Title: So You Don't Want To Go To Church Anymore
Author: Jake Colsen
Publisher: Windblown Media, 2006
Number of pages: 178
The problem with church as you know it, Jake, is that it has become nothing more than mutual accommodation of self-need. Everybody needs something out of it. Some need to lead. Some need to be led. Some want to teach, others are happy to be the audience. Rather than become an authentic demonstration of God's life and love in the world, it ends up being a group of people who have to protect their turf. What you're seeing is less of God's life than people's insecurities that cling to those things they think will best serve their needs." p. 71
When Jake, the Associate Pastor of a church in California, comes face to face with John, it appears he is talking to Christ's disciple John from The New Testament. In giving him advice, John turns everything Jake thinks about the traditional church on its head.
This book points out the failures of organized religion, how the very institutions that people have set up to help them, actually work against the faith they're trying to achieve. How have churches failed according to Jacobsen and Coleman? In these ways:
- they create reglious obligation
- they hold us accountable to each other instead of to God
- they cause us to trust in our own efforts more than in Him
- they have us play the "approval game" in which we do what others want so they shower us with affirmation, but 'cross them and they'll crucify your reputation, with or without the facts.' (p. 95)
- they manipulate people's shame by making them feel guilty
- they demand conformity
Out of intense frustration with the church as an institution, Jake, his wife, and other couples form a home church where they meet for a meal, praise and worship, and fellowship in one another's homes. This doesn't appear to work either, because, John says, "No church model will produce God's life in you. It works the other way around. Our life in God, shared together, expresses itself as the church. It is the overflow of his life in us. You can tinker with church principles forever and still miss out on what it means to live deeply in Father's love and know how to share it with others." (p. 123)
Ultimately, the book covers this premise a multitude of ways:
People learning to live in relationship to Father in freedom from shame is the core of body life. Find out how to share that life and you'll be the body. (p. 150)
Because an institution can never be what the church was meant to encompass, we can build it up in these ways:
- keep Jesus as its sole head and focus
- have daily encouragment among believers
- hold plural and lateral leadership
- encourage open participation
- create an environment of freedom so people can grow in Him
It makes me sad that I've so often failed in how I should behave or believe, trapped in my 'jar of clay' as I am. But these ideas help encourage me in the walk, as I'm sure they were intended to do for all of us.
it would be interesting to see the points they make, but I know God is everywhere, so churches were probably built for social interaction, maybe people need to see God in symbols and paraboles and within consigned rules and obligations because if not than the field is wide open and that scares people....I've felt God with me close to a creak, in Church well I've love the beauty of the art...interesting post as always DB ;)
ReplyDeleteI think you're hitting on what the author was saying, Lorraine, that the church confines people to what people think it is, not how God's defined it. I, too, find Him so close to me by a creek, or in the woods. I miss the churches that one so often sees in Europe: stained glass, tall steeples, beautiful bells. Now in America they seem to be more stadiums than churches, at least from the outside. Still, I go, because I want to worship in that way as well as in the forest. ;)
ReplyDeleteOur pastor is writing a book called "Why you, yes you!, need to be in church" and he preached each 'chapter' as it were over the course of the last few months. I learned a lot and it sounds like some of the principles in this book might mirror what he was saying.
ReplyDeleteWhat I got out of it most was the idea of what church could and should be if it is functioning the way that God intended which, for one example, means the body ministering to the needs of one another rather than simply going out of obligation or going to get ministered to. He also emphasized worship a lot. It was really interesting. I know that I need that recharge that church provides. Personal worship is extremely important, but so is that gathering together.
very interesting. very very interesting, both culturally and spiritually.
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