11/29/12: “THAT TRAIN NEVER LEFT THE STATION!”

BLOG 11.29.12: “THAT TRAIN NEVER LEFT THE STATION!”

I was leaving a Sunday morning (what was called a) worship service with a friend, a while back, when he commented: “That train never left the station.” I was both puzzled and curious about what he meant. It had been what is typical of such church gatherings, i.e., familiar music, Christian jargon aplenty, sermon, announcements, etc. I asked him to fill me in on what he was referring to. So he did:

“It just didn’t come from anywhere, or go anywhere. There was a Biblical text for the morning that was hardly referred to, and certainly not unpacked as to its context, the meaning of the words and concepts, and scarcely even referred to in most of the sermon. I guess it was just spiritualized, or trivialized into unreality. It didn’t go anywhere that I could relate to my life. It was like looking at an impressive train sitting in the station, but never going to any discernable destination. Does that make sense?”

I had to ask him what he had anticipated. I was surprised and impressed when he told me that he always checked out the pastor’s sermon title and text from the church’s web-site, and then did serious study of the text out of his own collection of Biblical commentaries. When he didn’t understand Biblical terminology, or understand the context into which the passage was written, he checked it out.

Then, as we stopped by the coffee bar, he also explained to me all of the weekly realities that he encountered in the several contexts of his own incarnation: neighbors, coffee shops, workplace, journals, research projects, things present and future that impinge on his thinking, and how he hopes taking time to participate in the Christian community on Sunday morning will do to equip and refine him in his own Christian presence in the social and cultural realities of his week to come.

What he had just experienced in the church’s ‘worship service’ left him frustrated and a bit depressed. Happily, he was also part of what our Christian forebears described as an ecclesiola in ecclesia, or “a little church within the church,” which also met on Sunday morning, and in which fellow-travelers met to encourage each other in their quest for faithful discipleship, seriously studied scripture, and shared engagements that illustrated the implications of such texts. That fellowship my friend found most valuable. So he left me and went on to meet with his ecclesiola.

I pondered this conversation as I left. I wondered how many folk make the effort, and spend a perfectly good Sunday morning participating in a familiar church, only to find that what is offered is like that train that never left the station, i.e., totally unrelated to New Testament Christianity, or to the Monday morning realities in which they are to be the incarnation of God’s new creation in Christ.

The answer is that while there are a host of faithful Christian communities “equipping God’s people for their works of ministry” (Ephesians 4:12), there are all too many who are dishing out (what has been described as) moralistic therapeutic deism.

Which raises the question: When is a church authentic? After all, New Testament Christianity is both radically transformational and radically incarnational. That’s pretty strong stuff!

We’ll work on that. Peace!

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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