YOUR CHURCH IS TOO SMALL: PART 1

 Decades ago J.B. Phillips wrote a slim but provocative book titled Your God Is Too Small. In it he exposed our often inadequate and distorted view of God in 17 chapters. Just to outdo him, I have come up with 19 ways I have personally observed over the years in which our church congregations so often fall short of the model Jesus gave us. I will admit that I am probably in a rather down mood at the present time and am using this post and a companion post as a means to unload some of my frustrations.

But the first thing to point out is an old saying I have heard: “If you ever manage to find the perfect church, don't join it or it will no longer be perfect.” It seems to be all too often that any time people get hold of something designed by God, they go out of their way to change it to meet their own personal needs and desires rather than His.

The Accommodating Church By this I mean that there are times when we try to be all things to all people and end up satisfying no one. I attended a very small start-up congregation years ago in upstate NY where almost everyone in the area was either Roman Catholic or Jewish. But local industry had a way of transferring in a few people from other parts of the country who could be characterized as Bible-believing Protestants. Under those circumstances, it was common for those few people to band together and attend any church that was even remotely like the ones they had left behind.

Our small church was a sort of haven for those outcasts, but it took a constant effort on our part to maintain unity and minister to everyone equally. It actually worked fairly well for a while even though our Sunday morning song service was a bone of contention since we had both “high” and “low” church attendees. During the more old Gospel hymn singing, there was at least one person who scowled through the whole song and pointedly refused to join in unless the hymn came straight out of the early Reformation. But others in the congregation were wanting to sing even more of these devotional and emotional songs and took to meeting at one person's house during the week to have a sing-fest around a piano. This self-appointed unofficial leader of our church found out about what they were doing and demanded that I (who was church chairman at the time) tell them to stop immediately. When pressed, he could give no coherent justification for his demand other than the fact that they were somehow going around his authority.

The Social Club For a couple of years my wife and I attended another small congregation in New York. The Sunday sermons were not at all bad although the denomination was a little more liberal than I was used to. The main problem came in with the people in the congregation. We became somewhat friendly with one couple, who proceeded to let us in on all the wife-swapping which was taking place behind the scenes.

And the adults obviously did not set a good example at home, as I found out when I volunteered to teach the high school Sunday school class for a while. I wanted to teach something they would be interested in so I gave them an anonymous questionnaire to fill out on our first meeting. It included several potential subject to choose between, and I also included a probing question which simply said, “If you had your choice, would you rather be anywhere else on Sunday morning than church?” Their unanimous response to that one was a resounding “Yes.” So I leveled with them the next week and told them that we were stuck together so we might as well make the best of it. That attitude was found in the adults as well, as we learned when Summer came around and the only adult class that was offered was on gardening.

Church as a Mere Tradition One man in our car pool while in New York attended a mainstream Protestant denomination in which he was always heckled as he left his car to walk into the church building carrying a Bible. The men standing outside openly jeered at him and asked, “Who do you think you are? I suppose you feel you are holier than the rest of us.” My Roman Catholic roommates in graduate school told similar stories about growing up in congregations where the adults routinely made fun of Catholic practices in rather sacreligious ways.

A Weekly Dose of Preventative Medicine I once attended a rather large congregation (I won't mention the denomination) as a guest of a friend at work. I was a little shocked to see that a large proportion of the attendees milled around the large anteroom during service talking to one another until it was announced that the taking of the Eucharist was beginning. At that point they charged through the door to be the first in line and then left as soon as they could. That may sound extreme, but I have belonged to other churches where some of the people would never miss a Sunday, but on the other hand seemed to get very little out of the service other than to satisfy themselves that they had done their weekly duty.

The Casual Church There was a small independent start-up congregation only a few blocks away from our house in another city. The people seemed friendly and I was impressed when the pastor took time before the main service to ask if there were any prayer requests from the congregation. He then started his sermon, but at a certain point right in the middle of a thought, he looked at his watch and abruptly said, “Well, I guess that's enough for today. Perhaps I'll finish it up some other time.” I got the distinct impression that he was sort of winging the whole thing.

The Unfriendly Church My wife and I had moved to a new town and were trying out congregations in the area. We showed up ahead of time and milled around without anyone saying a word to us. Then we sat down for the service, which included at one point an invitation for everyone to greet one another. Not a single person even looked in our direction. After the service was over and we were leaving I noticed that there was a folding table set up in the entryway with a sign saying “Visitor's Center” and a woman seated behind it. We waited and waited for her to pay attention to the fact we were standing there, but she was gabbing with a friend and couldn't be bothered. Needless to say, we never came back.

The Cowed Church I only visited my wife's old church once and that was more than enough. The problem was not with the members of the congregation at all. They impressed me as sincere, blue collar working people who were deeply religious. The problem was with the guest speaker they had that week. He ran an independent “Bible college” and had a weekly radio program. He drove up in his new Cadillac and parked it at the side of the church so that it wouldn't be damaged by any of the older model cars in the parking lot. He spent his whole “sermon” literally berating the congregation for not being as devoted to Christ as he was as well as scaring them to death with a horror story of a young boy who played hooky one Sunday morning to fly a kite. The kite supposedly got caught in some overhead electrical wires and the boy was electrocuted. At the funeral, the grieving mother came up to the speaker and asked for assurance that her boy was in heaven. His prompt reply to her was, “Your boy is rotting in hell this very minute!”

At that point, I was on the verge of walking out and would have if my wife hadn't held me back. I don't know what angered me more: the absurdity of the made-up story or the fact that he would brag about his own totally depiccable part in it. In either case, the sermon ended up, as expected, with a demand for a love offering for his ministry while shaming the audience for them “not having the guts” to follow God the way he did.

The only similar experience I had was when on vacation in New Hampshire. We happened upon a medium-sized church when Sunday school was starting. I guess my wife and I looked young enough at the time to fit in with the young adults class, taught by the pastor who also ran a “Bible college” during the week. I believe the subject was out of Jude, and one of the young men in the audience raised his hand and asked about a particularly difficult verse concerning the afterlife. Instead of addressing that question, which I doubt the pastor could have done in any case, he jumped all over the poor young man yelling, “You have been reading Catholic literature, haven't you!!” We didn't bother staying for the main service.

The Political, Self-Centered, Business-Modeled, Head-in-the-Sand, Rigidly-Doctrinal, Flawlessy Conducted Church Somewhat surprisingly, the congregation in which I spent the most number of years as both an attendee and Sunday school leader / co-teacher tops the chart as the one which demonstrated at least six major deficiencies all at the same time. There were two main reasons my wife and I stuck it out as long as we did. One was that the members of our long-running Sunday school class were uniformly friendly and devoted Christians who became like family to us. And as long as the official leaders of the congregation did not take to take the time to bother with us, we could pretty much run the class the way we wanted without undue interference. With that said, let me rant a little bit concerning the above listed deficiencies I saw in that church.

Politically-oriented We were in Texas at the time, which is not exactly noted for its flamingly liberal political views. But a group of influential women at our church became scared to death that the Democrats were right on the edge of actually electing someone of their party to office, which of course would mean the total death of conservative Christianity in our state. They formulated a plan by which those in the congregation would overwhelm all the local political caucuses with our numbers to get themselves elected to the national convention. I did not make friends with any of them when I openly reminded them that it was the meek Christian behavior of early believers under unbelievable persecution which won over the Roman Empire, not by them raising an army to take over the government. I even made the modest proposal that instead we should hope and pray for government persecution since that might change the hearts of those presently unsaved. My idea was received with shocked unbelief.

Self-Centered This attitude came clearly to the forefront when the church leadership decded to eliminate the positions of pastors in charge of mission support and of pastoral care. The decision came about not because the offerings had begun to drop off, but because it was felt that we shouldn't waste our time and resources on supporting those in other parts of the country or those elderly and sick in our own congregation who couldn't pay us back.

At the same time, they fired the music minister since he liked to pick songs that would appeal to both the older and younger members of the congregation. The feeling was that the elderly were unlikely to be able to pay their own way in terms of tithes and offerings whereas the younger members were just beginning to hit their peak earning power.

Business Model All but one of the nominated and elected elders in the church during most of the time I attended were independent businessmen, and that was precisely why they were chosen. Even two of the education pastors over the years told me that they were more than a little lacking in the basics of biblical knowledge. And at one elder's meeting one of them kept referring to the families in the church as “giving units,” since that was really all they were to him. As a matter of fact, I know of none of them who attended an adult Sunday school class. And the only time they even deigned to teach a class themselves was when they got excited over the popular “book-of-the-month” book which made a mountain out of a molehill over one very obscure verse in the Old Testament. Three of them were so excited, in fact, that without any warning they kicked out the class that had been meeting in one of the rooms for quite a while and left them to fend for themselves. And after teaching on this subject for a little more than a month, those elders departed just as quickly as they had come without warning any of the attendees of their plans. The Adult Education Minister subsequently wrote a scathing expose' of that particular book's reasoning and presented it to the elder board. He didn't last much longer at that job.

I knew the Adult Education at the time, and he later filled me in on the utter religious cluelessness exhibited by these elders, who also once invited in a visiting speaker from the outside to expose all the lies spread by scientists over the years in order to justify their rejection of God. That “expert's” total resume consisted of a large portrait of himself posing with President Reagan as well as his own self-proclaimed academic title of “PhD in Science.” After the extremely well-attended talk, which was full of utter nonsense which some of the more educated people in the audience poked holes in during the following Q and A session, I went up to the speaker and asked him where he had gotten his so-called degree.” He stuttered and totally turned his back on me in order to strike up a conversation with the next nearest person.

Rigidly-Doctrinal Although, as I said above, the elders at the time I was attending this church knew next to nothing about the basic tenets of Christianity, they swore by the detailed, 20+ doctrinal list to which all new members had to subscribe. I eventually fell afoul of them when I announced that I would not be putting in my official membership because I had doubts regarding two of their doctrinal points and definitely disagreed with another one which would have excluded most of world-wide Christianity from membership. Since I was a Sunday school leader at the time, the elders convened what amounted to my heresy trial. It took the efforts of one of the more enlightened junior pastors at that church to defend me and strike a compromise in which I would agree not to speak on those particular disputed subjects in church. And a little later, another associate pastor had to carefully explain to the elder board that they had not even understood what that most disputed point in their doctrinal statement meant or even implied.

Perfection in Everything This was the time period in which Tom Peters was the business guru every major company (including the one I worked for) followed. His goal was the pursuit of Excellence, to be carried out using a variety of means, one of which was to seek feedback from our internal and external customers on how we could improve ourselves as a group. Since the majority of our elders were businessmen, they immediately latched on to this idea and had a questionnaire sent out to all regular attendees with a variety of questions on it.

I was amazed when they announced their results on a Sunday morning and said that the majority of those in the congregation desired above all a church service executed absolutely flawlessly. I polled all the people in my Sunday school class and none of them had even thought of that as a goal, much less the primary goal, of our church. I highly suspect that the elders came up with their own conclusions before the poll had even been conducted. The results were rather disastrous as every ministry in the church was asked to conduct their work without any mistakes. It even led to the point where (a) our head pastor was dissatisfied with his performance in preaching a sermon because he was suffering from a cold at the time. Thus, he preached the exact same sermon a few weeks later when he felt he could do it more justice. And (b) when our preemie grandchild was fighting for his life in the hospital and we asked an elder for prayers from the congregation when he gave announcements, it was not done because (we believe) it would have set the Sunday morning time table back by a minute or two.

The Worldly Church This was the church in which I grew up. And although there were some periods when we had a reasonably well educated and articulate preacher as well as good Sunday school and youth group leaders, there were much longer stretches in which the only joy in attending church services was the chance to meet pretty girls and to inwardly laugh at the faux pas which often came from the pulpit. This was strictly a blue collar congregation composed of very nice people who were more than content to leave the theology in the pulpit and not let it unduly affect their normal lifestyle. Some of the pastors we ended up with would have been utterly horrified to learn that many of the most loyal attendees enjoyed smoking, drinking, gambling, and going to the movies on a regular basis.

That's enough letting off steam for now. I will continue in a companion post which will also include some positive church models to emulate.