What we owe the world
I have been thinking a lot about what the church and followers of Jesus Christ have to offer people who do not know Jesus. When I was growing up, there was a big uproar because some people were saying that God was dead, that the church was irrelevant and meaningless. An average Sunday morning service in many American churches seemed to bear that out, truthfully. There was talk about God and what he had done in the past, nice sermons about what Jesus did when he was on earth, and occasionally an invitation to "give your heart to Jesus." No one expected God to show up in church or to have much of a direct impact on what was going on there. Prayer was a routine; dear God, thank you for what you have done for me, now here is what I need/want. Most people didn't really expect God to DO anything, though. Prayer for healing was mostly "please guide the physician's hand" or "if it be thy will, please heal Sister Mary." Oh, there were parts of the church where people had more expectation of God, but mainstream American churches when I was growing up were more social clubs than hotbeds of spiritual activity.
As I read the New Testament, especially the Book of Acts, I began to wonder why we did not see the kinds of things happening in the church that were going on there. People were healed, delivered from demonic oppression, even raised from the dead; you never knew when an angel was going to show up or God was going to do something truly miraculous in the midst of his people. That sure was not what I was seeing in my church or any of the churches I had been to along the way. Eventually I found myself confronted by a kind of dualist thinking that I realized was going on in my own mind: I said that I believed God healed people and did things today, but I did not really believe that he would do much of anything when I prayed for someone else or when someone prayed for me. What kind of weird thinking was that?!
That led me to a church where things were a little different than what I had grown up with. Songs that were sung were generally expressions of love to God, not just songs about him or about what he had done. Many songs were downright intimate, like people really knew God. The messages that were given were still straight out of the Bible, but they seemed so much more alive and relevant. What was really different, though, was that there was an expectation that when we got together, we were not just meeting with one another, we were meeting with God, and he was going to be an active participant in what happened in our midst. You never knew when someone was going to get miraculously healed, or when some kind of oppression was going to be broken. The presence of God was almost tangible, and people couldn't wait to get there to be with him. Oh, there were weeks when not a lot seemed to be happening, but there was an expectation that God would meet with his people in some way; that was what we had come for, and he did not disappoint us.
I found out later on that we had started coming to that church at a time when most of the "old-timers" felt church was pretty dry and not much was going on. Compared to what I had known growing up, church there was so much more alive and vibrant that it seemed crazy to think that it was a dry period for the church. We have since gone through a number of ups and downs, when God was doing something every time we turned around, and then times where he seemed to be nearly silent, so we understand better how they could view things as dry back then. Once you've experienced the intense presence of God and been through a season of many miracles, you are hungry and thirsty for more. Nothing else satisfies, not great worship music or good sermons or hanging out with other people; nothing but the presence of God will do.
I've come to believe that what followers of Jesus have to offer and in fact owe the world around us is an opportunity to experience the presence of God, to get to know him personally and intimately. There is already lots of good music out there, both inside and outside the church. Many books have been written and messages given on how to live, what the Bible means, and so on. I do not mean to disparage or devalue any of that, of course. I love music; I have learned much from messages that I've heard; I was born reading; and obviously I like to write. Those alone are not enough, however; if we just sing some songs and listen to a message without ever encountering God when we get together, we have missed the essence of what it is to follow Jesus. How can you effectively follow someone you never meet? And how will anyone else come to follow Jesus if they never encounter him themselves? Following Jesus is not joining a church or getting religious, it is entering into a relationship with him, with the God who made us and the son he sent to earth.
So to any of you who have never met Jesus, or whose impression of Jesus is less than positive based on what you have seen in the average church, I apologize. I apologize for our failure to give you what you are owed, an encounter with God. I pray that we will begin to make room in our lives and our churches for God to show up and do whatever he wants, so that we have an expectation and hope that God is going to do something in our midst. I am convinced that he wants to be an active participant in our lives and our churches even more than we want it or need it.
February 2009
