For the past 15 years or more, I have primarily been viewing the Church from the inside. That is to say, I’ve been an insider, where my primary time, energy and relational connections have been within the boundaries of the Church.
Prior to that, I worked in the business world, and although I was heavily involved in the Church, helping to run youth groups, later involved in lay leadership, etc., my primary time and energy and a good many (not all) of my relationships were outside the boundaries of the Church.
As an aside, some might argue against my depiction of the Church having “boundaries”, given some of the newer paradigms of trying to understand the relationship between the Church and the world, but if you’ve spent much time at all within a church, you just know that boundaries exist, implicit and explicit.
Lately, since having stepped outside the boundaries of the Church and investing my primary time and energy outside of that sphere, and beginning to develop more relationships outside the Church, I’ve been able to view the Church from the outside, after a decade and half of viewing it from within. And, I have to tell you, it’s not a great sight.
You know how it is with a messy room or a dysfunctional family? The longer you live and breathe in that space, the less you notice the mess and the dysfunction, and a new kind of “normal” sets in?
Now, I want to be careful to say that nothing I say here is intended as a slam or criticism of anyone or (more specifically) my previous church, which I still love and have much invested in. BUT, it has been disturbing to me to walk in the world these past few months and realise just how out-of-touch, irrelevant, even perhaps boring, the Church is to those who are not inside it. And I’m not talking about any particular denomination or movement here… the people in the world have a rather smooshed up view of all that. They just have this weird overlapping and confused mish mash of tradition and weirdness associated with “Church”, but they certainly don’t have any attraction or interest in it. This much is very clear, and to be honest, as I’ve stood with them and looked back into the Church, it’s disturbing to me. We’re certainly not the salt and light Jesus talked about… instead we’re gloom and bland, if not actually a little unpleasant to the taste.
I don’t write this with any huge answers in mind… perhaps that’s a later post when I have my head around this, but it’s been bothering me a lot lately… the Church from the outside is far too different from the Church I was looking at from the inside, and although there will always be a degree of difference for a variety of good reasons, mostly I’m disturbed at how big the gap is from where I’m standing at the moment.
PS: I should just add that (to torture Twain) the rumours of my loss of faith are highly exaggerated… :-)
3 comments ↓
I would like to make a couple of comments about that, I don’t have the disadvantage of a higher education and so perhaps see things from a different perspective and just maybe a little too simply. However here goes; We are told by the “ancient ones” that no body comes to God unless He, through his spirit, beckons them or invites them. So it may be safe to say that those that are really invited into the Church ( I am suggesting here that not everyone in there is invited. “not everyone who calls me Lord”- etc) are holy (set apart) and born of the Spirit. It is most logical that they would come to see things differently to the world, they would feel differently to the world and most definitely and hopefully, they would act very different to the world. I would be most surprised if the world didn’t look on and see some things about the Church that were weird and very much out of sync. But to a person living within the Church much of what they do, say, act or live out would seem very normal. Would this have the tendency to make the Church appear uninviting or irrelevant ? I am absolutely sure it would.
I left the Church and lived outside from 1983 to 1995 and must say that from the outside it felt most irrelevant to me but as God by his spirit called me back into fellowship with him and other believers I found most things that I previously saw as weak and crutchy from the outside to be totally different from within. It takes guts to be a christian, some of our traditions are hard won through the sacrifice of many martyred saints but until you embrace the traditions with a new understanding and in the Spirit, they will remain meaningless and foreign.
I might add that I do not point here I am only speaking out of my experience.
Brave and incisive Mark. I tend to agree somewhat with you view to a point. If we are taking the Church as a stand alone organisation hoping to attract people through the door because they are looking for “something” or we have marketed that we have something to offer then I think much of what you say may be true.
Let me first of all say , and this is very general in it’s application that I think the childrens and youth ministries in most Churches are salt in this world, kids thrive in the safe environment youth groups provide.
I tend to see the Church in a much different light from others I guess. I see myself needing to be salt, light and truth. For this reason I cultivate friendships outside of the Church, many times to my disdain as I “miss out” on spending time with some great guys in the Church. But if we were not to have relationships with those outside the church we wouldnt be around when those people have marriage problems, have a kid go off the rails, suffer a major illness etc, it’s at these times we get the opportunity to sow just a little deeper into thier lives and when we go through these times they see how we cope and how we are supported by our church family. It’s sorta like being a window into the church. When we have big social occassions we try to always invite a good mix of church and non church folks and we have had friends say “but you’re all so normal”.
A past pastor of mine used to encourage the church to ask “who is rockingham rodney”, if he came through the door would he feel comfortable, would he understand the lingo, etc” This is the challenge if we rely on marketing or as the marketers call cold canvassing, but if we are inviting or introducing people to our Church family then we have already convinced them we are normal, but a better kind of normal :)
Thanks for the comments, guys. Both good for consideration. And, Max, I’ve come to realise that simple is far better than complicated… :-)
My only (simple) reply would be this… sinners actually liked to hang out with Jesus. We know that they would have found him very confronting at times, given some of the things he had to say, but they actually liked to be with him.
I can tell you right now, from the national stats and from personal conversations, most sinners aren’t that excited about hanging out with Jesus’ people, and I think we need to ask ourselves the hard questions about why that is so…