December 7, 2002

I was driving back to the office from a client’s this week and had one of the most distasteful radio listening experiences of my life. As usual, I was listening to talk radio. The host was spending the hour interviewing the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches about an ad they placed in the NY Times claiming that a war with Iraq violated the teaching of Jesus. This guy was a Methodist preacher and a former congressman. At the conclusion of the hour there was an ad from good old Hollywood Presbyterian Church.

Hollywood Pres has been running the ad for some time, and I have avoided writing about it. The ad is so bad that the first time my wife heard it she pronounced it "blog fodder," so I decided it would be too predictable for me to actually write about it. However, its juxtaposition with the interview with NCC makes it more interesting. The ad is for Hollywood Pres’ venture into the worship style debate by offering 4 services at 4 different times, each with a different worship style.

When the hour plus ad was over I just felt yucky. I tried to figure out why and it finally dawned on me – never had I heard so many people who claim to be Christians talk for so long about Christianity and never once talk about Jesus. It drove home for me one more time why the mainline churches are failing. They have simply lost sight of Jesus.

The radio host kept trying to get the NCC guy to explain how attacking Iraq violated the teachings of Jesus and all the guy could do was sputter platitudes. Advertising a church based on worship styles without ever once mentioning the object of the worship speaks for itself.

There seem to be two traits that currently successful churches have in common. I have called these churches "Pentecostal" but they also include the Southern Baptists. The Mormons also continue to grow, even if they are not strictly "Christian." The first trait is that these churches are unabashedly conservative. I do not necessarily mean politically, but I do mean socially. Secondly, they fight for their conservative social agenda. If it could be summed up in a nutshell, these churches actively and loudly move counter to society in general.

The successful churches state loudly that homosexual practice is a sin. The mainline churches debate whether to ordain homosexuals. The successful churches stand loudly and proudly behind US military action against terrorism. The mainline churches worry about "collateral damage." The successful churches declare divorce as the solution of absolute last resort. Ordained clergy in the mainline denominations divorce at the drop of a hat. The successful churches loudly declare abortion as an abomination. The mainline churches want to be compassionate. The successful churches say, "if you do not believe as we believe, you will be better off finding someplace else to worship." The mainline churches seek "diversity" and wish to be "inclusive."

I am not saying the "successful" churches are any cup of tea either. They are as full of corruption and misguided ideas as the rest of the world. All I am saying is that they are maybe one step closer to where the church should be than their mainline brethren. People seem to be able to sense that one step and since it is a journey to God, they want to make it. But alas, they typically run into a different brick wall that’s all. That is why "success," as measured by attendance and participation, is not really the yardstick to use. However, for purposes of this column, I am using that yardstick.

There are two factors at play here. The first is that Jesus really did call the church to be something different from the world. The more we try and fit in the world the more we will not be what we were intended to be. In my experience success is more a matter of being true to oneself than it is meeting some external expectation. Let me put that another way. I am a really good chemist. When I do chemistry, I do it well. I succeed. I am lousy at foreign languages. When I meet people from Russia and try to speak Russian with them, I fail. I don’t understand a word they are saying. Even when I was studying Russian I would have failed.

The other factor is that people want something different from the church, even if they are not "true believers." If the church is just like everything else, there really is no reason to go there.

Maybe I really am repeating myself here, so I should just bottom line this thing. It was utterly apparent in listening to the radio that afternoon that the people talking may bear the name church, but nowhere was God apparent. It was more than just disagreeing with what they were saying. It was how they were saying it. They spoke without authority. They spoke as people grasping at something that wasn’t quite there. If they spoke with the authority of God would they not be confident? They sought answers to questions that can only be answered with "Rely on the Lord." They sought to solve issues that only God can solve. They did not even sound like the proverbial "clanging gong and clashing cymbal." No they sounded like someone banging on the inside of a trash can. It was ugly, and ultimately such things hurt the progress of the Kingdom.

The answer is not in how we worship, but in Who we worship. Peace is not the answer, God is the answer. Jesus is the answer. Jesus is not in stands on invading Iraq or in contemporary music. Jesus is in you and He is in me. He gets there because we ask Him in. Please ask Him in everyday.