Church shouldn’t be this hard

As I continue to think of my new vision for millennials (and the church as a whole), I have decided to look at an op-ed from Tom Ehrich that appeared in the Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/commentary-church-shouldnt-be-this-hard/2014/01/07/1d869022-77c0-11e3-a647-a19deaf575b3_story.html

Mr. Ehrich has spent 36 years as an Episcopal priest and more recently as a church consultant. He has a very simple message in this article, that church shouldn’t be this hard.

It is good for me to see that the issues he raises are not the sole problem of evangelical churches, or conservative churches, or liberal churches, or mainline Protestant churches, or Catholic churches, or any specific style or model or anything specific. The hard reality is that church is just too hard.

As he says:

An assembly that exists to help people shouldn’t be so willing to hurt people — by declaring them worthless, unacceptable, undesirable or strangers at the gate. 

An assembly that should relax into the serenity of God’s unconditional love shouldn’t be so filled with hatred and fear. 

An assembly that should do what Jesus did shouldn’t be so inwardly focused, so determined to be right, so eager for comfort, so fearful of failing. 

An assembly that follows an itinerant rabbi shouldn’t be chasing permanence, stability and property. 

An assembly whose call is to oneness and to serving the least shouldn’t be perpetuating hierarchies of power and systems of preference.

This is a good place to start. In the previous articles that I have considered, this seems to be a theme. I will also say that the conversations that I have with people outside the church, some variation of these points are surely what I hear most from people who are attracted to the message and teachings of Jesus, but want nothing to do with the church. The church shouldn’t be this hard.

Too often the church reflects the people inside of it, instead of reflecting Christ. Now this is admittedly a cliché way of looking at it, but by this I mean that too often people go to church with the desire to hold fast to who they are and to have God reflect who they are, with their own baggage, their own problems, their own prejudices, and they are much too hesitant (scared?) to accept the free gift that is waiting for them by giving it all up to the Lord.

This is difficult. Control is mighty tempting, release and freedom is for someone else. Ehrich acknowledges that it is difficult. He focuses on the difficulty of self-sacrifice and renewal, the difficulty in dealing with mammon and speaking truth. These are all indeed quite difficult, and infinitely moreso if we are afraid to let go. Faith should and is hard, but church shouldn’t be this hard.

Ehrich continues:

But the institution whose sole justifiable purpose is to help us deal with those difficulties shouldn’t be making matters worse. 

When we bring our burdens to church, we shouldn’t find ourselves feeling intimidated by the in crowds, caught up in conflicts about who is running things, budget anxieties, jousting over opinion or doctrine, or relentless demonizing of whoever is trying to lead.

Yes, yes and yes. These are surely the problems of any institution, but how much damning are they when they deal with an institution of the soul. Ehrich suggests that it is these issues that are truly driving people from the church. It is not bad doctrine, or shoddy production on Sunday morning, or inconvenient calls to mission, but an escape from the institution and an escape from the battles and discomfort that is faced by those trying to enter.

I suspect that at this point he is a little bit too much in his consultant hat. Good, healthy churches don’t call in consultants to help them out, and I think he is a little bit too specific in the problems that come up. For example, I do think that bad doctrine is a problem. It may not be something that is obvious at first, and bad doctrine, depending on what it is, might actually be quite attractive at first. But bad doctrine is what will bring down the church from the inside, a rot that will be unable to serve as the foundation when other problems inevitably flare up.

That said, I think he is quite right on his other two points. People are not leaving the church because the production is a little shoddy or there is too much of a call for mission in the rest of their lives. People may shop churches because of these reasons, but they are not going to leave the institution. As Ehrich states later – worship isn’t a Broadway show, it is a way to glimpse God. If worship is glimpsing God, that goes much further than worship style, or hymns vs. contemporary, or guitars or whatever seems to divide. There are surely preferences, but people do not leave institutions because of preferences. Church shouldn’t be this hard.

Ehrich concludes with these thoughts:

Church should be a safe place — safe to be oneself, safe to make one’s confession, safe to love whoever one feels called to love, safe to imagine more, safe to fail. Instead, church often is a dangerous place, where people feel guarded, self-protective, hemmed in by tradition and expectation, required to obey rules. 

Church should be different from society. Instead, it plays by the same rules: get mine, be first, be right, punish the weak, exclude the different, reward the wealthy. 

Our society needs healthy faith communities. But neither society nor God has much need for religious institutions grounded in right-opinion, self-serving and systemic danger.

These are interesting critiques. I am not sure I agree with all of them myself, but I would suspect that conversations with people outside the church would point to these problems. The idea that church should be different from society is especially poignant. A church that is no different than society around it doesn’t do much for anyone, especially God. Why would someone be a part of that type of institution, there are several others that can provide all the same functions with much less of the hassles.

The church is called to be different. It should always be based on the foundation o Christ, not the foundation of those that are in the institution. Church shouldn’t be this hard.