(This will be a two-part post)
On an average Sunday thousands of churches will perform the routine of ‘Sunday School’. Children will attend ‘Children’s church’ with its coloring pages, crafts, and ‘children’s Bible stories’. Youth will go to their building or room, eat donuts and drink soda while sitting on couches. Then have ‘stimulating message’ with cliché phrases and pyrotechnics given. Adults will go to their room and sit in chairs either around a table or in rows and listen to a man who has studied all week to teach them.
But something is missing, something important, a main tenant to Christianity.
Silos. Silos are what tradition has adult, youth, and children’s ministries, which ‘cater to each level’s individual needs and comprehension’. But this tradition is killing community and our youth.
Boys grow up watching other boys get old, graduate and go drink their brain cells dead. While girls grow up seeing other girls get old and sleep with the drunken boys. Because there is no community within tradition! Boys cannot watch godly men be godly men in college, because they are in a different part of the church. Girls cannot watch godly women be godly women in relationships because they meet off campus. Boys cannot watch godly men be godly men in marriage because the married folks meet at the other end of the church. Girls cannot watch godly women be godly women with their kids because they meet on Thursday mornings by themselves… Are you catching my drift? Do you understand that this ‘silo system’ we have developed, this Sunday school system, this tradition is killing our youth?
Additionally, within tradition we don’t talk about sin. We don’t confess to each other. We don’t repent to each other. We don’t cry because our sin is massive. Rather we walk around hiding our sin as best we can, avoiding being seen as vulnerable. Our facade of faux joy is like the face of a well-polished porcelain doll, never changing, always smiling, ever eerily fake.
So the proposition is this: break the porcelain face to reveal our own, marred, scared, impaired, and hideously ghastly features so as to be in community with other appallingly similar shattered people.
The answer is simple, but it requires work, it isn’t pretty, and it is not clean. Traditional churches seem to want to come off as though they have no problems, as though everything is all right. Bull. Churches are hospitals. People are dying in them, defecating, having limbs amputated, sicknesses cured, gory wounds mended. If a church longs to be seen as clean and shiny as opposed to needing sterilization from such grotesque diseases, then it would be better for that church to die than carry on. For what good is a hospital with doctors who are scared of getting the floor dirty with the blood of patients?
2 comments:
The other side of that is churches that seem less like a hospital and more like Hostel, the church takes pleasure in tearing eachother apart. Sadly, most churches fall into one of these two stereotypes...
This is Good. On the other hand, so often people walk around wallowing in their sin. "Woe is me..." they always say. In James 5 the Bible tells us to confess our sin to one another so that we might pray for healing in one another. When we wallow in our sins we are living a masochistic faith, almost as if we must pay a daily penance for the sin that has already been made clean through the blood of Christ. The Bible clearly says that confession should bring healing and in turn joy. We do need to confess to one another, as you so boldly stated. But, I would hate for a person to believe that confession means living in daily guilt. When God brings healing to his people, who were once dead in their transgressions but now have life, he brings joy and praise. This healing, joy and praise should be the answer to reveling in sin, as Samurai Jesus so wisely pointed out is a problem in many churches.
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