is not holding up. The reason? Kids don’t see that the beliefs of the generation that came before them make a lick of difference.

Leaving, walking out of churchThey HEAR an ideological distinction espoused, but they don’t see it lived.

They HEAR about the Church as a countercultural community, but they don’t experience it personally.

They HEAR about a mission, but their parents don’t center their lives around that mission.

They HEAR about a relationship with Jesus, but they don’t see what that relationship changes, because it certainly hasn’t changed their parents’ way of life.

So what do kids do? They toss it all. Because it’s irrelevant. Better to join the Sierra Club. At least it ACTS on what it says it believes.

There is no greater disconnect in a church than the wildly committed youth group that does mission projects, helps the poor, evangelizes, and on and on, but then those committed kids see their parents doing none of those things.

The message sent to those young people by their parents: That “Jesus stuff” doesn’t really matter in the end. It’s something you do before you do the REAL work of being an adult. And that REAL work of being an adult is to keep your nose clean, bolster the status quo, and settle into a traditional American Dream lifestyle.

Now, I’m going to throw one more log, a big one, on this fire.

This generation of children has seen no genuine Holy Spirit revival. For the most part, the real gifts of the Spirit are not practiced before them.

Sure, in Pentecostal and charismatic churches they’ve heard a ton of prophetic words that didn’t come to pass, and words of knowledge that were off, and on and on, but the REAL gifts are outside their experience. They haven’t been shaken to the core by a genuine move of God either.

And in those churches that don’t believe that “stuff,” the kids learn that Christianity is just something you think. It’s all in your head.

Parents who don’t live the faith and a powerless church.

I want to leave too. Don’t you?