A Spiritual Re-awakening

I’ve made it a point over the last couple weeks to begin re-reading some books that I have found thought provoking and helpful in parish ministry. I am re-reading because I want to refresh why these books were so helpful. One of the reasons is that they challenge me in my call as a leader in a congregation. The first book I picked up was Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. Real quickly, on page 26, David strikes right at the heart of where I have let myself fall short. In the section titled “Too Much Masculine Spirit or Feminine Spirit Leads to Spiritual Abuse he writes:

A church with too much masculine spirit succumbs to legalism. It’s all about performance–what you do for God. There’s often a pastor who rules the congregation with an iron fist. There are silly rules, frustrating rituals, and simplistic black and white answers that don’t work in the real world. It’s about fear, not grace. Salvation is a free gift but everything else must be earned.

A legalistic church can foster horrific abuse. I have a friend who was being physically and verbally abused by her husband. She went to the elders of the church for help. These men read her Scriptures and accused her of “being under the influence of a spirit of rebelliousness.” They told her to “go home and submit to your husband.” They did not rebuke the man; he continued to enjoy his position in the church.

Since too much masculine spirit has the potential to create this kind of abuse, one might think the solution is to reject the masculine in favor of the feminine spirit. Yet this leads to another kind of abuse I call “Velvet Coffin Christianity:” show up on Sunday, participate in comforting rituals, listen to a pabulum sermon of familiar truths; then go home and forget all about your faith until next Sunday. Velvet Coffin Christianity is rampant in America today. After Cynthia Woolever and Deborah Bruce surveyed more than one million churchgoers, they reported that “half of all worshippers say they are not growing in their faith.” I suspect the true figure is 75 to 80 percent; after all, would you admit to a pollster that you were not growing in your faith?

Legalism makes the headlines, but Velvet Coffin Christianity is the real cancer in the church today. Its key characteristic is comfort. Everyone is so nice to each other. And we choose a church based on how comfortable it makes us feel. I wish I had a dollar for every conversation I’ve heard like this one:

Corrine: Why did you choose First Church, Mary?

Mary: I’m so comfortable here. Everyone is so nice to me and the kids. The pastor is so nice.

Men gag on this kind of religion. It’s angel food cake, soft, spongy, and unsatisfying. It does not reflect the wildness of Jesus. Everywhere Christ went, He created an uproar and discomfort. He made it a point to insult people (Matt. 23:13-39). He even called his best friend “Satan” (Mark 8:33). (That was a horrendous insult, akin to calling a Holocaust survivor “Hitler.”) Although He comforted the needy, an encounter with Jesus was often an uncomfortable experience, especially for religious people.

Is Velvet Coffin Christianity really abuse? Yes, just as legalism is abuse. People don’t see it as such because it’s not sensational or salacious. It doesn’t make good gossip. It feels so nice. But it’s abuse nonetheless. Churches are comforting Christians to death, because the feminine spirit has taken over and the masculine spirit has withdrawn. In time, so do men.

I included that rather long quote because that gets to the heart of what has been gnawing at me now that I am three years into parish ministry. My wife calls my Fire/EMS work my “guy time.” Why is that work “guy time” and the church not? Murrow puts it well “the feminine spirit has taken over.”

We are so afraid of “abuse” that we in the church abuse with a “Velvet Coffin.” Christian churches aren’t dying because the Gospel is irrelevant to today’s society, the Church has become abusive. We “proclaim” a message that asks everything, and then say “O never mind, not really for you, just go about your business.” We don’t expect anything of anybody except to be “comfortable.”

When Dr. Kent Hunter visited our congregation, he said much the same thing. If we’re about making people comfortable, we will not reach the unchurched. We have to be willing to make people uncomfortable and do some out of the box kind of stuff. In other words, take risks.

A few months ago I used this video as a sermon illustration:

 

I went on to say that we need to be squirrels. It’s the same idea really. We spend so much time making ourselves comfortable in church that we forget that there’s a mission to do that calls us to be uncomfortable. Because it isn’t about us. It’s about making sure that others hear the message of Jesus Christ. It’s about us fulfilling His call for us to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

I recommend David Murrow’s book to you. He has lots of good stuff in there, encouragement as well as challenge. I’m looking forward to continuing my reading and “re-finding” insights for fulfilling Christ’s call for our ministry both here in our neighborhood, and the world over.

This entry was posted on August 5, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.