But, you’ve probably felt it…maybe when you’ve tried to hook up with a church small group that promises real friendship and support, but all you find is emotional and spiritual barbed wire. Maybe you’ve sensed it when you’ve shown up in a worship service and all of the words that are being sung and spoken are transparent and empty and thin, especially your own. Maybe you are aware of it when it occurs to you that you don’t even know these people you are supposed to be loving unconditionally, and you’re not sure you want to. Maybe it buzzes around your soul when you realize that everything you’re involved in feels flat and meaningless. You’ve felt it too, right? Please tell me you have.

Sunday, our new pastor, Bill Johnson, talked about the reasons why the Church is still worth loving. And I totally agree. I can’t say that I have always agreed or that I agree every second, or that I will always agree, but I think I have seen the alternatives enough to know that the Church is pretty lovable and upstanding and meaningful compared to other things that bring people together. We, the Church, are noble and genuine at heart, but there are some stiff addictions that we need to call out and slap down before we start looking like Jesus.

To detox, a body has to go through some things that seem radical and even unreasonable.  I wonder if we, as Jesus’ Body, might not need to do some rehab before we can start to be the enticing, refreshing, restoring groups we were made to be. Maybe we need to lose ourselves a bit to find ourselves.  I have some possible rehab-plan suggestions that are totally not in the “ministry plan” of any church I know of, which might be just what the therapist ordered for our many churches that make up The Church:

• What if we’d stop our obsession with church attendance for one year? Don’t publish attendance figures in the bulletin. Don’t post attendance on the website. Don’t talk about it between churches as a comparison. Don’t use it in any way that suggests that attendance is a accurate measure of success. If the crutch of attendance was kicked out from under our churches, what other things would we start paying attention to? What sensitivities would come alive that are now blind? How would it change our mission and our strategy? How would it change our willingness to risk?
• Could we declare a season of Spiritual Amnesty that gives people the chance to be pruned spiritually so new growth can appear and flourish? Could we permit each other to admit our doubts and questions and weariness, in private and public ways, without any threat of easy answers, prescriptive plans, rebuke or shame? Could we have “Doubt Services” that give people a chance to publicly admit and process their lack of faith in a safe, prayerful environment so that the process of growth and restoration and encouragement-in-the-faith could occur.
• As part of that Spiritual Amnesty season, could we encourage each other, corporately, to simultaneously wave the white flag of surrender to living behind sterile, opaque, proud facades? What if we’d invite confession in a way that lets people off-load their heavy guilt, not so that a “priest” can suggest penance, but so that together we can find the freedom of admission and the common ground of sin (See Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz for evidence of this idea’s power). We all need the chance to say “I’m Doug, and I’m a sinner.” We all need to see that we’re in this together and that our sins shouldn’t keep us from living free, open,vibrant lives.
• Could we try to schedule at least half of all church activities somewhere other than the church facilities? We keep saying that the Church is not the building, but we seem rather naked without it.
• Could we do a lot of hard work to seek out those who have dropped out of church and go to them and apologize for our indifference, our inflexibility and our lack of humanity? Maybe we could ask them how we could help them grow closer to Jesus and then shut up and listen and not be defensive. Maybe we could invite them back and help them see that we need people who can’t stomach church, the way it is, in order to make it what it should be. We need them to influence “church” back to a place of honesty and warmth and spiritual purity. Those of us who are left in church right now will never be able to do that.

Even though I can’t explain the disconnect between our hearts and church very well, I think, at its heart, it has something in common with the Hebrew slaves’ insistance to create a golden calf and worship it instead of the living God.  We have created a very sterile, controllable, predictable faith that looks a lot more like us than it does the all-loving, all-powerful, wild God. It makes us feel in control, but it doesn’t touch the really deep issues of life any better than we can.  Deep is calling to Deep, and this golden calf that we’ve made out of church is not the Deep that satisfies. Church needs to look more like God: honest, pure, mysterious, raw, agile, energetic, open, self-less. It is going to take letting go of the comfort of control so that we can begin to look, feel and act like Jesus’ body, which is the Church.