Epicurean Jesus

I’ve embarked on a life-long jaunt called Christianity and never really ceased to be amazed by what I’ve found along the way. See, there’s this set of ideals I hold to with regards to the Divine. They embody radical grace, radical love, and radical freedom… all of which the good teacher embodied, and most of which the church has seemingly forgotten.

I recently was invited to do a lecture on Quality of Life in Oak Ridge with regards to religion and spirituality. I had fun leading the discussion, but perhaps twice as much fun preparing for it.

During my preparation, I delved into a concept which I am certain will be one of interest in the next decade: religious brown fields.

Religious brown fields are churches that have for lack of a better phrase, “gone out of business.” Splintered and fractured beyond repair, these churches bury more than they baptize and begin the inevitable descent into a vacant building, which they can no longer fill nor afford to maintain. Over the next 10-20 years, expect our community to be over-run with religious brown fields… buildings that were once vibrant fellowships will most likely be reduced to the ever increasing number of eyesores in Oak Ridge. The rubble of these buildings will serve only as a physical reminder of something much deeper running through Christian culture – a disease, a poison, a toxicity of spirit that according to the book of Jude are nothing more than blemishes on our love feasts, foaming shame out the mouth of our theology, doubly dead and uprooted from the foundation.

The buildings are themselves the final causality of a war that most Christians apparently aren’t even aware they are waging… a worship war or perhaps more aptly named, “the music wars.”

Here’s the scoop for the non-religious among us: younger crowds have increasingly found mom and pop’s music boring and incomprehensible so they’ve upped and formed their own churches. Hey, I’m not one to knock a start-up church. High Places was one… 20 years ago.

At a time when start-up churches were going the “contemporary music” route and building big congregations by snatching up members from traditional churches, we said two simple words, “No thanks.” It would have been easy to build a church around a dynamic music program and early on there was pressure to do so, but the reality was that everyone else was doing that. Churches were splintering and fracturing all over town and everyone was hip to join the “new fresh sound” a block away.

Contemporary is on its way out though. About the time many traditional services started offering a “tradition worship experience” and a separate but equal “contemporary worship experience,” culture had already moved on to the “new, but not really contemporary worship experience.”

I say, “Bullocks.”

Show me a congregant that picks their churches based on a collective “worship experience,” and I’ll show you a Christian stuck about two miles behind a mature believer on the Christian journey. That people select their churches based on music programs says a whole lot more to me about the person doing the selecting than it does the nature of the music. And it says a great deal more about the inefficacy of the gospel of Jesus Christ in today’s culture.

Truth be known, there are some real easy formulas for growing churches out there, and some real easy ways to fill row after row of entertainment-minded believers. Any number of books can get you there. Any number of guest speakers or live video feeds can take you there too.

“Apply liberally to infected areas” and the antiseptic-God will magically be conjured up by a guitar riff ready to cure those worship doldrums and smother that itch we all feel for something real.

I’ve been doing this pastor thing for a while, and I’m a keen observer of people. I watch them move to and fro, and what’s hot today is what’s not tomorrow. It’s time for the gospel to get its due.

After all this time I can guess the first question that come out of people’s mouths when they’re asking about my church – 1) What’s your worship style? It’s only on extremely rare occasions that anyone has the wisdom to ask me what God is doing in our church.

To this question, I can only respond with a question – “What isn’t our worship style?” I’m becoming slightly brazen to the question, perhaps it is the crankiness of my old age, but I am starting to believe it is most likely out of a deepening spiritual maturity. The question tells me something about the asker. I think Jesus had that simple truth of life figured. When people asked him questions, he sensed a deeper issue going on and didn’t hesitate to address it.

I’m increasingly becoming committed to ask such questioners a question in return, “Are you looking for a church with a particular music style?” Any answers to the affirmative give me good enough reason to start handing out addresses and meeting times. The gospel doesn’t need music shoppers. This isn’t I-Tunes for Jesus, it’s about something more… something deeper.

The road truly is narrow and few there are that find it. We often refer to ourselves as a “church without walls,” I wonder though if that takes in to account the wall of sound that shuffles believers through congregations like decks of cards.

I remember when we were first getting cranking, we didn’t have permanent seating. During those days we would intentionally turn the seats to face a new direction periodically. Some folks didn’t like that. Even today, we’ll forgo music, shift music around, or pull something utterly outrageous out the hat. Some folks don’t like that either.

Holy Cows. That’s what we call them… places where form makes more of a difference than the eternal God who assumes so many different forms. Holy Cows need to be tipped over occasionally and we do just that. If we didn’t, we’d find ourselves fighting over a future brown-field one day. Maybe it would be ten years, maybe twenty, but eventually someone somewhere is going to come along and start a war over expectation.

If we didn’t engage in Holy Cow tipping, we’d soon find ourselves in a war that is a deflection of the light of the gospel, and we’d be forced to watch helplessly as the entertainment-minded believers erected an epicurean Jesus for a new set of worship coinsurers to shop from within our own walls. That’s what is happening to countless churches around town right now. That’s what is waiting for countless more. And the greatest causality of this war is the gospel itself – and a Christ who had no band of traveling minstrels, no certain set of chords he was destined to play, no favorite instruments strapped across his back, and no shiny angelic chorals to prepare the hearts of man for his Sermon on the Mount.

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Beware the man who’s God is in the skies.”

I say, “Beware the man who’s God is in a style.”