I’m noticing a pattern. Every time I write or talk about a spiritual issue, I accuse the church of wrong-doing. I’m trying to put a finger on why this is, and I think I’m getting close. I’m hoping that writing it out will help me to nail this down.

As I have mentioned before, I was raised in the church. I have always wanted to believe. Goodness and virtue have always been interesting to me, and I think I have always basically been mystified by the Christian story. As a young child I committed to myself that I would never stop searching for the truth, even if it took me outside of my own religion. And many times I read books or exposed myself to ideas that stretched my notions of God to the limit and made it very difficult indeed just to believe, let alone to live as if it matters.

But for some reason, despite my will to believe, my desire for truth, and the Christian insistence that they (we?) have the truth, I have never been very comfortable with the church. Christ spoke much of love, yet I see little of it practiced in the church. Christ loved especially those who were farthest from God. The church can’t even manage to love its own members or even to decide who truly is a member and who is not. The Bible speaks of a God who is all-powerful; mysterious; unpredictable. The church appears to have “tamed” him somehow. Jesus taught about sacrifice, but most of what I hear in church peddles comfort. Prayer is touted as the most important means of touching the heart of God, yet the church is usually satisfied using it as a tool for opening and closing worship services.

I could go on and on. But I’ll stop there. I am critical of the church, and frustrated with it, because the church should be a movement, not an institution. I have said these kinds of things in the church before and been criticized for doing so. Is the church not a safe place to ask people to think more seriously about God and what it means to serve him? Possibly not, and that thought is disturbing. But the church should be the place where it’s okay to say, “Follow God relentlessly. Do not allow the world (including the worldly elements of the church) to suck the life out of you, to conform you to some comfortable, plastic, non-threatening shell.

In fact, church should be a dangerous place. The church should be a counter-cultural training camp. Church should be the place where we are daily creating revolutionaries — people who will challenge materialism and Americanism and individualism and racism and homophobia and elitism. But we cannot challenge the things we embrace.

The other day I was at a restaurant. Okay, it was Applebee’s. Applebee’s is a great restaurant but it’s a sports bar. Everyone who steps into Applebee’s needs to know this. My family had just been seated after a long wait for a table. It was not long before we overheard a large party at the table next to us complaining that their table was too close to the bar. The “reasoning” was that they did not want to be associated with drinking. Now I will not belabor this point because these people had a right to their opinions, though I find nearly comic the obsession Christians have with what others might think. Knowing what non-Christians might think requires actually spending time around non-Christians, but apparently places where non-Christians like to be are “inappropriate” places for Christians to be. (Sidenote: Have very many Christians actually READ the Bible? Just wondering.)

So after having promised not to belabor that point, I belabored it. But the main point is that the way they spoke to the host as they insisted on being moved negated everything they claimed to be about. They wanted to move because of their Christian convictions, yet absolutely nothing about their way of relating to that host appeared to be Christian in any way. I’m certain the end result was a group of Christians sitting further from the bar and likely a non-Christian host standing further away from Christianity.

Though I am trying to cut down on the hyperbole in my writing, I can only say I find this nauseating. And the worst part for me is all the believers who would read this article and defend those people for what they did. And this is why I am critical of the church. [Prepare for the most stinging comment yet. If you offend easily, and are comfortable where you are, you may wish to stop reading here.] I spent time as an undergrad studying abnormal psychology. Abnormal psychology teaches that psychosis is defined as having a break with reality. Someone who quite clearly seems to not understand the world around him/her (or appears to believe he/she lives in another world) is likely psychotic.

But is that not what we do in large sections of the church? As believers have we not been given the greatest, most ambitious task in the history of humanity — that of spreading Christ’s message of love to every single human being on the face of the earth? Do we not serve a God who defined himself by his loving sacrifice for us? And yet our churches are characterized not only by divisiveness over petty issues such as styles of music and colors of carpet, but the leaders in most of our churches seem to have accepted this as a fact of life. There is little confrontation of these childish and petty attitudes, and no accountability for living in ways that run completely counter to what Jesus taught us. The world is desperate for love and most churches can barely bring themselves to even be around non-believers. Many are critical of those who wish to be.

And this is why I’m critical of the church. [I am not critical of all churches, but I think my remarks are accurate in terms of the church in general.] I simply do not feel that most churches are representing the whole truth of God accurately. Most leaders are too fearful to tell the truth and instead settle for telling people what they want to hear. Money has become too important. So has power. We need leaders who will say “NO MORE.” And until we have those leaders in churches all over America, our believers will continue to be, as a whole, out of touch, out of date, and out of the lives of hurting people. When I think about this it makes me angry. Not angry enough to leave the church, but angry enough to talk about it. To post it to the Internet and to preach it from the pulpit every chance I get.

Those are some of the reasons why I am critical of the church. But my criticism, to me, feels not like that of an outsider throwing stones. It feels more like that unique criticism that takes place mostly in families, where I am comfortable being critical because I am sure of my love for those whom I criticize, but hesitate to accept criticism from those who have not invested their lives into this family.

And I am critical of the church because I do not feel I have been taught the most important components of what it means to follow Jesus. Nor do I feel most Christians I know have been taught either. I think the church has compromised its responsibility to tell the truth, to be the standard-bearers not simply in right living, but in out-loving and out-serving the rest of the world.

3:39 pm.  Tired, but sleep is not coming.  The noise of my fan seems like a violent insult over the thick blanket of silence in this place.  Right now I cannot imagine three days of this.  I just want something – anything – to do.  I want to go home.

4:08 pm.  Feels like detox.  Finally gave in and cued up Rich Mullins’ A Liturgy, A Legacy, and A Ragamuffin Band.  Am I praying now?  Right here, in these thoughts of dread and burden?  What could/does God want me to know right now?  According to Rich, at this instant, “Peace of Christ to you.”

I’ve been here less than five hours, but consumed already by thoughts of my family.  Starting to feel very hungry, as I ate a light lunch because I grabbed food on my way here.

Why do I tire of this God thing?  Others can worship for countless hours, but I get bored and sick of it.  I think I can’t maintain anything very long that isn’t hopelessly cerebral.

I want to go home.  I’d rather be anywhere than here.  If I were to get in the car and drive home, I know what I’d be driving to.  But what would I be running from?  That is what I have to stay to find out.

4:28 pm.  Some people’s biggest problem is that no one loves them.  Most people’s biggest problem is that, though deeply loved, we often act as though we are alone and unloved.  That is me.  In my work with teenage girls, I have often found myself saying to them, “You are sitting now next to your father – the man who already loves you like no man on this earth will ever love you.  Why won’t you let him?”  The answer – deep wounds and hurts that prevent it.  Anger and resentment toward him for not being who she thought he was, and who she thinks she needs him to be.  These girls need to let go of their pain and disappointment, learn to let daddy be who he is, and accept the love he freely offers.  This is where they will find joy.

I am at this moment (and all moments) in the presence of the one who loves me more than anyone will ever love me.  But usually I can’t let him.  Why?  Because of deep wounds in me that prevent it.  I carry anger and resentment that God is not who I thought he was – who I think I need him to be.  I need to let go of my pain and disappointment, learn to let God be who he is, and accept the love he freely offers.  I know this is where I will find joy.  God, I am here this weekend praying for the healing of wounds that keep me from taking what you freely offer, and what I most need.

I haven’t put up a new post in a very long time.  Even as it sit typing this one now, I’m doing it to avoid getting down to business with prepping a sermon for Sunday.

That’s right, 3:29 on Friday and still no sermon.  Nothing even started.  To every person in every church on every Sunday morning who feels like they don’t want to be there, know this — the man (or woman) up front is often fighting the same battles.  We get discouraged too.  We get exhausted. We feel we have nothing to say, nothing to share, and nothing to give.  We often feel the tension between what we profess and how we live.

But Sunday comes every week and none of the above will suffice for not having something ready to say.  And nothing should.  One of the best (though not one of the funnest) things about being a pastor is that we are reminded, by necessity, that sometimes the best we can do is simply show up.

I understand not wanting to get up and go to church.   I understand staying up too late on a Saturday and just wanting to sleep in, or not wanting to be around a big group of people in the morning.  I understand struggling with prayer.  I understand being in a place in your life where, sometimes, for long periods of time, you don’t even care, and feeling like no one could ever identify with how bad you feel or how hopeless things seem.  Every pastor understands those things.  Some might not admit it.  Some might prefer to let you think they are super-human, but that just means that they’re one day going to have farther to fall.

Sunday comes every week.  And there’s a fine line between being a hypocrite on one hand, and simply acknowledging on the other that with the spiritual life — as with so many things — showing up is more than half the battle.  So I’ll sit here right now writing about how hard this is going to be.  After I stop writing this post I’ll probably still spend several more hours agonizing over what I’m going to say and how I’ll say it.  But I promise you that between now and Sunday, I will write a sermon.  And when I get up there Sunday morning, it’s not going to sound like I’m phoning it in — like I just threw some drivel together because I didn’t care.  If you come to be encouraged, you might find encouragement.  If you come to be challenged, you might be challenged.  If you come simply because your husband or wife dragged your sorry butt-end out of bed and you’re not looking for anything at all, well — know that on some days the only difference between us is that getting up there and being prepared is what I get paid for.

But the thing is — that doesn’t for one second mean I don’t mean every word I say, that it’s not full of truth.  All it means is that the messenger sometimes struggles not to get lost before the message reaches you.  Actually, the message is all the more powerful in contrast to the frailty and weakness of the messenger.

The passage below is adapted from plural to singular.

2 Corinthians 4:7-9; 16-18 (MSG)
⁷ If you only look at me, you might well miss the brightness. I carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pot of my ordinary life.  That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with me.

⁸ As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that I’m not much to look at. I’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but I’m not demoralized (at least not right now!); I’m not sure what to do, ⁹ but I know that God knows what to do; I’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left my side; I’ve been thrown down, but I haven’t broken.

¹⁶ So I’m not giving up. How could I! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on me, on the inside, where God is making new life, [I know that] not a day goes by without his unfolding grace.
¹⁷ These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for [all of] us.
¹⁸ There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.

That’s a future promise, but this is present reality.  Here and now, times are tough.  Hearts break, people live without love.  Many rarely know joy.  We struggle to let others know us and even harder to let them love us.  We run out of money, life loses its gloss, and we grind out some of our hours by sheer resolve and force of will.  That is part of life in a broken world.  Parts of all of our lives, of all of our days, are broken.  Even Sundays find themselves among the broken pieces of the world and we can be sure that — on those days too — we will sometimes feel the loneliness and pain, or the apathy, of our brokenness.

Still, Sunday comes every week.  We show up not because life is perfect.  We show up not because we are not broken or bleeding.  We show up not because we are good.  No, we show up because life is full of struggle.  We often show up broken and bloody.  We show up not because we are good, but because we need to be reminded that God is good.

It’s the farthest thing from hypocrisy, my friends.  No one knows when you’re at church how much you had to overcome just to get there that day, how many excuses you had to shoot in the head and lay to rest, how much apathy or fear or suspicion you had to wade through.  No one knows, that is, except  God.

I hope to see you Sunday, to shake your hand, look you in the eye, and exchange a knowing glance with you.  If that happens, I’ll know you read this post, and you’ll know that I may have more in common with you than you had ever imagined.  Showing up is more than half the battle.

ADDENDUM
It is now 10:11 pm.  The sermon is finished.  I am exhausted, having sat here for the past seven hours either procrastinating, writing, or both.  But I love what I have here, and am excited about sharing it Sunday.  I may be tired, I may not even want to get up Sunday morning, but once I get up there and spread my notes out, I’ll be engaged.  No phoning it in.  We don’t have to want to do things, but we might as well do well whatever we have chosen to do.