BLOG 10/14/13. WHO IS INHABITING OUR ‘CHURCH’?

I was the visiting preacher at a neighboring Episcopalian Church on one occasion. After the service I was approached by a stylish lady who was quite a fixture in that church. There was about her that savior faire and a certain flair for the dramatic gesture. She was expressing her appreciation for my presence and for whatever I had said. So I asked her how she had become a follower of Jesus Christ?

With a laugh and a wave of her hand, she responded: “O, Reverend Henderson, I haven’t believed in God for years, but I just love the Episcopal Church!” She loved the ambience, the aesthetic beauty of the liturgy, the social network of the church, and was obviously at ease with all of the familiar in-house jargon that is part of that tradition.

I have often wondered in the several years since that conversation how many inhabitants of our churches there are who would not be quite so candid as she, but who are ‘religious’ and comfortable with gospel words, while at the same time in the darkness of unbelief and evidently sensing no contradiction.

I have led countless workshops on evangelism in my career, and on so many occasions have had the audience most enthusiastic about what I was teaching about the gospel of the Kingdom of God, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ … yet later over lunch when I have engaged them one-on-one to share with me how they came to know Jesus, they were awkward, or embarrassed, or quite unconvincing that they had ever had such an encounter. They are all for the gospel words, but have evidently never encountered him who is behind the words and whom they point—they quite obviously have never had a living and transformational encounter with Jesus Christ, and so deliberately expressed their love for and trust in him. They have never, seemingly, become those deliberate followers of Jesus who have renounced the dominion of darkness and entered into the dominion of God’s dear Son.

As pastor I have come face to face with this in-house unbelief so often. Folk love the church. It is an essential part of the social fabric of their lives, but their faith is a remote sense that God is near, or that he will be there when the need him. When pressed about their deliberate turning to Jesus and their intent to be his obedient disciples, they could get all flustered as though that were an unfair question.

It has convinced me that there is a major mission field inside of the church. If I can plagiarize and put my own translation/interpretation onto one of T. S. Eliot’s poems, it would go like this:

You neglect and belittle the desert/mission field.
The desert/mission field is not remote in southern tropics
the desert/mission field is not only around the corner,
the desert/mission field is squeezed in the tube-train/the church pew next to you;
the desert/mission field is in the heart of your brother/inside the church.   (from ‘The Rock’)

The community of God’s people needs to be re-evangelized every time they meet, lest they/we drift off into a mindless godless Christianity. I think that may have been what Jesus had in mind in establishing what we call the Eucharist.

True discipleship can never be casual unengaged religiosity. It grows out of a passion for Jesus and our knowledgeable love and obedience to him.

[I’d love to hear your feedback on this.]