I posted some reflections last week on whether or not God is good. A friend mentioned that she’d like to hear a similar rumination on the church. Following are my non-exhaustive thoughts, from many years of experience being both for and against.

I became a Christian in the summer of 1993. For me that meant believing that the bible on some level emanated from the Almighty, that Jesus was God, and that it was time to go back to church. Since then, I’ve been committed to multiple churches, and held every position imaginable, from janitor to pastor, with the exception of the person who sits at the front desk and organizes things.

I’ve donated a ton of money and much more of my personal time and energy to this church thing, convinced that it’s something the world really needs. I’ll admit that I’m still haunted from time to time by the people that I’ve hurt over the years. It seems that the higher up you go in any hierarchy, the more people get caught in your wake. I also carry my own wounds from leaders and others who misstepped, either triggering some already existing wounds, or creating new ones. Mostly the former.

Freedom and Hurt

I’d say that’s one of the hardest things about church. The deeper you go, the more likely it is that someone — probably in leadership — is going to hurt you. It’s easy for leaders to get confused, sell out to the wrong agenda, preach the wrong message, represent the wrong god (politics these days), fight the wrong fight, marginalize people, mismanage funds, exploit shame, etc.

In all of that, folks get hurt.

If there’s any organization that shouldn’t be hurting people, it’s church.

At the same time, I’ve seen people set free by their faith community, challenged towards a deeper maturity and a truer sense of their personal worth. There are churches that have transformed the city that they operate in, garnering for themselves, even among the non-church crowd, a reputation that would make the biggest corporation jealous.

There are some churches that are just as committed to their city (and beyond) as they are to their congregation.

When I think about what church is supposed to be, I think about that. Nobody would question the “goodness” of church if they all operated that way.

Sadly, in our current media moment, the good stuff rarely makes the news, leaving the worst churches to be ambassadors and representatives of the whole thing. That’s one of the reasons why so many Americans are bailing from an institution that’s been a staple of American life since its inception.

Keeping the Butts in the Pews

But is church, in the general sense, a bad idea? Should we get rid of it altogether? Or better, should we characterize all churches by the arguably horrible behavior of some of them?

I don’t think we should do that with other staple intstitutions, say, marriage for example. That one hurts people all the time. So do corporations, political institutions, government services, and other fundamental elements of our world. In all of these, you’ll find shining examples of benevolence and hard work on one end; abuse, injustice, sometimes murder on the other.

Does that make them bad?

The problem isn’t with organizations and institutions, the problem is with people. All of these require leaders, followers, agendas, money, and ultimately opportunities for the abuse of power. Some manage to stick to their guns, remembering their place in the world, keeping the care of people somewhere near the forefront of their agenda. Others get carried away by self-serving siren songs that too many times come disguised as a good idea.

That doesn’t make whatever institution an inherently bad idea. It seems to me that any organization that’s supposed to serve a large group of people is going to be tempted to take care of itself, usually at the expense of the people it’s supposed to serve.

The church is not immune to this, often capitulating to its own survival at the expense of a greater calling. When the church becomes more concerned about keeping butts in the pews, understandable as that agenda is, it changes into something that few people want to be part of, leaving outsiders even more convinced that church just needs to go away.

Neccessary?

It’s interesting to think about where America would be if you got rid of faith altogether. It’s a difficult proposition as there simply aren’t any countries, similar to ours, that don’t have some system of belief enmeshed in everything else, especially their formation.

As Western countries put church in the back seat like never before, while simultaneously experiencing cultural changes of unprecidented heft and speed, it will be equally interesting to see what happens next. Will getting church out of the way make us all better?

I’m not convinced. I do get exasperated with churchy folk running around, pointing fingers, judging others (never themselves) for all manner of contemporary, allegedly questionable behavior.

Is that the church’s job?

At the same time, somebody needs to question our moral experiments as we put “feelings” in a place of authority that they’ve never had in my lifetime. Morality is a tricky thing, and seems to change based on how much a culture values relationships. When a society tends towards closeness and interdependence (think America 200 years ago), it adopts a moral code that’s quite distinct from the one that’s peddled in a place where people tend towards independence and isolation, like we do now.

Because humanity has such an arbitrary time at figuring out right and wrong, we’ll need something a bit more stable than feelings to guide the way.

Should church play a role there?

Long ago, when we fought for our independence, church was right in the middle of it all, providing all manner of spiritual and non-spiritual aid and guidance. When we fought our next war, the one where we couldn’t decide whether or not chattel slavery was legit, church was in the middle of that one, too, convincing both sides that they were fighting for the lord.

Would slavery have had such a foothold in our country without so many organized faith communities claiming that it was God’s way?

While churches have racked up their share of evil perpetrations, isn’t there an equally long list of good deeds, or at least one that’s worth considering? If we’re going to judge the church by its behavior, we’ll need to look at the whole thing before we decide whether or not church is a bad idea, or a good one that often goes bad, or something that needs to go away.

Personally, I’m not ready to condemn church as an institution, but I have no problem condemning the corporate sins — especially with regards to racism, injustice, awful politics, and homophobia — that are so prevalent, keeping the church in America at bay.

Some churches have had the life sucked out of them by that garbage, some are working on it, a few have managed to take their people to a higher calling. As someone who once tried to start his own church, I can attest that folks get angry when you go after the more personal sins; the kinds of changes that today’s church needs to make are dangerous. Org-threatening. I have deep respect for churches that are inclusive and multi-racial, for example. They had to walk through hell to get there.

I have a history of being committed to churches that many would call “bad.” The first non-catholic church I ever attended (30+ years ago) was one of the whitest, straightest, conservative, suburban, evanglicaliest churches you could imagine. But I found, among many other blessings, a level of acceptance that I hadn’t known since my youth. While I’d have a hard time committing to a similar church today, I can’t call that church bad. I still benefit from its ministry and committment to me.

As a former pastor, I believe that people of faith need a place to go where they can, for at least an hour, acknowledge and celebrate that God exists, to feel accepted and welcomed, to consider those scriptures that call us to a better, more peaceful and courageous version of ourselves, to learn the deeper meaning of love, and be challenged to take that, without condition or limitation, into the deepest parts of their world.

Outside of church, no institution provides anything close to that.

 

Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

I once dated a Christian girl who lost her Chapstick.

She had recently served as a pilot in the African mission field — super serious about Bible, church, etc. — I was relatively new to her world. One hot summer day, paddling along a Texas river with some friends, she found her lost Chapstick rolling around in the back of our canoe. She picked it up, popped off the lid, and said a quick “Thank you, Jesus,” while she moisturized herself.

As someone raised Catholic, I was annoyed by this, as I was with many other aspects of such a strange, new religion. If God helped her find her Chapstick, why did he allow her to lose it in the first place? I was sure that Jesus had nothing to do with this and only marginally cared about whether or not her lips were dry.

But it wasn’t long before I too started thanking Jesus whenever good things happened. Shortly after the Chapstick incident, I moved into a large house, made some great friends, launched into the next step of my aviation career, dove head-first into the life of a local church, and got super serious with Chapstick girl. My life was amazing. Every time something good came my way — even the smallest thing — I saw Jesus in it, manipulating the cosmic cogs in such a way as to cause a blessing or two to fall in my lap. I was special to him, allegedly, and could expect many great things to come.

Things weren’t so simple when bad things happened, like when Chapstick girl started a back-door romance with a fellow pilot and didn’t tell me about it. Did Jesus cause that too? Was I being punished? Was there something I was supposed to learn? A hidden blessing maybe?

Super-serious Christians throughout history have believed that nothing happens randomly. God controls everything and has a plan in his mind for the tiniest insect. Along with this goes the idea that God has to be good. If he’s not, and has his hands on all the buttons, we’re screwed.

So, when good things happen, we say, “Thank you, Jesus.” When bad things happen, we do all kinds of gymnastics to try and fit our bad moments into the meta narrative of God’s goodness.

That’s a bit easier for contemporary American Christianity than it is for those parts of the world that see death, loss, and suffering on a regular basis. The chances that a local militia, for example, is going to come crashing through my front door with automatic weapons and kick me out of my home are slim at the moment. If that did happen, I’d be scratching my head, trying to figure out how God could let that happen.

And yet there are people in those parts of the world who still worship God, calling him “good” nearly as often as we do. Why? Do they truly believe or are they simply hanging on to a delusion because it eases their suffering on some level?

Many others, on the eve of something horrible, will completely bail from whatever religion they previously held. Who could blame them?

If you’re a Christian, I’m not inviting you to do the same, but if you believe that God exists, you have to be honest about the reality of suffering; not the I-lost-my-Chapstick, or I-caught-my-girlfriend-making-out-with-Jaques-behind-the-hangar kind of suffering, but the gut-wrenching horrors of this world.

Would you still believe if your kids were kidnapped, shipped off to who-knows-where, never to be seen again? Things like that happen all the time, ungoverned by who’s Christian and who’s not.

Spare me the apologist loaded with proofs as to why God does what he does, allowing no tension, no room for mystery. Sure, you could deduce, as C.S. Lewis did, that God allows suffering because it forces us to come to grips with our need for him, or that suffering makes us stronger, or builds character. You could say, as this blogger has so many times, that suffering drives human intimacy — arguably God’s highest priority — like nothing else.

But, as my wife has asked many times, why didn’t God simply make a world that doesn’t require suffering? He can do anything he wants, why not achieve his goals in a more peaceful, comfortable way?

I also don’t want to hear how suffering is proof that God doesn’t exist. My atheist friends say that the universe created itself and is “evolving,” i.e., moving in a trajectory of constant improvement. If that were true, human suffering would be on some trajectory away from where it’s always been.

It’s not.

Regular, unthinkable suffering is not going anywhere.

And so, the average, every day Chapstick Christian like myself is forced to reconcile our suffering world with an all-powerful God who must be good.

But we don’t struggle with this because there’s some lack of data. We struggle because we can’t embrace a simple fact about God: by definition, if he exists, he’d do things that don’t make sense. By further definition, he would, on occasion, do things that seem outright unjust.

His understanding of the universe significantly outstrips ours, how can everything he does make sense, or seem righteous?

When he makes things like earth and sky, or when he takes on the form of a human to set us straight on what God is really like, or when new people are made, some will say, “thank you, Jesus.” Others will say that’s what a good, all-powerful God is supposed to do. A great many others will parse these with skilled scientific analyses. No miracles here.

When a tsunami wipes out everyone on the coast, some will say a very Christian “c’est la Dieu.” Others will say “I don’t understand.” A great many others will include this in the mounting list of evidence supporting the idea that God can’t possibly exist.

When we indict God for the parts of our world that don’t add up (understandable as that is), we’re making a statement about our ability to grasp the universe’s realities. A good God who allows suffering cannot exist; those two things don’t fit within the limitations of our understanding, so we set out to find something that does, forgetting that the most righteous religion is going to have to allow for some conundrums, a few miracles, and, now and then, utter nonsense.

The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of people ~ St. Paul

There are things that exist outside of our ability to understand, including, but not limited to, the shenanigans of God.

But auditing the modern mind’s limits is not a favored modern pastime. We’ve come so far over the past ~ 100 years and are much impressed, now adding to our ken — our ability to understand — by leaps and bounds. When we compare what we know today with what we knew back then, we look like geniuses. When we compare our ken to a being that knows everything about everything (should he/she/it exist), we look like a basketful of newborn kittens.

Speaking on a personal level, I think the horrors of this world are an abomination. I’ve experienced a few, and on occasion can be found yelling obscenities at God for them. Add to that the global abominations that happen every second and it’s hard for me to believe.

At the same time, embracing the existence of a Good, all-powerful God has brought much peace, hope, and power to my life. But it’s not just the cognitive, theological belief that has made a difference, it’s the relationship, if you’ll allow such an idea. The sins of the world, mine included, have been obliterated, leaving me (and you) with a further bit of nonsense: unfettered access to God. No conditions. No limitations.

No human, and certainly no other religion will extend such an invitation.

In my worst moments I can go to him and find a level of peace that I can’t find anywhere else.

“When anxiety comes upon you, talk to God. With an attitude of humility and thankfulness, ask for help, and the peace of God, which transcends your ken, will keep your heart and your mind from drying out…” ~ St. Paul 

Because I’ve been the beneficiary of God’s unconditional goodness, I’m compelled to extend it, with equal unconditionality, to everyone else. If I could expand the limits of my ken a bit, I’d do it much more often, but I do feel that this particular behavior expands my ken like nothing else.

The more I express unconditional goodness, the more I understand how unconditionally good God is.

 

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

Most people can attest to owning a long list of personal perpetrations, mistakes, errors and general sins that, from time to time, pay a visit, serving as a constant reminder that they are not worthy of the peace that comes from letting all of that go.

This might not be true for you, but my list is closely tied to people, i.e., someone was deeply wounded by my mistake, or angered, disgusted. I’m guilty, from time to time, of doing things that allegedly affect the way people think about me. Because I’m convinced that my victims haven’t let me off the hook, I can’t let myself off the hook.

Attached to this is a deep sense of shame, arguably the worst emotion in the book.

If you can relate, I’ll attest that the quickest way to relief is to keep a list of things that others have perpetrated against you. When I’m feeling bad about me, nothing whisks me away like ruminating on the failures of others. It’s interesting to note that the people on this list are those who are closest to us. Family members, old friends, etc. are consistently bigger sinners than everyone else, not because of the quality of their sin, but because of the closeness of the relationship.

I keep that list up-to-date as well, constantly reviewing it, never forgetting that there are some in my life who simply aren’t worthy of a clean slate.

Sadly, each list perpetrates the other, and keeps us far from the life we’re hoping to live. Letting go of this garbage would be a quick, simple way to freedom, but us American Christians don’t look at life as something to be set free, we look at it as something that needs to be found.

The things that hold us back get little attention.

Jesus told a story about letting people off the hook, one that goes alot farther than the American mind when it ponders forgiveness:

“Once there was a man who owed a very large sum of money, say, 3 million dollars, to a great king. The king demanded immediate repayment, then threw the guy into prison and his family into slavery for defaulting. Although the man could never hope to repay the enormous usm, he begged for another chance.

The king forgave his debt.

The man immediately went out and found someone who owed him, say, ten dollars, and had him thrown into prison when he couldn’t repay. When the king got wind of this, he had the man thrown into prison to be tortured until his original debt was paid.”

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from the deepest parts of your soul.” ~ Matthew 18:21-35

Lots of complicated theology here, especially the part where we owe God something that’s impossible to pay back. For those of us who believe that our debt has been paid, i.e., nothing can now keep us out of heaven, this is especially tricky. Jesus seems to affirm the evangelical idea that our slate has been cleared, but adds that it will be reinstated in full if we don’t clear it for others.

If we believe that Jesus actually told this story, and he is who he claimed to be, it would be a little silly to cling so tightly to our sin lists.

We’d do better to clear them and keep instead a list of the people we need to forgive, to use their transgressions as an opportunity to remember, express, and celebrate the unconditional, eternal (with one exception?) forgiveness of God. Sure, we’d spend alot of time and energy forgiving people, but is that so much harder than the work required to keep them on the hook?

There’s a big difference between investing our energy in something that sets us free, and wasting it on something that does the exact opposite.

Regardless of what you do with your lists, time and energy will be spent.

If we we simply can’t stop ruminating on our own sins, I say simply the list: ruminate, over and over again, on one sin: unforgiveness. Forget about all the other stupid stuff you’ve done in the past and focus instead on whatever level of unforgiveness you’re guilty of.

Jesus made it easy. According to him, there’s nobody unworthy. He forgave everyone, unconditionally, for the deepest sin, and expects us to do the same on a much smaller level.

I love that scene in the New Testament where Jesus tries to teach his disciples about forgiveness, and instead of taking notes, Peter tries to show off:

“Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Just before launching into his story about the unforgiving man (above), Jesus responded:

“Not seven times, but seven times seventy.”

Forgiveness is central to Jesus’ teaching. It’s holy, a heavenly thing that overlaps our world whenever we wield i. It transforms us and those closest to us the way that heaven always does when we let it in. That should trump our desire to keep our sins and the sins of others so close at hand.

Remember what it felt like to be a kid and look at your parents, or a close relative, or a friend, like they could do no wrong? Remember how that bled into every single crevice of your life? Jesus is begging us to look at everyone that way, and to not worry about whatever future wrong they’ll do. The more we do that, the more we’ll extend it to the deepest parts of ourselves, and clear the soul that could never clear itself, to turn loose the idiot who’s come to believe that he can somehow, one day, get it right.