There’s a hole in my neighborhood
Down which of late I cannot help but fall.
–Grounds for Divorce Elbow
“22 David said to him, “Let me have the site of your threshing floor so I can build an altar to the Lord, that the plague on the people may be stopped. Sell it to me at the full price.”
23 Araunah said to David, “Take it! Let my lord the king do whatever pleases him. Look, I will give the oxen for the burnt offerings, the threshing sledges for the wood, and the wheat for the grain offering. I will give all this.”
24 But King David replied to Araunah, “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the Lord what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing.”
-1 Chronicles 21
One of my favorite scenes of all time is in the most profanity laden film I have ever watched about 1940s era British Monarchs. In The King’s Speech, there is a fantastic scene in which the King and his speech therapist Lionel are yelling at each other…
King George VI: Listen to me. Listen to me!!
Lionel Logue: Listen to you? By what right?
King George VI: By divine right if you must, I am your king.
Lionel Logue: No you’re not, you told me so yourself. You didn’t want it! Why should I waste my time listening?
King George VI: Because I have a right to be heard. I have a voice!
Lionel Logue: [pauses] Yes. You do.
You have to love stuff like that!
I think I get drawn to things like that scene because there comes a time in every generation when they look around and realize that they are no longer the up and comers, they have arrived. Now what will they do with that voice that they have?
My generation has reached a point in history when we are no longer able to stay the church in waiting. We are the church now.
We are ready, but we also are not. We have more power than we realize, but when we start to see it, the responsibility feels too great and we run away from it.
We don’t call it that of course.
We call it talking about “what is wrong with the church.”
My generation and those rising after us suffer from an epidemic level of complaint about church.
I get it.
I give into it…
a lot.
You could liken what we do to an entire generation of Christianity sitting in a boat together and shooting holes in it while lamenting there are so many, many holes in the boat!
However…
There is a time and a place to call out it what it is.
Church does have a lot of weird stuff in it that is probably not as useful as we all think it might be. To a large extent, it is a production with set formatting that is intent on trying to “get the people where they need to go.” We may be sheep, but that does not mean we all need tight fences.
Take for instance, something that I muse about a lot when I sit in many church services, is the hypothetical lead-ins before the slow songs about how life is so rough? It is almost always followed up with a number of hypothetical situations that may or may not ever have happened to the congregation the previous week.
It reminds me of an Ellen DeGeneres comedy special I saw once on HBO where she talks about anti-depression drug commercials…
“All the commercials on TV today are for antidepressants, for Prozac or Paxil. And they get you right away.
[Looks sadly in the camera] “Are you sad? Do you get stressed, do you have anxiety?”
“Yes, Yes I have all those things……I’m alive!”
Now, I fully understand that church is and needs to continuously be a place where authenticity is a core value, but you also can’t live in a perpetual crisis all the time either. Immune systems protect the body, but if there is no off switch, you die. Really fast.
On the other side, structure and planning in church is an absolute necessity. If you let a river have no boundaries and simply flow wherever it feels like at the moment, two things will happen. First, it will slow down to an almost dead stop. Rivers with no walls just spread out. The second thing that will happen is that rivers with no boundaries become bogs. They become marshes filled with stench.
Proverbs declares, “for lack of vision, the people perish.” More than anything, that is the glaring error I carry with me into church. We have been so concerned about not being like the previous generation that we fit a tight mold ourselves.
We withhold almost all judgment.
We place relationships over doctrine
We do not worry about encouraging boundaries.
We accept and rarely confront.
And…
We have lost our way.
The great C.S. Lewis said at the very end his awesome book, The Abolition of Man:
“…you cannot go on “explaining away” forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.”
Read that quote again…it took me years to get it, and the jury is still out as to whether I actually have got it yet.
I love that quote because it is so true, if you could see forever, you could not see anything. There must be things that are not transparent in order for you to actually see. The man is brilliant.
I do think that there is a lot of good that my generation brings to the church, but we cannot be as good as our God needs us to be unless we follow in the footsteps of our ancestors and those that have wrestled before us.
We need to learn and then use and interpret that knowledge for the times we find ourselves in. I am where I am at spiritually because of a tradition of faith that my parents and grandparents fought long and hard to protect. We cannot abandon it. Great parents want a better life for their children; we should follow God and shape and lead in a way that provides a stronger church for those that take the reigns from us.
But again, we must be allowed to take those reigns.
Perhaps it is not that we are allowed to lead, but that when we do, it just looks different.
Perhaps we need to explain ourselves more in order for us to even understand what we need to do. Know thyself right?
Perhaps…
The truth is that each generation brings to the table a few prominent skill sets.
My generation is very good at sniffing out what stinks. When we call something out, it is not because we hate it, but because we are really good at seeing through things that are not genuine. We use our language in ways that shock because we are at the frontline of a culture that has systematically abandoned us. Those in power use us to make them feel good about them. If you think I am way off base, go to a little league game. Anywhere. Who is it the players fear letting down?
We enjoy going all in. Our passion is often mistaken as brashness, which it might be sometimes, but that passion changes the world because we don’t fear failure nearly as much as we probably should.
We will fail…a lot. The church needs to be okay with that.
Say you put an animal in a cage all its life and upon graduating from high school, the animal is given freedom for the first time in its life. Of course it is going to run bat crap crazy all over the place! It has no idea what is doing yet! It must learn through pain. I have so many failures in my life. I have messed up in so many ways that you would think I would run out of new bad ideas soon, but I won’t. Neither will you. That’s why God is always talking to us about what He is like.
We are Dreamers, Soapbox Philosophers and somewhat Dirty Poets.
We swear, we drink and we love to hangout with church people that do too. It’s why we believe in Jesus in the first place. We have fell in love with Jesus because He stood out in stark contrast to our culture as the Someone that is big enough to love us through our struggles, tensions, vices and contradictions. Yet in it all, He still speaks heartfelt, no holds barred, messy love songs into our hearts. We love Jesus because when He said come as you are, we know He meant it. We come and we do find healing in it. It is not a bad thing to be that honest.
We have a lot of things wrong with us. Let us deal with us. The more we are pushed, the exponentially faster we will run away from it. The bible we all are held to account by talks about how “to him who knows the right thing and does not do it, to him that is a sin.” We know we need to get off the bench, but we are chained to pride a lot of the time. That is our biggest sin by far– stubborn pride.
We will always be eternally suspect of church tradition that is done simply because it has always been done that way. We have no obligation to religion, and so we won’t jump until someone can actually explain in plain English why we need to. If you don’t know why you worship that way, sing those types of songs or listen to sermons on these topics, why should we follow you?
We follow not because we have to, but because we want to. It’s a frustrating difference I know, but which would you rather have? A person that follows out of duty, or one that puts their life on the line for it?
Some might say, “but what about when the going gets hard or the mood has past, duty must take over then!” I would agree, but also suggest that if something such as Christian service becomes a part of you, the tenacity at which you throw yourself into the task may fade or have highs and lows, but the two can never be fully divorced. You can stop a task for a while, but it will haunt you until you pick it up again. The cross will beckon because the soul can never be complete without Him. There will always be a hole. Something will always be missing.
Fake religion makes us mentally vomit. The, “do this and sing these songs that all need to start in G and then God will HAVE to come bless us” approach to church doesn’t cut it. Why would God come to that service? We obviously already know what we are doing, why would we need Him? There is no more room for Him.
I heard a phrase recently while reading a totally unrelated article to the topic I am stumbling through in this blog currently. It was in an interview with the band Over The Rhine. They were speaking about how they have changed their sound because of a piece of advice that one of theirs dad’s gave them about the farm they live on. He told them to plan and cultivate the land, but “Leave the Edges Wild.”
If I could sum up God’s pull on my life and on many of my brothers and sisters in my generations and the generations that are rising up as we speak, it would be that we must suffer the tension of following a God that demands worship that is both order and disorder. Peaceful Chaos. Quiet Passion.
I think we must change, not because we just like change, but because if something that we do is not helping anymore, we need to let it die. All good trees become lovely because someone cares enough to prune them. We are being given the garden, let’s not run from it, but also not plow it all under.
Plan yes.
Prepare yes.
But leave the edges wild.
Because out there is a Wild Beast that wants a good chase…
“And then—oh joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.
But for the movement of his tail he might have been a stone lion, but Lucy never thought of that. She never stopped to think whether he was a friendly lion or not. She rushed to him. She felt her heart would burst if she lost a moment. And the next thing she knew was that she was kissing him and putting her arms as far round his neck as she could and burying her face in the beautiful rich silkiness of his mane.
“Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan,” sobbed Lucy. “At last.”
The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.
“‘Welcome, child,” he said.
“AsIan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.””
-Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
Chasing The Wild Beast 