AND NO RELIGION, TOO
© 2008 by Edward Goble
Smashwords Edition
ISBN: 978-1-4658-7560-0
Cover & Interior Design by Bluegrass Creative
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from:
The Holy Bible, New King James Version © 1984 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Other Scripture quotations are from:
Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT) © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV) © 1973, 1984 by International Bible Society, used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without prior written permission.
For information:
Edward Goble
PO Box 442, Campbellsville, KY 42718
www.edgoble.com
Table of Contents
Chapter One - The Funny Side of God
Chapter Two - On Being Right
Chapter Three - If You Build It, They Will Come
Chapter Four - The Seduction of Christianity
Chapter Five - And No Religion, Too
Chapter Six - Thoughts on Living Free
Chapter Seven - After Their Kind
Chapter Eight - Don’t Take the Pole
Chapter Nine - Those Daring Young Men (and Women)
Chapter Ten - Progeny
Epilogue
Chapter One
The Funny Side of God
I was married five days before my twentieth birthday and ordained shortly thereafter. So I guess I’ve been an official husband a couple days longer than I’ve been an official minister. Usually I don’t think I’ve done a very good job with either title, but thirty years later I’m kind of over worrying about it. Looking back, I have often wondered what those Elders might have been thinking as they knelt beside me and extended their hands of covering and blessing at my ordination. If I had been praying over me I would have been asking God to give the kid a clue, not a church. I barely knew God and what I learned during my brief stint at Bible college was that I didn’t think like many of the people I’d been thrown in with. Most of what I knew about God I learned from my mother when none of the family went to church and my clearest memories are of mom standing over a steamy iron, working through endless baskets of wrinkled shirts, dutifully pressing every piece, hanging them from makeshift clotheslines in the living room for people I didn’t know. She would iron for hours watching her stories and singing gospel hymns in a sweet country twang that reminded you of Tammy Wynette. When she sat down to rest with a glass of iced tea, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a dish towel and humming What a Friend We Have in Jesus, she’d close her eyes and smile and you could see Jesus all over her. I knew early on that God was real, His love dripped from my mother like rain from a slicker.
In the Presence of Craziness
I was probably only nine or ten when the church parade came down the street and disrupted our game of football. Me, Lance, Larry and Tavo, moved grudgingly to the side of the street to avoid being run over by the church bus which was decorated like a Mexican pinata and being driven by a clown. We impatiently tolerated the parade while other children around the neighborhood burst from their homes, jumping, pointing and spazzing about. One of the clowns, or it may have been the guy on stilts, handed us each an invitation to their church on the upcoming Sunday. It was decorated with drawings of balloons and streamers and promised us a grand time if we would be standing out on the curb on Sunday morning to be picked up by the church bus. I recall my parents thinking it was a grand idea for me to be out of their hair for a few hours. Mom made me put on clean jeans and a button-up shirt and there I stood, waiting for the pinata bus on Sunday morning when the grass was still wet with dew and you could hear the birds mocking you from the power lines.
The bus had been raped of it’s charm. It looked like the after picture at the Rose Parade. Someone had hurriedly stripped it of decorations and tried to restore it’s former ugliness for Sunday morning rounds. The contrast was not lost on the three 4th-graders who cautiously boarded with hopes of a good time. We convinced ourselves that they must have erected an actual Big Top on the church grounds and were all there, even now, planning the Show of Shows, probably feeding the wild animals and putting on stilts. It turned out to be a very entertaining morning, not in the way I imagined, or would have preferred, but memorable, like watching the Crocodile Hunter pick up a venomous snake by the tail, like you’re in the presence of craziness. Memorable like that.
We were shown seats somewhere in the middle of the auditorium, a big, cool place that smelled of old wood, old people and Welches grape juice. The sun shown through stained glass windows portraying the life of Christ. There was a window with a nativity scene. It had a bright yellow star lighting up the deep blue night sky over a rickety carport-type shelter like the one I’d seen on my aunts mantle at Christmas. There were animals standing around, and a few people, and a box of straw holding a glowing baby Jesus. Another window displayed a grown up Jesus surrounded by kids with one little guy sitting on his lap, reaching up as if to tug at Jesus’ beard. Jesus was smiling and not trying to slap his hand. Another showed Jesus hanging on a cross against an ominous charcoal sky with shadowy people standing around with their heads down. Finally, there was a window with yellow and orange glass that magnified the sunlight so you could hardly look at it for more than a minute. If you would squint your eyes and filter the brightness, you could see an empty cave and an angel sitting on a rock. Underneath it said, “He is Risen!” I’d never seen Bible stories depicted in colored glass. It was beautiful, but, when combined with the organ music that I equated with Count Dracula and the odd scent of grape juice, a little spooky.
I don’t remember much about the actual church service, there are just surreal snapshots in my mind that replay as if recorded on a disk. Me and the guys were sitting there with our senses on high alert. There were no clowns, no circus and no animals. There were other kids, but it didn’t look like they were dressed for fun. In the row in front of us was a woman with orange hair. It was twisted and wadded in a vertical column that caused it to look a little like that building over in Italy that isn’t quite straight. When everyone stood to sing she and the other women in her row began to shake and sway as if they were having a private earthquake. It made you kind of dizzy to look at them. At some point during the music, some of the brightly dressed women started wailing and making strange Oh-Jesus noises. They would push out of their rows and scurry to the front of the sanctuary, falling ungracefully on the altar steps. The preacher would just smile and walk by them, putting a hand on their shoulders as they lay there. I think he was checking for a pulse.
All the sudden the woman with orange hair started convulsing and then, without giving her stack of hair fair warning, she spilled onto the aisle between the wooden pews like a plate of jello. She lie there right next to where we were standing. I didn’t know whether to help her or climb on the pew so whatever got her wouldn’t be able to get me. She lay slumped in a heap invisible to all but the three of us boys, who, wide-eyed, tried to maintain bladder control. Then, like a fighter trying to get to his feet before the ten-count, she stood, gathering herself. She raised her arms high overhead and above the singing and shouts of Glory Be, started speaking a gibberish that sounded like the natives on the documentaries we’d watched in Social Studies. She jabbered about as if in a trance. I thought she lost her marbles right in front of God and everyone. Then, suddenly, she fell silent and calmly returned to her seat, shining with sweat, her leaning tower of hair more askew than before. We stared up at her wondering if she knew our language or if she was even from our planet.
My mom explained to me later that the woman with the orange hair was probably speaking with tongues, a visual which made perfect sense to my young mind. I wondered how many tongues she had. Mom said that this is what people sometimes do in holiness churches, which is the kind of church she went to when she was a girl. She said that, usually, someone in the room knows what the person is saying and translates afterward so everyone else can understand. I don’t know if that happened or not, by then I and the other boys were in shock and could hear ourselves breathe.
I read, years later, a letter written by the Apostle Paul who said that when people in churches do that sort of thing in front of people like me and my friends, we’ll probably think they’re crazy. Paul was right as rain. I didn’t go to church for a few years after that.
I’m Saved!
We moved from California to Colorado in October, right after school had started for my seventh grade year and the weather had turned just cold enough that kids were staying inside most of the time. I was lonely. I met a kid named Dave who mostly wanted me to come to church with him. I resisted, explaining that I only spoke English, but, starved for friendship, I finally buckled.
I just remember sitting in the back row, drawing on the offering envelopes that were stacked, free for the taking, in wooden racks on the back of the next pew. I used to draw a little, so I drew hot cars and motocross bikes while the other boys huddled around in awe. I was the star of the back row art guild. I got home and couldn’t wait to tell my mom how great church was. I announced that I was going back the following Sunday. For a few weeks I sat in the back row of that big church like Michelangelo, taking requests for offering envelope masterpieces. I even brought my own pencils. Fifteen minutes of fame.
I arrived at church one week oblivious to the fact that there was a special service which required kids to sit up front. We sidled into our row in the back, as always, but just as the organ music began, an usher approached our row and signaled for us to follow him. All the other kids were already vibrating in the first three rows and the only seats available were right in front. I felt exposed, as if I’d done something wrong, which, I probably had.
From our seats everything was magnified, like sitting in the front of a movie theater where you have to turn your head to see the whole screen. The front of the church was old and ornate with a dark, imposing stage, and large grey organ pipes stretching to the ceiling along the back wall like oversized prison bars. Centered on the wall, surrounded by pipes hung a wooden cross large enough to have dispatched King Kong. It was the kind of cross you could stand on a hill and then see from twenty miles away. There was a choir loft filled with people in matching blood red robes that made me queazy, and two imposing chairs that looked like thrones on either side of the choir. The scariest element on the stage was the pulpit. It was a massive mahogany tower that loomed over the congregation. The preacher didn’t step up to this pulpit, instead, he sort of appeared from behind it, rose from it’s midst like Moses upon Mount Sinai, standing over the children of Israel while the mountain shook and quaked. It was eerie. The preacher in this church was a big man who wore a large, dark robe with a wide, golden sash that hung from either shoulder. After he appeared from behind the pulpit and sized up his prey, he read from a Bible that was as large as our kitchen table. When he looked back over the congregation, peering over the top of little frameless spectacles, he looked serious, angry, intent. I was afraid of him from the word go.
I was paralyzed. It felt like the two of us were alone in the room and he had the advantage of the stage, the pulpit, the booming voice and the power of God. I sat helpless, pinned to the back of the pew, trying to divert my eyes but unable to escape his gaze as he preached hell and damnation. He said there is no guarantee of tomorrow and each of us must realize that today might be the day we enter eternity. The question, he posed rhetorically, was whether we wanted to spend eternity in the pit of hell where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, where the fire is never quenched and the worm dieth not, or, did we want to spend eternity in heavenly glory where there is no more sickness and no more pain and the streets are paved with gold and you can eat ice cream and Cheetos all day long. Tomorrow may never come, he said, pointing a bulbous finger at my trembling row. We might not even make it home this afternoon, may not even make it out to the car before our name is called and we receive our eternal reward. I was thinking how I wished I’d slept in that morning.
The only pathway of escape, he explained graciously for all the ignorant seventh graders, was to be saved. If we would come forward and stand under the shadow of the cross, when he gave the word, we could be saved and elude the consequences of our grievous sin. Our row emptied the second he gave the altar call. There were eight or nine little sinners standing right up front, first in line for the ticket away from hell fire and immortal worms. He led us all in a prayer in which we confessed that we were sinners and didn’t want to go to hell, but instead wanted to receive God’s gift of salvation. As serious as I was, and as scared as I was, I said amen and looked up and really didn’t feel all that secure. I was hoping there would be a receipt or some kind of certificate that I could show God if the need arose. “See, here,” I’d say at the pearly gates, “I’ve got a receipt.” There was nothing. The organ started to play and people started filing out of the room and back to their cars. I was afraid to go outside. What if I was the one who wouldn’t make it through the day? I and the other boys cautiously stepped into the sunlight and felt a wave of relief when our feet landed on solid ground and we weren’t zapped straight to hell as feared. I made it all the way home and ran into the safety of the house, still, somehow avoiding damnation. I began to think maybe I had been saved just as the preacher promised. My mom was in the kitchen when I burst in declaring, “I’m saved! I’m saved!”
She said, “You’re what?”
“I’m saved, Mom, I got saved!”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I’m not in hell!”
I think I went with Dave to the big scary church another time or two, but a kid can only draw on so many offering envelopes before the novelty wears off. Not only that, I was never sure we wouldn’t be summoned to the front again to have the beans scared out of us. That prospect alone was enough to keep me away. After two long years we moved back to California.
We didn’t land in our hometown, unfortunately, which I wanted more than anything. I wanted to be with my old friends and pick up where I left off. We ended up in a town about twenty miles away and so we had to figure out how everything worked. When you move to a new area you are automatically behind everyone who has always lived there. They know how the ball bounces and you’ve got to learn. That’s tough for anyone, especially a kid.
One of my dad’s younger brothers was the pastor of a little church in the next town, while two of his other brothers were church leaders. We were surrounded by churchgoing aunts and uncles and cousins. My uncles were nothing like my dad. I thought it was strange that they were really brothers. My old man was this big, tough, mechanic sort of guy that wore a size nineteen ring, while his brothers were mild mannered, good hearted and hilarious. I still didn’t want to go to their church.
The Little Red-Haired Girl
God is sovereign, which means He is far above all others in rank, character, power, knowledge and every other category, so He can do whatever He wants. He doesn’t need to run His will past a committee. He speaks a word and things are, that’s just the way it is. The Bible also describes Him as love and that He has a way of working all things out for good for those who love Him back (see Romans 8:28). I don’t completely understand that dynamic but it is a spiritual truth that is as absolute as gravity. He is sovereign and He is love, and He is also funny. Sometimes we don’t notice His humor in our lives, but it is usually there if we look. Take me for example.
At the time we moved back to California, I didn’t really love God back. At least not consciously. My mother probably did, and I’m sure, in their innocence, my little sisters did, but as for me, and most likely my father, loving God wasn’t really on the radar screen. Just because you are not currently loving Him back doesn’t mean that He doesn’t love you. He always loves you first anyway. I didn’t know that at the time. Somehow God is working in all the lives of His children in unique and personal ways and working all things together for their good, all the time. The sheer detail He oversees in the lives of His people would simultaneously fry every supercomputer on earth. Yet He not only watches over them, in addition, He continually orchestrates scenarios and situations where people that don’t even know Him yet can discover His love and receive His blessing over their lives. It’s mind boggling.
Little did I know at the time, but He was including me in the process of working things together for good for somebody else who had been loving Him back. I was part of His good plan for someone else. He does this all the time. Other people are probably the primary way He works things together for good in the lives of people who love Him back. Still, the intricacy of it happening way back when, to an unsuspecting ninth grader who wished his parents would have found a place closer to his real hometown, still blows my mind. Here’s what happened.
It took me about five minutes in the new house to discover that just down the street and around the corner from our place lived an auburn haired goddess who looked to be about my age. Her best friend lived a few houses up from mine so the two girls walked by our house a few times each day. Suddenly our move to the new town didn’t seem all that bad. By fortunate coincidence, or by the spiritual workings of the previous paragraph, it turned out that we were all in the same grade at the same school. The plot thickens... I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was the girl of my dreams, and by the ninth grade, a boy has had dreams, trust me. She had long, flowing auburn hair, thick and fiery like Vermont in the fall, and bright, silvery braces that made me weak with desire. I loved girls with braces. The most curious thing about the cute red haired girl was that she happened to attend the little church in town where my uncle served, and, she was friends with my cousins from the church in the next town where my other uncle was the minister. Now, that’s just weird. What are the chances of that? If we would have moved into a house a few blocks over I would have been in another school district and we may have never met.
So the little red haired girl invites me to church. Grrhh. What do I do now? The last thing I needed to learn is that the girl of my dreams is as nutty as a can of Planters. In the interest of sanity, even if it meant celibacy, I declined her invitation. I just couldn’t see myself going through the whole Bait and Switch thing again. Not to be denied, sometime later, the little red headed girl invited me to a Youth Group Retreat in the mountains which would be attended by both her church and my cousins church, as well as chaperoned by several aunts and uncles. Yikes. My only experience with a Youth Retreat had been in the seventh grade at Dave’s church in Colorado before the Sunday morning pastoral ambush.
A bunch of faggots
We’d gone away for the evening and wound up by a campfire where the leader made us all feel bad for calling each other names. Specifically, he made us all gather a handful of sticks and hold them together in a little bundle and then look at them while he talked. One of the ways kids have always demeaned one another is by calling names. Back then the name of choice was sometimes faggot. Most of us probably said it a million times and never gave the etymology much thought. This guy seemed very worked up about it. So while we’re sitting there around this campfire, solemn and still as the fire crackled and the leader studied each clueless middle school boy as if we were hiding something under our shirts, he began to scold us.
He said that when we call someone a name we are hurting them, and we are showing that we really do not love them the way Jesus loves them. He said that calling someone a faggot is like calling someone a bastard or a bitch, and we knew better than to use words like that. He was right. I nearly wet my pants just hearing him say those words. At my house cussing came right after armed robbery on the list of things not to do. My mother reserved a big green bar of Zest soap with which to wash out my mouth if I ever let one fly. Then she’d blister my butt for good measure. He didn’t have to tell me twice that it is not good to cuss. He said that when we call someone a faggot it shows our ignorance because it doesn’t really mean what we think it does. He explained that a faggot is, literally, a bundle of sticks, just like those we were holding in our hands right then, the ones he’d directed us to look at during his talk. I didn’t know what the word was supposed to mean anyway, but calling someone a bundle of sticks didn’t sound like a very well placed ‘chop’ to me. Then the speaker instructed us to ask God to forgive us for calling others names, and after we did that he directed us to throw our bunch of faggots into the fire as a symbol that we were getting rid of that word and, also, getting rid of that nasty habit.
It was a powerful lesson since I remember it almost forty years later, but at the time, throwing faggot sticks into a campfire just struck me as another in a growing list of weird things church people do. So, remembering that experience, I found an excuse why I couldn’t go to the Youth Retreat with the red headed girl and all my cousins. The calendar worked in my favor this time. I had a game and I was scheduled to pitch. Whew.
Jellystone Campground
During the first inning sometime, I noticed some commotion in the stands behind our dugout. I looked over and there, on the typically deserted bleachers, was the entire Youth Group from the little red haired girls church. Seeing them threw off my game, which, as a rule, wasn’t usually on anyhow. Between innings I walked over to the fence to find out what was up as the Youth Group Retreat had been scheduled to start several hours earlier.
They had decided to wait for me. Lucky me. I spent the next six innings trying in vain to concoct another excuse. That weekend I experienced my second Youth Group Retreat, this one at Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Campground surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and the girl of my dreams. The speaker was a missionary from some mysterious, exotic sounding locale. I sat mesmerized as he told stories of jungle tribes. Back then your only frame of reference for stories like his were National Geographic magazines which always included pictures of dark, shoeless clans and native women without shirts. I was spellbound, my imagination in high gear. He said that God loved the jungle people and Jesus came to the earth to die for their sins. All this time I thought God was an American and spoke English. That night, through tear-filled eyes that were equal parts campfire smoke and Holy Spirit conviction, I asked Jesus Christ to be my Lord and Savior.
I had trouble sleeping that night. Sleeping in a bag on the ground while my cousins farted and cracked wise was part of it, but there was more. I felt strangely euphoric, as if something significant had taken place in my life, like a heavy tumor had been excised and I was lighter.
My mother and I were baptized the following Sunday. MaryAnn, aka, the little red-haired girl, and I started dating which back then was called “going together” soon thereafter. As it turned out, she had been praying since she was a little girl that someday she could marry a preacher. I’m not sure why she would pray that. Maybe when she was still very young, sitting in church by her grandmother, wearing lacy dresses, stockings and shiny white church shoes, still too small for her feet to touch the floor, she saw the pastor as a strong and friendly man who always smiled and talked about God’s love. She decided on her own that this was the kind of husband she wanted. So she began to pray.
Romans 8:28 is true even when a little girl is too young to know the verse. God heard the prayers of that little girl who loved Him will all her heart, and He devised a whole system of circumstances and events to answer her prayers by, ultimately, offering me the opportunity to choose Him and us the opportunity to choose each other. We could have said no, that is called free will, but we didn’t. We said yes. Specifically, we said, “I do,” about six years after the weekend at Jellystone Campground. I was ordained a few weeks after that and she got her preacher.
Try to tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.
Chapter Two
On Being Right
Baskin Robbins has developed a nearly foolproof strategy for selling ice cream: offer thirty-one different flavors of yumminess to your customers and, odds are, everyone will find something they enjoy. Not a bad concept. However, some of the flavors they devise don’t sound all that appetizing to me. Creole Cream Cheese flavored ice cream? Really, that’s one of the regional selections. But I’m sure there are people who just can’t get enough of the stuff, because we’re all different. Each individual human tongue has about ten thousand taste buds and each little 10,000 member colony is unique to a given tongue in a given mouth. How’s that for unique? It’s no wonder some people would like flavors of ice cream that trigger the gag reflex in others.
Since our taste buds are so distinctive, imagine how unique we are in other areas of life. If you pause to consider just how individual each person really is, you can’t help but echo the words of the psalmist who said, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The New Living translation puts it a slightly different way when it says,
“Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.” Psalm 139:14, NLT
Wonderfully complex. What a perfect description of people. God has created a repopulating world full of unique, peculiar, wonderfully complex individuals that are each matchless creations of God. But during my extensive travels and interactions with people I’ve discovered that these unique, complicated individuals, while different in everything from DNA to fingerprints to taste buds, share at least one common trait. We each have at least one thing in common.
We each believe we are right about everything.
I was a pastor for much of the last twenty-five years and, as such, had occasion to talk with people about everything from God to golf. I served, at various times, in at least four distinct denominations and learned early on that God had given me two ears and one mouth, which suggested that I should be listening twice as much as I talk. Spending the better part of a quarter century listening to people talk about their lives, their beliefs, their faith, their families and their politics, I’ve discovered that every person, and I mean everybody, looks at things differently. Sometimes only slightly, but always uniquely and usually confidently. People naturally believe their perspective on things is correct, or they would change their mind. It would take a stubborn mule to knowingly hold a belief that they found to be false. As a result, most people believe they are right and are more than happy to draw swords with anyone who holds a different view on issues they are passionate about.
As a result, in a gathering of a local congregation, each person will hold unique theological beliefs. No two people look at things exactly the same way due to our background, upbringing, biblical literacy, etc. Think about the subject of baptism or grace; chances are that if you explained your perception of these in detail they would likely be a little different from my ideas, or your pastors view, or even your spouses beliefs of the same concept. Each week we sit in our churches surrounded by people we assume to be like-minded, but who, in actual fact, probably understand things very differently that we do.
Now, should we leave the local church and search for people that agree with us on every issue in the hopes to start a pure strain of like-minded believers? No, that would be futile and impossible because the dynamic will always be true. Unfortunately, that’s essentially what happens when someone splits off and attempts to start their own church, there is always a sense that they want to do it right, finally, after two thousand years. I know, I’ve done it. I’m no longer under that delusion. There are bigger fish to fry.
I told a church one Sunday that if they knew what the people around them, including their own family, or even the person on the platform, believed about things they assume people agree on, they would be amazed and, in some cases, appalled. Because we all think we’re right and we assume that the people around us in church believe the way we do. They don’t. So, how do we really know if we, of all the people in the world, are right, and, does it even matter?
I’ve discovered that being right is highly overrated. It usually just means that I get my way, which, in the long run, generally isn’t that important.
Limitless Appreciation
I’m learning to relax my need to be right about everything, in part, because of the example of my friend Patrick. Over the course of twenty years I’ve admired Patrick’s uncanny ability to enjoy life and value people, even when they are his polar opposite. He doesn’t just tolerate difference, he appreciates it. When I’m with Patrick my need to be right is trumped by his appreciation for me as a person. Patrick has learned that the key to biblical relationship is not intellectual superiority or doctrinal advantage, but unconditional love and limitless appreciation. That’s seems very Christlike to me.
Jesus was intellectually superior and more doctrinally pure than the rest of us put together. Yet you would never notice it from the way He interacted with people in the Gospels. Jesus always led gently, He always let people think for themselves and then guided them, as they were open to receive His words, into the deeper things of God. He could have gone about zapping the very hell out of people like some of our more zealous preachers do, after all, He is God incarnate. Patrick is a lot like Jesus in this regard and for that I am grateful. He could have zapped me good a dozen times along the way, but never has, or maybe he did it so gently that I didn’t notice. Like a good dentist who tells you it isn’t going to hurt a bit and it doesn’t.
Being loved is more attractive than being right and people respond better to it. Even people who think they are right all the time can bear godly fruit if their lives are otherwise full of love and acceptance. They might assume people are drawn to their imminent wisdom and profound insight, when really they are drawn to the love. I discovered this by accident at our first church home. I was teenager and, like most teens, a self-exalted authority on life. I tolerated others views like the college professor I would one day have, who stated, “I can afford to be narrow - I’m right.” This church was the same way in many respects. It was a group that espoused a couple of ‘pet’ doctrines that placed them at odds with much of the evangelical world. Like most dogmatic groups they could give chapter and verse for each of their beliefs and could argue them into the night. Of course, others might use the same verses to ‘prove’ other things, but that’s beside the point. My nature is to disagree with whatever salvo is shot forth as immutable so, naturally, I contested every pet doctrine and found myself on the opposing side of just about everything my little church stood for.
My first thought, after determining that they were wrong about everything, was to change them. Mind you, I could barely drive myself to church by this time, but I had already pronounced judgment and developed an action plan for fixing the church. It didn’t work. People would just smile and pat me on the head. My second tactic was to leave and attend a more enlightened church. My wife still remembers the morning one of the dear old women of the church explained that they were hoping that we would come back to the Lord, meaning, their church. That rubbed me like a cheap saddle.
Guess what I found? The next church was just as screwed up as the first one, only in different areas. I felt like running into a phone booth and emerging in spandex and a red cape. I had found my calling, I needed to fix the church.
Cheers
Looking back, I realize that the organized church’s biggest impediment is the very thing that it thinks is it’s greatest strength. While it’s biggest advantage is something that it overlooks as a given. The incalculable treasure of the church first dawned on me in the late eighties. In those days I met with a group of people on Thursday nights that allowed me to see them as regular, dysfunctional people, without excuse or pretense. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if I mention their names. There was Sam Malone, a former pitcher for the Boston Red Sox; Diane Chambers, Rebecca Howe, Carla Tortelli, Woody Boyd, Norm Peterson, Cliff Clavin, who worked as a mail carrier. There was a Psychiatrist named Frasier Crane; an old timer, Ernie Pantusso, that everybody just called Coach, and Lilith Sternin. This band of misfits gathered at a bar in Boston and I joined them faithfully every Thursday evening after dinner even though I lived on the West coast. They even had a song. It was called, Where Everybody Knows Your Name. You might remember the lyrics but the most familiar phrase was from the chorus where it said:
Sometimes you want to go, where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.
We have an innate, I believe, desire to be known, accepted and loved. People felt that way at Cheers. I wasn’t the only one drawn to Sam, Woody and the gang, enough of us were that they hovered near the top of television ratings for a decade. What was it that made them so embraceable? Part of their magic was that they were like Patrick - they loved each other and accepted each others oddly imperfect condition. Another reason they resonated with America was because life is hard. The world exerts an unseen pressure on every person, regardless of age or vocation, that is exhausting. It is a continual weight that is always pushing you down like a playground bully and you need a few people among whom you can just be yourself and know you’ll be safe and loved no matter what.
Life can be like a lead apron
My friend Gary is an engineer and recently he was doing some testing on a project that required him to wear a bulky lead apron throughout the work day. He said that at first it didn’t seem like a big deal walking around carrying an extra forty or fifty pounds of lead distributed across his body. However, by the end of the week he was worn out and completely exhausted. His back was out and his legs were sore and he was a mess. It took weeks to fully recover.
Life is kind of like that lead apron. It includes gravity, but it’s more than that. Just living in the world exerts a weight upon each of us, not one that we can physically sense or carry, but a pressure that is pushing us down and pushing us back, all the time. So by the end of the day it is no wonder that we are worn to a frazzle and on our last nerve. We adapt to the pressure with days off, weekend activities, maybe yard work or vacations, arranging our lives with an occasional break in the action so we can survive the constant conflict. It’s not that people are weak, rather it is that the world is very, very strong.
The pressure of extended conflict
I heard a news segment from one of the reporters embedded with the troops in Afghanistan. He looked like a pack mule that had been driven hard and put away wet. The sharply dressed and rested anchorperson back in the air conditioned newsroom asked him why he looked so beat up. The reporter replied that they were getting very little rest out on the field of battle which appeared to be the understatement of the day. When one of the military leaders was asked, as a follow up, how he thought the soldiers would hold up in an extended conflict, he said, “During the battle they will run on one or two hours of sleep per day, and they’ll be just fine, they are conditioned and ready to operate for extended periods under extreme circumstances.”
Conditioned soldiers hold up fine, while many of the reporters, even after just a few days, looked like they’d been run over by a tank. The pressure of extended conflict is hard on a person; body, soul and spirit.
That goes for the rest of us as well, we can get beat up pretty good in the world and we find ourselves we looking for someplace to rest, a safe harbor. Thus the attraction of a show like Cheers or whatever the advertisers are pitching to make us think that if we just go there, or buy that, we’ll have peace in the storm. We never will. Jesus put it like this:
Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light. Matthew 11:28-30
The answer to the burden and pressure of life is Jesus. Rest for our soul is found in Christ. The real break that I need is not a trip to McDonalds. The authentic, lasting rest we seek is found in the cross of Christ. It is the missing peace that every life needs and it shouldn’t be as hard to find as it apparently is in our generation as we see church membership declining and the influence of faith being silenced in our schools, communities and governments. The welcoming, loving, accepting arms of Christ, while open to all, seem to be harder and harder to find.
This is the crux of the problem of the organized church.
Our biggest asset and greatest treasure is the fact that we love God and we love people. Jesus said that was the number one thing and it really is. We seem to think the dynamic of loving God and loving people is a given so we seek to separate ourselves from others by means of unique programming and doctrine. We structure our churches using business models that trade humanity, relationship and honest conversation for entertaining programs, persuasive preaching and unspoken competition with other churches.
Marketers tell us to find out what the people really want, then give it to them. I want to go to church at Cheers. I want to go where people want to know me, the real me, not the victorious me, but the broken me. The one I am when nobody’s looking. The one we all are before God at night when we confess for having forgotten Him again. I want to be embraced and to embrace others with the greatest miracle in the world, God’s agape love.
Cheers reminded me that this is exactly the kind of church I that I had left. The one I felt the need to fix. It was nearly impossible to see, but beyond the big banner of minor things that they held forth as major things lie their greatest asset, the very thing that drew me to Christ and to them. Just past the haughty dogma and the mundane liturgy and what I viewed as shallow, narrow-mindedness, was hidden their true power and life, they loved each other, and they loved God.
I remember the people in that church as if they were family and if we were together today, thirty-something years later, it would be as if we’d never been apart. Beneath all the unsavory churchiness they were like the Cheers gang without the booze. They knew me, loved me, and wanted the best for me. If I could tell pastors and leaders one thing it would be that people are still looking for that.
If all people see of the church of Jesus Christ are mega campuses and light shows, slick, professional bands and polished, type-A leaders that insulate themselves like they are running a country, not a community of faith, then we will continue to effectively hide that which is our greatest strength, and people will continue to seek relief elsewhere. All that other stuff is crap, it really is. We don’t need to be the best and we don’t need to be slick. We don’t need to be right all the time. We have so much more to offer. What people need, what people really want, is to be loved, appreciated, valued and listened to. Sometimes you want to go, where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.
Chapter Three
If You Build It, They Will Come
I’m a big fan of church buildings. I love hearing the stories of their construction and I love the ambience and the architecture. I’ve seen and heard of so many that inspired awe and reverence for God. From the ornate and opulent to the tin roofed utilitarian, I appreciate them all.
A family in Tijuana, Mexico had a concrete slab about the size of a 2-car garage on the side of their house that wasn’t being used for much other than sopping up oil from leaky, broken cars. So my good friend Jose asked them if he could use the slab to build a church house. We went down there with a crew of eager workers and before the end of two days my friends Kevin, Roy and Len had erected an open-aired cathedral out of used wood, rusty tin roofing, and a budget of about five hundred bucks. It served the purpose just fine. The believers in the surrounding neighborhood gathered and declared God’s praise. On the other end of the spectrum, the first time I entered St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, the largest gothic-styled Catholic Cathedral in the United States, I was awestruck at its overwhelming grandeur, a priceless jewel among buildings dedicated to God’s glory.
One of my favorite church buildings is an old structure in Oakland, California, that my friend Roy spent years refurbishing after it had been gutted by fire. He rebuilt the place by hand along with a crew of eager workers from the congregation. The finished product is a monument to God’s love. The thankful church body now exalts the name of Jesus in their beautiful rebuilt sanctuary nearly every night of the week, thanks to the selfless work of Roy and some men who wanted to do something bigger than themselves. Something they could drive by with their grandkids and say, “I helped build that for God.”
Each church building has a story of miracles and provision and the blessing of God that becomes part of the body’s tribal language. I’m sure God looks with pleasure upon the men and women who have toiled long, selfless hours in building them and then making them look their best by donating time and talents to prepare them for those who would come to worship Christ.
I once lived in a community of three thousand. It was no more than a wide spot in the road on the way to somewhere else with no traffic signals and only a handful of stop signs. We wound up attending church in the largest building in town. It was located right on Main Street and to say it was overbuilt for the community would have been an understatement, but the story of the building was amazing. I guess it had been built early in the twentieth century by a small denominational church when the town was just a fraction of it’s current, small, size. The little group believed that God wanted them to build in faith, so they erected a facility that would have, at the time, seated half the town. I thought back at the faith it must have taken for them to undertake such a work and the questions people would have asked. It reminded me of how it might have been for Noah, “You’re building what? How big? You loco, brother!” Like Noah, they built it, and a hundred years later I sat in that giant chapel with my family. The sanctuary was full and praise was being lifted before the Lord, all the result of a preposterous step of great faith.
Like I said, I appreciate church buildings, but folks, they’re just buildings.
Follow the Money
I say all that to preface the real point of this chapter because I don’t want what I’m about to say to be taken the wrong way. Somewhere along the way we’ve gotten off track. Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that people need stuff more than they need Jesus. By stuff, I mean facilities (buildings), programs, professional care, that kind of thing. I think we should take a hard look at what we are really saying to our generation, the one Jesus planted us here to reach, the ones among whom He made us ambassadors.
What are we investing in? How are we using our church resources? We should prayerfully consider if our tithes and offerings are being invested for kingdom work, or hidden under brick and mortar. Not to be crass, but the axiom, “Follow the money,” reveals motive as well as anything. How are we using the congregations hard earned and faithfully given dough, that’s the real question.
Look at your own church. It’s always easy to look at others and point fingers, but my suspicion, crudely formed by watching all the church buildings being erected and expanded around me, is that this issue is effecting everyone from mainline denominational churches to contemporary evangelical churches to hip emergent communities. Internally, of course, it’s natural to look at what you are doing as somehow higher and deeper than what others are doing. I used to spiritualize my church finances as well, so I know the drill, but when it’s all boiled down to a spreadsheet, are you really spending differently, or just wrapping your budget in a more flowery spiritualized package? Here’s the salient question: How much of your annual budget is being used for staff and facility? My guess would be the lions share. It might be over half and it could be over ninety percent.
We attended a mega-church in the Southern part of the country long before the term was coined. At a congregational business meeting the budget was passed out for review. I applauded them for doing this because I’d been in churches where the budget was a pastoral secret spoken of in veiled terms and known only to a chosen few. At least these guys were forthcoming. We received the photocopied presentation along with everyone else in the room. There were pie-charts and graphs and explanations about this and that and the leadership stood up and gave a succinct report of all the good things that were happening. Someone in the back of the room, and I think the question had been brewing among some who had been a part of the church much longer than us, asked how much money was being used to accomplish the biblical mandate of reaching the lost and helping the poor. He was holding the same report everyone else was, and began to add up the little colored slices of pie which represented what amounted to various internal expenses from salaries to retirement to paper towels in the rest rooms to paying the mortgage. The long and short of it was that leadership was investing a mere fraction of its seven-figure annual budget, outside the church walls. When the believers in the congregation realized this and saw it there in living color, a shock wave was felt in the next county.
Your Church Magazine conducted a survey from 1991 to 2001 among recipient churches to discover trends about how much money was coming in and where it was going. The results were published in the fall of 2002*. The article suggests, in general percentages, that churches are spending an average of around eighty percent on staff, facility and internal programs. Does 80% seem like a lot to anyone but me? Now, I’m not going to be the guy who stands up and says the workman isn’t worthy of his hire, but come on, is this how Jesus would use a $100,000 or a $1,000,000 dollar budget? In the larger churches you might expect cost efficiencies that come with greater size, but those sprawling campuses are expensive to operate and staff. The electric bills alone at some of these campuses would fund entire mission works or a smaller church facility. When you can build a house for a homeless family in Haiti for $2600 bucks, is it good stewardship to have a five figure mortgage payment on a modern church campus so the local sheep can have a spacious, comfortable place to come and graze for a few hours a week? Am I the only one that is somewhat nauseated by that thought?
Yet we continue down the path, led by the allure of the mega-church - a somewhat recent phenomena wherein one or two churches in a given region marshall the staff, program and facility to create a super-ministry that effectively drains the outlying churches of all casual attenders. Assimilation is desired, preached and worked towards, but in practice, many people come, sit, laugh, sing, feel good about themselves and God, maybe shake a few hands at greeting time with people they don’t know and will probably never see again, and file out in seventy-five minutes to get to the better restaurants before the Catholics.
Are we building communities, or commodities? Are we using God’s money to engage our community and meet needs, or are we building ingrown, overfed, superstar ministries? Does the next generation want, or need a 50 acre campus with ponds and waterfowl and an 8,000 seat sanctuary? What I hear them saying is that they want to talk about God with someone who will honestly listen and who won’t try to fix them. I hear them saying they would like relationship with our generation but the church is in the way, not making a way. Have we become what we despise? An impersonal, objective-driven machine where we plug people into a proven system and expect them to respond according to a statistical matrix where a good percentage of them will complete the four level program and become tithing members while a few will peter-out and return to being casual attenders if they bother coming at all?
I’ve heard ministers boast that eighty percent of their membership had completed their discipleship course. Great. What about the other twenty percent? Jesus told about a shepherd that went on a search and rescue mission when just one percent of his sheep fell off the wagon. Mega-churches would have a hard time monitoring a one percent attendance fluctuation. Oh, I guess they could if they installed turnstile gates like stadiums or amusement parks they could, but... Yikes, I hope that’s not prophetic…
Tailboard
This issue of facility sprawl is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to assessing the effectiveness and direction of the western church, but it’s a big tip, one that no one seems to be interested in talking about. All the way back in the book of Acts we read about Christians gathering. Their first meeting place was Solomon’s Porch, a huge, open aired portico on the eastern part of the temple in Jerusalem. It was covered and as such, offered some protection from the elements. Jesus used the porch often and the infant church gathered there as well. So using a facility, or having a specific gathering place for believers, is about as old as the church. The difference between our facilities and Solomon’s porch, is, the porch wasn’t the place all the God-stuff happened, it was the launching pad.
My friend Kevin is an electrical contractor. He calls it “tailboard.” It’s when the crew gathers at the back of a truck to review the plan for the day, sort out problems, hear about potential issues, concerns and any good news the guys might have to report, kind of an open-air gathering place. When they’re done they separate and get about doing the real work. If the guys stood around the tailbaord talking, drinking coffee and eating donuts all day the real work would never get done. Tailboarding is a necessary, tactical part of the work day, but it is not the work. In tailgating all the arrows point out toward the work. The original gathering place was primarily for tailboarding.
Our out-of-balance use of resources, including building monstrous facilities, hiring a stable of trained specialists to work at the facility, and then creating multi-sensory experiences for every age group so they will have a pleasant, uplifting and convicting time while at the facility, (so they will come back and bring their friends), isn’t anything like the tailgating of the first century gathering place. All the arrows back then pointed outward, like the construction crew at the back of the truck. In our churches, all the arrows point in. You just have to look as far as the budget to see that. The greatest percentage of our expenses are internal and, as a result, our emphasis is heavily weighted toward getting people to the building. Everything happens at the facility, led for the most part by a professional staff who is authorized to speak for God. We even call the facility our “church” as if the plaster and pews were the bride for whom Christ died. We’ve got it all wrong. Our misplaced emphasis on facility is telling our generation that they must go there, “Go to church,” to get God stuff and hear from God’s special people.
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