What has church ever done for us..?

There have been some very interesting posts on blogs of late about church, two that have caught my eye and my comments have been Jason Clark's "I love church" and Glenn Hager's "does church life equip us for real life?"

Both of these posts have stirred up some thinking i have been thinking over the last few weeks about church - mostly how much i have fashioned church into my own expectations  and let those perceptions determine  my reality - from romanticisng the church one year to hating it the next, from wishing it was better to realising that there was no such thing as the perfect church (and even there was it wouldn't want me).

I have had the experience where i have been hurt in church, where i have expected church to be the one place where people would react differently than in the outside  world and was sorely disappointed when they acted in the same predictable crap manner.

I've also conviently busy some people have needed help, refused to give up any more time and energy or take a risk on a new relationship and managed to dress it up with some suitable spritual sounding excuse like giving others the chance to step forward, being in a season of rest, yadda yadda.

i have experienced the rubbish of others selfishness and i has also contributed to that as well through my own. 

i once famously posted a guest piece on Jason's blog where i said in the comments that as a man I didn't get very much out of church but that i was glad i had met some good friends through it, it was helping my wife in her depression and my kids were being really blessed meeting some other christian kids to play and learn with. 

What has church ever done for me? I  sounded remarkably like the sketch from Monty Python's Life of Brian, where the question is asked what have the Roman oppressors ever done for the Jews...

I did recant a little the following year and posted on how i was rediscovering and appreciating churchianity - in other words what church was giving me that I had not really appreciated before - all the good times and hard times, doing life with people at our best and our worst. The grace that comes from having to experiene people i'd rather not and knowing that i was someone elses problem and they were feeling exactly the same about me.

It feels a lot easier to me to remain in apathy, despair or fantasy about the church rather than keep going in the reality that church is full of flawed people like me who will often disappoint but also that we have something to hope about together.  That those moments when we are chose to go that extra mile, to give instead of to take, to love instead of to walk away - where the penny drops and we realise together that life is not just about me and what we want, but instead that there is a different reality to order our lives around.  That the ultimate reality of life is not about following our individual desires  but in changing the practice of our lives in following Jesus - to give up our rights and to learn to love and serve.

I want to spend the next few posts looking a little at what we mean when we talk about church, it is afterall a term that can mean anything from "shoot me now please" to a place to reorientate a shared life around the reality of Jesus" - sometimes both at the same time :). 

I want to explore with you how we can begin to reconstruct something of our church experience out of the dominant narrative of our consumeristic-individualism orientation and practices.  Hopefully we can look at some of the practical ways we are exploring this without our faith communities and pool our thoughts together.

But before we go there together  let me ask you this question: what has the church ever done for you?

Comments

[glenn]

What has the church ever done for me?

I am coming from the perspective of someone who was a pastor for 20 years and has been "a former pastor" for about six years.

Given me a false sense of importance within a false system. It boosted my ego and left me faltering when it was no longer there.

There were mystical moments that came sometimes while preaching or talking with someone when it seemed like God was right there.

Taught me how to deal with difficult people and situations with grace and truth.

Taught me some very hard lessons about the fickleness and meanness of people.

Shown me some faithful friends who will walk with me even at their own risk.

Given the opportunity to shepherd and nurture people.

Shown me what a closed and self perpetuating system it really is.

Paul, I think you were looking for something more positive. Truly, I am just being honest.

[Jonathan Brink]

It would be unfair to say nothing. The reality is that we lived in times suited for modern church and this introduced me to Jesus. I would say the church gave me a foothold and a start. I was just smart enough to get move beyond the limited resources of what it was. I don't blame anyone for what it was. I just want to find the people who can help make it what it can be.

[ron cole]

" what has the church ever done for us ". Maybe the question should have been re-phrased, because I think in it lies the problem. I think for far to long in order to get people to come to church, we've had to provide something for " us ." Whether it be trendy youth programs, various support groups, highly performance worship...we had to market something to get " us " to come. You tried to do something better than the church down the road was doing...or better yet something they weren't doing.As Willow Creek has found out this creates couch potatoes, rather than disciples. And hey, I was on the couch with the rest of them for awhile. But when all I heard was complaining about this and that...this group and that group.It got to the point where I left...I woke up, and realized it's not about what the church can do for us...it's about what we can do for the church. When it becomes about us, we never become the salt, or the light.In most cases any problems with the church has started with me...my attitude, me sowing seeds of discouragement instead encouragement, not working to make things better. The church isn't about me/us it's about Christ and his Kingdom...folks trying to reflect and build the Kingdom He imagined outside the walls of the bulding.

[fernando]

"What have you done for me lately?
Ooh ooh ooh yeah"

That's a lyric from an old Janet Jackson song. It comes to mind 'cause this conversation feels like it might be more about falling out of love with the church, that the bare question about whether the church has done "anything at all" for us.

Catastrophies sometimes kill love, but more often it is dulled through an accumulation of hurts and disappointments. That's sure how I feel about the church most of the time. There's been some painful experiences, but in a lot of ways, the disillusionment is more to do with a slow, steady and relentless realisation that something is really wrong at some deep level.

[Paul]

Thanks Glenn, by nature i'm a +ive person but i wasn't looking for anything more than an honest response :). Your comments seem to sorta reflect the mixed bag of my own experience, sometimes its good sometimes its not...

[Paul]

Thanks Jonathan, i'm intrigued by what you see that church can be that does not simultaneously exist alongside all that it is not - that tension always seems to be there for me. So i'd love to hear more?

(oh just seen your email is it ok for you to post it here as well?)

[Paul]

Thanks Ron, that's a great JFK paraphrase and i guess that is when church is at its best, when we're working on giving rather than getting? It's something i want to explore, especially how we do what were seen as individual aspects of church as part of a community - so what does evangelism as a church look like for example.

[Toni]

Ron has, I think, rather hit the nail. But then this was meant to be a post that created 'conversation' about the 'church', wasn't it?

I grew up in a traditional church, but I'm not sure I could bear to be part of one again without a major revelation, probably involving arch-angels, maybe even a talking donkey.

"I want to explore with you how we can begin to reconstruct something of our church experience out of the dominant narrative of our consumeristic-individualism orientation and practices."

The church we're part of is a family, joined with love, making mistakes as any group of ordinary people will do, yet still working together. I don't recognise consumeristic-individualism as a basis for church construction, and to be honest with you, I think it's the wrong place to start. I don't deny it might be a common background and outlook brought to church by many, but it doesn't have a place in the foundation of our thinking about church.

I don't really have time for a decent answer right now - sorry.

Despite the slightly grumpy (that's how I feel this post comes across) tone, I'd sign off with the words you usually do in your emails.

In love.

Toni

[paul]

Thanks F, liking the JJ :)

Falling out of love with the church is one reality, plenty of people have but to switch literay sources to shakespeare, what do you feel is rotten in denmark?

[Jonathan Brink]

You asked, “So what do you think church can be that is different from how it is?”

This is an ecclesiology question to a great extent and one we’ve been actively researching from a practitioner’s perspective for about five years. I have been working with about ten guys trying to figure that out. It’s now about forty of us. We’ve been exploring what it looks like. We’re looking at intentional discipleship that focuses on engaging Missio Dei in the context of communitas. We focus on two things main things, the inward journey to restoring our hearts by connecting to the Father and the outward journey of loving our neighbor. There’s a deep methodology here that would take a while to explain but eventually became Thrive.

A lot of our work and observations revealed that the number one question people encounter is very simple, “Does God love me.” And what we found was that people can’t love (self, others, even God) if they don’t know God loves them. We realized that this was the curse. The journey became removing the obstacles that keep us from God’s love. One we engage that love we are released to embrace the Imago Dei and bring that love to the world around us.

And what is funny about the whole thing is that the church we are all members at gets in the way. There’s an organizational structure that exists that creates breakdowns for what is happening. We’re always competing with Sunday. And what eventually happens is that the discipleship group becomes the church for people. And they begin asking, why do I need to go on Sunday (and pay for a building). I’m doing church on Wednesday night. As an aside, we just finished a “new building”. It’s nice but has now put a really big $49,000 dollar mortgage on our heads. Its a love hate relationship.

My pastor is a really great guy but he is stuck in an old paradigm. To a great extent I understand why. He’s afraid of losing his job. I feel like there is going to be this transition over the next twenty to fifty years between what we used to do and new emerging expressions that take its place. I’m a huge proponent of the priesthood of all believers and we’re actively engaging that. And what we’re finding is that it’s releasing people to be who they are designed to be.

The original group is now looking at what it would look like to be a church on our own. But this is a political issue and one we are exploring carefully. We don’t really want to destroy these relationships but recognize we don’t have control over that.

Much Love

[Paul]

thanks toni, i don't thin you were grumpy at all. I think talking asses and arching angels are more common in church than one might think ;)

I'd be interested to hear what it is about the "traditional" church that you don't like - was it just being inoculated against it in your youth or something else?

I like your idea of family and am glad that is your current church experience - family is a great metaphor as you say "joined with love...still making mistakes."

I guess where i'm coming from needs a bit more context and i will put that in the post at the time - it's not where i want to start from or stop at either.

i just wanted to start in this post at a broader level and wider context/back ground and couldn't resist monty python, not least cos it gave me a telling reminder of some of the many things i am grateful for the church now and historical :)

[Jeff Gill]

The church gave me my first job and my third job and my sixth (and current) job.

-

My dad, who was also my pastor, for about 25 years always made a very clear distinction between the 'I will build my CHURCH' and the human institution called by the same name. There tends to be a lot of overlap between the two, but they are not the same thing. I guess because of that understanding he gave me, I have pretty much tended to see all the junk as human and typical of any organisation of humans.

Splitting the two has made it pretty easy for me to love both the church and the people in it. I don't have a lot of time for most of the structures though. A year as a Baptist deacon cured me of that!

[fernando]

Maybe our allusion should be to Othello and not Hamlet? Hamlet implies that the problem is largely moral, but Othello implies that the problem is largely one of identity - that we are prone to act in irrational and destructive ways because we are unsure of our place in the world.

It seems to me that the one of the big, hairy, ugly problems is that we seldom really know what to do as a church - why, in a practical sense we gather and what, in a practical sense our mission looks like. It's a contested e and in that space we "make up" visions of what we *could* do.

In a lot of ways the more invested we get into that, the more combative it becomes. I love Toni's idea of a church that is a "family" growing and learning together. But, I've never seen it. Well OK, I've seen it on small scales, in groups, in teams, in ministries, but never, ever on a church-wide basis. Moreover, I've met quite a few clergy who would suggest that is a really bad idea.

Argh...

[Pistol Pete]

While I think it's a fair question to ask, "What has the Church done for me?" ultimately, we have to also ask, "What have I done for the Church?" "You get out of it what you put into it," is more than just a cliche.

[Paul]

Thanks Jonathan, that is a great story of what you are involved in and what is forming as you are exploring this.

Your context/experience will inpart give your own identity but i am still intrigued by how this is different from the interplay of values that the church catholic has held for years, groups of people gathering together to love and be loved?

[Paul]

Thanks Jeff, i think that is good healthy distinction between church and the organisation of church - much as i'd like it to be a spontaneous experience i've found that structure and planning are vital :)

Maybe that is part of my romatic problem - that i like outcomes but don't much enjoy the planning/working to make those happen?

[Paul]

Thanks F, yes the vexed question of identity. Why do you think we end up confused about it...

...the confusion of identity as a crisis in the west? is it cos we inhabit a world of manufactured off the shelf identities that we feel we need to manufacture one for church?

...the ability to "reinvent" ourselves the cause of a local identity crisis? Is it harder and harder the further we get from a local community to retain the diversity of identities available that get mulitiplied up nationally?

... is the problem with identity that we seek to set out boundary markers and end up making them our sacred cows?

And is non-participation in church just another way of setting out our identity?

[Paul]

Thanks Pete, so what do you put into it and get out of it?

[fernando]

Oh for sure, non-participation or "controlled" participation is a big way of making identity.

I'm not sure there is one reason for the identity problem. We have an ecclesiological identity crisis because we can AND we have a crisis because churches are caught on the faultlines of cosmopolitanism versus localism AND we have crisis because we can choose our communities and choose whom we afford rights within the community.

[Paul]

Thanks F, so how do we respond to the crisis? or is back to the classic model of wither engagment with/withdrawal from/create somethign else?