The Country Club Church

It concerns me that many of America's churches look a bit like country clubs, outside and in, the architecture as well as the people and the programing. Members flit about like chickadees looking for a tasty morsel or a warm place to sleep. At the slightest offense or challenge, people move on in search of a more welcoming atmosphere. I wonder if many of us have lost sight of what the church is supposed to be.

We spend millions of dollars erecting buildings to house hundreds or thousands of people for one or two hours per week. I realize that many churches have weekday activities that take place in the building, but only a small percentage of the square footage is used daily. If I grant that such large gatherings are even necessary, I stumble over the cost to build and maintain these usually extravagant structures. I think we may have fallen into the same trap that caught the medieval cathedral builders. Magnificent temples are no longer necessary to house our God; He does not dwell in houses made with hands, after all.

Similarly we expend tremendous effort to construct programs that will attract and entertain the masses needed to fill our modern cathedrals. We go to great lengths to provide musical and visual experiences that rival the theater and concert hall. Sadly, however, programs are often little more than entertainment. I am no Luddite when it comes to music; I enjoy the contemporary sound of the "worship band," as it has come to be called. Much of the popular music masquerading as worship, however, is anything but real worship. Too often it is pablum compared to the meat and potatoes of the traditional hymns it has all but replaced.

I fear that the experience-based Christianity that began to infect the church in the middle of the nineteenth century has become entrenched in the thinking of evangelicals today. As marvelous and reviving as the spiritual awakenings were, they left behind a legacy of expectation that is not entirely Biblical. Christians today seem primarily concerned with having an experience; they want a religion that makes them feel something. I believe it is more important, more Biblical to seek to know something (a revelation) and want to do something.

The present focus on the individual's personal relationship with Jesus biases believers toward an inward facing experiential mindset. Instead, the Biblical perspective is that the church IS Jesus; we are his body in the world. Therefore, we should be doing Jesus when we are doing church. What did Jesus do? He reached out to the hungry, the hurting, the downcast, the outcast. Most of His forays into the Temple, the cathedral if you will, resulted in heated arguments with the Temple partisans. He never turned a sick person away, yet He sent the Pharisees scurrying off with tails between legs.

If our churches seem more like a country club than a rescue mission, are we really fulfilling Christ's call? During a particularly difficult time for the church in Hitler's Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of a cheap grace that lulled people into thinking that they could have Christianity without cost. I am afraid we have gone one step further from the truth by suggesting that it is not costly at all, but rather pays wonderful social and material dividends. How blind we have become.

If you had to walk three hours to church, only to sit on a wooden plank for three more hours, then walk back home, how often would you attend services? If your religion caused you to lose all your possessions and find your very life in peril, how long would you name the name of Christ as your Savior? No, I don't think we should sell all our buildings and run around in sackcloth. But I do think we had better wake up. Read Jesus' letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3. If it doesn't send a chill up your spine, you're not really listening to what the Spirit has to say to the churches.