Friday, February 24, 2006 | by nathan

Shouldn’t You Be…

…at the Gazette? Why yes, yes I should, but I woke up this morning when Brian left, and I had a very, very chewy thought in my head, and every time I try to get up and get in the shower, it gets chewier.

This post, too, has its origins in Jon Warren, because, well, I am too busy to have my own thoughts, it seems. No, that’s not true, but the guy does always give me a lot to think/pray about, like right here, where he is discussing this idea of the church being guided and run by the overarching principle of "cultural relevance," or treating congregants like customers - basically running churches like businesses.

 And I got to thinking about that this morning, literally the second I was awake enough to have thoughts. I realized how fundamentally American the whole idea was, really, in the sense that we are a very results-oriented culture. We have a free market capitalistic system, and in the name of "soul-winning" (I assume) many of our churches have taken on this "bigger is better," McDonalds-esque business model, where you get people in, meet their "needs," and get them back out (and, one assumes, onto the golf course) as quickly as possible.

[God, I hate Edmond so much].

Anyway, I got to thinking that, as twisted as this is, in some way, people must be responding to it, because there are megachurches, and they do seem to be growing. So I wondered why people respond to it, and suddenly it hit me: it’s the whole Bible Bar thing all over again.

See, Americans - people in the wealthy West in general, but especially us - are taught from a very young age how very entitled we are. How deserving. If we are paying money for something then we deserve to have it be exactly what we want, and exactly how we want it. But bookmark that for a second.

Yesterday I spoke about how we like to slap parameters on everything so that we can easily define things that are, by nature, not easily defined. We do this so that we feel that we have control; we can say we are beautiful if our bodies conform to what amounts to a set of numbers. We can attach truth-claims to what we say if it can be proven in terms of the scientific method. In each of these cases there is much, much more to beauty and truth than these simple defining boundaries.

I think we do the same thing to our lives of faith. It’s called legalism, and it is absolutely addictive. There is a whole culture built around it. The same culture that has built megachurches and runs them like businesses, I think, has attached a wholly ridiculous set of parameters to defining the Christian life, and I think that they have some pretty scary consequences. If you are Christian you vote Republican, you are against stem-cells, and Harry Potter, and you are against whatever new things we all get together and decide to be against.

There was a joke once on the Simpsons: "Oh, Neddy doesn’t believe in insurance. He considers it a form of gambling."

We joke, but I’ve been in churches where it is more or less like that. "Only listening to Christian music will bring  you closer to God." "I just feel more comfortable voting for someone who’s a believer."

Yeah, our senator, Tom Coburn is a believer. Also, he is a nut job who advocates executing women who have abortions. Is this what Christlike love looks like in our world now? There is a church in Edmond that has this gigantic Christian bookstore - probably the biggest I have ever seen - right inside its front door. Books like Your Best Life Now tell us steps - steps - to how to be closer to God, like God is a Panasonic TV and all we need to do is figure out how to read the directions. It’s "Bible Bar" all over again.

Of course our churches are run like businesses when we approach our relationships with God the way we approach weight-loss. Get as much result, as quickly as possible. Figure out which new foods to avoid, which exercises to do, to get the most result for the least effort. It doesn’t take a lot of faith to have a list of things you are against. What it does take a lot of faith - more than I have almost all the time - to do is to love your God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself, and to try not to kill anyone, just for today. (This last one can be really trying for me, at times).

But we are Americans, and we believe in our American dream, and it is a mythology to which we cling so desperately that it has been woven into our religious observance, so that now holiness, righteousness, and love are achieved by hard work, discipline, and a mixture of all the right "products," in this case, the intake and rigorous application of the "correct" religious message. And how do you know it’s correct? The same way you know anything is good in our results-oriented culture: it’s the place where the most people are.

 We want to be able to measure how much God we have in our lives, because we want control over this relationship we have with Him. You can always count how many people you witnessed to, how many Jesus fish are on your car or how many TV shows you don’t let your kids watch. What you cannot count is grace, and Americans, we love to count things. We love to measure success, but if Jesus was about anything, it was that where God is concerned, there is no such thing.

 The more I think about the t-shirts that the Warrens came up with, the more I want the one that says "Christians for irrelevance."

 I do not think that the church as she is conceived in Scripture owes much to the culture in the sense of conforming to it for the sake of - comfort? Broad appeal? I am assuming these are the reasons for churches becoming so business-model oriented. I am sure that it all began in very well-meaning terms, too - they wanted to bring the Gospel to as many people as possible. But again, I am pretty sure that an American business model is not how that was intended to happen. And I am positive that we are not meant to think of our relationship with God in terms of "success" like it is weight-loss or wealth-building, although if you stroll the aisles of any Christian bookstore you will see a lot of "biblical" perspectives on both of those subjects.

We cannot measure success in Christ because we cannot be more loved than we are right now. We can’t earn, deserve, buy, date, own, order, marry, vote for, protest with, exercise to, dress for, invest in, drive, drink, listen to, or self-improve ourselves into the love of God. Through Christ we are as "there" as we are going to get - the question is, "How do we then live?" The words of my pastor come to mind - "radically free." "A life free from striving," he said. I like that.

My question, Jon, isn’t so much how to engage the larger culture, as it is how to engage the culture of the church, with whom I tend to have more of a problem. I can see America, the west, and the world believing what it does without Jesus. It’s the people who invoke His name, and then go around acting like everyone else, or sometimes even worse, that stresses me out the most.  

Margaret Cho, just before the 2004 election, was talking about a lot of the hateful rhetoric coming from the religious right, and she said, "They’re taking it to a whole new level. Even Satanists are like, ‘Wow, you guys are being really mean.’"

Last week I read a column on Worldview Weekend (remember the World View Test?) and this guy was saying some of the meanest things about liberals. Just unnecessarily mean. I sent him an email that was like, "It’s wonderful that you have these tiny little opinions, but remember how Jesus said to love your enemies? Well, I’m not sure that using phrases like ‘liberal minded pansies’ or ‘the old dinosaurs of the Dumb-o-cratic party’ are very loving."

But, I may be the tiniest bit angry, and I really, really should be at the Gazette. So I’ll leave you with that. 

Living In America, This I Believe