Date posted: December 2, 2011
I pulled up, parked the car, and headed for the door of the Church. Behind the stage whole teams sweated and slaved to ensure a high quality event. The band visibly under pressure rehearsed, their conversation strained. The Pastor was stressed, and moved about the auditorium checking that his leaders were discharging their various duties. The media team buzzed around in a funk of sweaty annoyance.
A giant clock appeared on the screen and began to count down to start time. This device did not seem to affect the punctuality of the attenders who dribbled in over the next fifteen minutes. The next forty minutes was a combination of phenomenal music, amazing media and a lighting and sound system that most secular venues would have been jealous of. The video announcements offered attenders a virtual cornucopia of options, programs, and activities.
I turned around and looked out into the audience as the last song before my talk was being played. The front row comprised the Church leaders, all of whom were engaged enthusiastically in the worship but as I looked deeper into the congregation I noticed that the rest of the congregation stood, at worst not singing, at best half heartedly mouthing the words. Almost every expression was blank as the colored lights flashed across their faces. Arms were crossed, gum was being chewed, the audience were the epitome of passivity.
They were not participants but consumers of a spectacle, not disciples but spectators. In that moment images of Jesus poured into my mind. Jesus walking through the silence of the desert, Jesus walking the dusty paths of Israel, announcing the kingdom of God. Shaping, disciplining and teaching his disciples. Jesus on the Cross giving up his life for the world, Jesus rising on the third day to inaugurate a new world. Instantly I was back in the auditorium, now myself staring at the show on stage like a deer caught in headlights. I shook my head and the disparity of the images in my mind and what I had just experienced.
In the past I would have blamed the Church. I would have with coldness deconstructed the service. Looked down at my nose at the methodology. The problem is that I now have seen the same look of detachment in Reformed gospel preaching churches, hip emerging churches, and polished Pentecostal services. I have seen the same bored eyes in liturgical heavy high churches and casual, organic house churches. The people who were running this church were great people, they were passionate about Jesus and sharing his mission with the world. They were dedicated to creating disciples. Yet something had fundamentally shifted. The balance of power had moved, but everyone was too busy trying to get the punters in the door to notice what had happened. My friends at the Church faced an almost impossible task, satiating the hungry beast that is the twenty-first century citizen of the West. Church was not the problem, we were.
FAITH HAS CHANGED
Listen to how differently we describe faith today. Yes, we still adhere to Christianity but our language has changed. We use terms like journey, feeling, and experience. The word awesome is everywhere, not so much describing a transcendent idea of God, but a transcendent experience; which in the current language of faith can be used interchangeably between a worship service and an skiing tour of New Zealand. Our language exposes a new way of holding to faith. One which is short term, feelings based, and fragile. Something has fundamentally changed.
REFUGEES OF FAITH
Today our religious lives are dominated by a kind of traveling, a search to find the right church, right expression of faith that delivers the right lifestyle. To contemporary sensibilities it seems ludicrous, but in the past people attended Church through a sense of duty and responsibility. A decision to attend Church was not made with individuals wants, desires and needs in mind. Rather Church attendance was part of the fabric of spiritual discipline. Today people without an ounce of shame admit that they are ‘church shopping’. Like good consumers we compare the various attributes of Churches, looking for the Christian community which will best assist us in achieving our predetermined life goals.
Some will note that the culture of transience that we find both in the Church and in the wider culture is caused by an economy in which many move jobs and thus homes regularly. Yet its real engine lies deeper in the human soul. Philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain, ‘To say that we live in a secular age in the modern West is to say that even religious believers face existential questions about how to live a life.’
Ours is a culture in which a constant searching for happiness is the ultimate goal, this means that believers find themselves constantly reevaluating their faith. Anxiously reassessing their beliefs, testing faith’s ability to deliver our cultures vision of the good life.
CHRISTIANITY IS NOW JUST A LIFE STAGE
One religious sociologist I heard interviewed, noted that for many young adults Christianity is now just a life stage. An experiment of adolescence explored in the way that many flirt with recreational drugs or promiscuous sexual activity during their early twenties. Christianity then is reduced to just one of many tools that the individual tries during their life in the quest for the good life. These heightened expectations of faith and radical individualism, presents an incredible challenge to faith. Sociologist Wade Clark Roof has observed that, “The real story of American religious life in this half-century is the rise of a new sovereign self that defines and sets limits on the very meaning of the divine.”
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach commenting on the religiosity of contemporary culture, notes that in the West we now have “a generation whose principal desire is to feel G-d rather than worship Him.”
In such a climate, faith becomes just one rest stop on the highway of life. The culture of the Road has subverted Christian discipleship in the West.
Next Time in Part 2 What is the Culture of the Road?