What DOES the church have that is useful?

Last night at church council we had a challenging conversation about why people don't go to worship.  One member said, "I recently invited a colleague to join me at church and was told, 'I can't see that the church has one thing to offer me that I would want.'"  After a silence, he added, "You can just imagine how quickly that brought our conversation to a close."  For us as church leaders, however, this just got things rolling in a lively way for we wrestle with this reality everyday and consider its implications.  A few random reactions:

+ First, this young man was right:  not only do we as a church not have things that are obviously useful and valuable to him as a consumer, but as an institution we have a whole lot of baggage that NOBODY wants to be associated with anymore.  None of us want the taint of ignored and quietly sanctioned pedophilia.  No group of modern people working two jobs wants to support a bloated and irrelevant bureaucracy.  No thinking person can abide the literal biblicism that so often dominates the public realm.  And nobody I know can support the cruel moral judgments that have denigrated and defiled our LGBTQ sisters and brothers.  Let's face it, the church looks like a mess - and in many ways is even worse in person than it appears - so what smart, young hipster or middle aged thinking person would find anything attractive within and among us?  As a product, we leave a lot to be desired.

+ Second, this broken down body of Christ, however, just might finally be wounded enough to be free to become the church rather than a "vaguely therapeutic institution."  In his lengthy reflection on the spiritual wisdom born of recovery and addiction, Thirst, Jim Nelson notes that one of the most important New Testament insights is that in Jesus even God has chosen to quit acting like God. In Christ the sacred comes to us in our wounds - in our brokenness - in our failures and offers grace not judgment.  What a blessing for those of us who own our wounds, brokenness and failures.  Not only does God come to be with us, but God nourishes us when we are down so low it can only look like up, feeding us with love, hope and new life.  But here's the rub:  this blessing is only experience from the bottom looking up.  Those who still harbor an illusion of control, don't get it - and while that's good news for the least of us as sisters and brothers - this not such good news for young people striving to stake their claim on the world.  And it is especially unattractive if they are looking at church like one more commodity to be purchased or used.

+ Third, the vaguely therapeutic liberal Protestant church has not had much fire in the belly for at least 50 years or more - and we don't have much practice pointing out how the distilled wisdom of humanity in our Bible can be useful even in the 21st century.  That's what I hear young families telling me when I ask, "What do you need on Sunday morning?"  Most say, we need a time to be spiritually fed AND a time to learn how to use the wisdom of the scriptures in our everyday life.  To be blunt, we haven't done such a good job of talking about the wisdom of the Bible in useful ways.  For too many generations we haven't nurtured silence and awe, beauty and reverence, trust and clarity in worship either.  So, young consumers are right when they tell us:  I really can't see even one thing that the church could offer me that I might want.

So, what DOES the church offer that others in this - or any other - generation might want?  For me, the church offers at least these seven things: 

1) A physical place and a fixed point in time to practice reverence and learn the habits necessary to reclaim a sense of the sacred within the ordinary.

2) A set of clear moral guidelines based upon 4,000 years of compassion in community that can help families of all types mature with integrity.

3) A commitment to human well-being over greed.  This is a counter-culture value that is not addicted to the bottom line nor the waste of consumerism; it offers caring people an alternative to life styles driven by stress and performance metrics.

4) A worldview that begins with love not chaos, avarice or ambiguity.  We are defined by grace and posses the time-tested practices necessary to nourish a love-shaped life.

5) A community that is safe, humble and small - nothing too grand nor bigger than life - just real people in a user-friendly environment dedicated to becoming a little more gentle and real at the close of each day. I think of Psalm 131

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

6) An order to each day, week and season that helps us know that life is NOT all about me:  ours is an other-centered existence where we rub shoulders with people we don't like but treat with kindness, a collection of people who would not ordinarily gather together but are now committed to one another in love, a community that is not segregated by age, race or gender no matter how inefficient that seems to the world.

7) A center that practices group singing - and sharing our resources - and listening - and honoring the dignity of every living being.

Recently Fr. Richard Rohr wrote the following that captures the best of what a wounded, all-too human church looks like and has to offer our obsessive culture:

The sin warned against at the very beginning of the Bible is “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). It does not sound like that should be a sin at all, does it? But the moment I sit on my throne, where I know with certitude who the good guys and the bad guys are, then I’m capable of great evil—while not thinking of it as evil! I have eaten of a dangerous tree, according to the Bible. Don’t judge, don’t label, don’t rush to judgment. You don’t usually know other people’s real motives or intentions. You hardly know your own.

The author of the classic book The Cloud of Unknowing says that first you have to enter into “the cloud of forgetting.” Forget all your certitudes, all your labels, all your explanations, whereby you’ve put this person in this box, this group is going to heaven, this race is superior to that race. Just forget it. It’s largely a waste of time. It’s usually your ego projecting itself, announcing itself, and protecting itself. It has little to do with objective reality or real love of the truth. If the world and the world’s religions do not learn this kind of humility and patience very soon, I think we’re in historical trouble.

I believe THIS is something invaluable and useful for times such as our own.