Sometimes you and I make life out to be more mysterious than it actually is. For example you could ask why you keep getting speeding tickets. Do you usually speed? If so then your speeding tickets are not that mysterious. Perhaps you might ask why your friendships are so full of conflict. Do you gossip about your friends? Is it that mysterious as to why your relationships have a lot of conflict when you gossip about them?
Often problems whose origins seem mysterious to us are really not that mysterious to others. The same is true for many of us who want the church to reach new people and are puzzled why that just isn’t happening. Maybe it’s not as mysterious as you think.
The stories about the Old Testament prophet Elijah are recorded in the last part of the book of First Kings and the first part of the book of Second Kings. We know very little of what Elijah said. We are told stories of wonders that he performed. He is probably known best for the challenge he issued the nation of Israel over worshiping other gods. The famous story of Elijah verses the 450 prophets of Baal on top of Mt. Carmel. Elijah won the challenge over the prophets of Baal yet it is unclear if the nation really returned to worshiping just one God. Not just worshipping as in singing worship songs. Yet worshiping God in how the people lived their daily lives.
Amos, another Old Testament prophet, was a shepherd from the town of Tekoa in Judah. He insisted that he was not a professional prophet yet he had an important message from God. In the middle of the eighth century B.C. he felt called by God to prophesy in Israel, the northern kingdom. The message Amos gave there was disagreeable to Israel’s ruling powers. He identified all of Israel’s neighbors as being under God’s care and subject to God’s punishment.
Amos' harshest words, however, were aimed at Israel itself, specifically its royalty and aristocracy. Amos condemned the wealthy, the powerful and the elite for enriching themselves at the expense of the poor. Amos made it clear that because of this Israel was doomed. Amos reminded the people of God's desire for justice and righteousness. Words not just reserved for God. Justice and righteousness were how the people of God were to conduct themselves in their daily living and as a society as a whole. Amos said that justice was to “roll down like water.” He was talking about social and economic justice for the poor that were not being treated fairly by the rich and powerful. God was telling the people what kind of soceity he desired and that message was not very popular.
Every OT prophet pointed out areas where the nation of Israel had lost its imagination for the way that God wanted things to be. Pointing out the error of the people's ways got them upset. It got people upset because it messed with the ways things were. It meant leaving normal behind for something different. It meant calling their motives, agendas, systems, biases and daily habits into question. Much easier to silence the messenger than consider the message.
This is why Jesus says in Luke 11:47 “Woe to you, because you built tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus reminds the Jewish people of his day that they are still not doing what God has asked them time and time again to do. They killed the prophets instead of reconsidering their lives and the fairness of their society. The prophets of old warned the people. Many times. Change or face calamity. We know what happened. It was not a mystery.
As a child and teenager in church I often wondered just how dumb those ancient Israelites were. Prophet after prophet came with warning after warning. The truth is not that the people were dumb. They weren’t crazy. They did what you and I do all the time. They did not take responsibility for their behavior and instead made excuses. They blamed others and even other countries for their woes.
I don't know of a church or church leaders that aren't bemoaning the current state affairs for the local church. During COVID lots of people left and have not returned. Sunday attendance is not what it once was. Budgets are tight and the current culture seems annoyed towards Christian folk. For some Christians there seems to be some kind of a mystery surrounding why the local church is struggling. Here are some things that I think every church is currently contending with in some manner.
A LOT OF CHRISTIANS ARE MORE IN LOVE WITH THE PAST THAN THE PRESENT.
When the present and future look scary we turn to nostalgia to put a smile on our face. We want to remember when things were not like they are currently. In the past things were so much better (really?). Hindsight is not 20/20. Longing for “the good old days” is harmful because the present could never possibly live up to such a falsely idealized vision of the past from which all negative emotions have been filtered out, and the unfair comparison causes a state of denial, filled with unhappiness and despair, that is rooted in self-deception. In other words nostalgia is fondly remembering and longing for a time that never existed.
A recent study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Bas Verplanken, a professor of social psychology at the University of Bath, discovered that, after being exposed to nostalgic stimuli, participants who exhibited a “strong worry habit” showed “enhanced symptoms of anxiety and depression” compared to those with the same predisposition in the control group. In other words, the nostalgic triggers caused those who worry “habitually” to become more depressed and anxious than they would have been otherwise.
When your affection for the past is greater than your excitement for the future, you’re in trouble. You’re in trouble because, like Peter walking on the water, all we see are the waves around us, not who is with us. When the people of Israel were in captivity they began to long for how things used to be. They found themselves in a culture that did not honor their values, worship their God or encourage their customs. They wanted to go back to the good old days when things were better. But there is no such thing as time travel. And the good old days, where they really that good? We might ask who were the "good old days" good for?
The prophet Jeremiah addressed this longing for the past when he tells those in exile to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jer. 29:7) In other words unpack your bags you’re going to be here a while. You can’t go back. Instead look to the new life that is right in front of you. Normal is not coming back. Normal is what is happening right now. Look to the welfare of the city. Get a job, open a business, send the kids to school, plan your wedding, plant a garden, embrace where you are not where you wish you were.
CONFLICT IS ABOUT ALL THE WRONG THINGS
There will always be some level of conflict whenever human beings gather. Just about every page of the Bible is filled with some kind of conflict. Perhaps one of the most overlooked issues in the New Testament is the pervasive amount of conflict within the early church (not to mention among Jesus and his disciples). See Acts 15 for starters.
Paul wrote a letter to the Christians in Corinth. A letter we don’t have. The Corinthian Christians responded by writing a letter back to Paul. Another letter that we don’t have. What we do have is Paul’s response to their letter which is called First Corinthians. Some of the conflicts that Paul addresses are: partisanship, (1:10–4:21; 16:10–18); incest (5:1–13); prostitution (6:12–21); celibacy within marriage (7:1–7); Christians married to pagans asking about divorce (7:12–16); questions surrounding marriage and remarriage (7:25–40); lawsuits (6:1–11); idolatry (8:1–11:1); concerns about women praying (11:2–16); inequality in the communal meal (11:17–34); denials of the bodily resurrection of Jesus (15:1–58).
Paul highlights these conflicts as forms of arrogance and stubbornness. Paul suggests that some of the Corinthian Christians had spun these issues into an unhealthy self-deception that they had really achieved greater spiritual awareness then others. Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that in all of their conflicts what they forgot was the call to love one another. Unhealthy churches spend their energy fighting each other. Healthy churches spend their energy fighting to love each other and their neighbors better. Which gets us to the next problem that many churches face.
FOCUSED ON INSIDERS and BLAMING THE CULTURE
Too many churches are focused on their wants, preferences and perceived needs. They are self-focused organizations. Their vision and mission statements state that they are there to "reach the lost" or "love all people" yet when you examine the majority of events and programs, they are for insiders. A life devoted to self ultimately leaves you alone. Jesus taught in Mark 10:43-44, “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” Christians always define those verses as being willing to do stuff for other Christians without getting any accolades. I’m sure that’s part of it, but I think what Jesus was driving at was that he wanted his followers to purposely choose to not get their own way, to put their own wishes and interests and needs aside in the desire to further his kingdom. In other words Christians are supposed to be willing to be offended.
Instead what I see is many Christians blaming the culture. If celebrities, political figures and so on would just follow God then everything would change. Maybe we could blame Elvis Presley since he brought Rock-n-Roll to the masses. Maybe we could blame corporations and their greed. Social media from Facebook, to Snapchat to Twitter could be handed all kinds of blame. Some Christians find themselves in full retreat from and in a never ending argument with our culture. Yet Jesus’ most pointed criticism were not for the culture that he lived in. Jesus never blamed things on Caesar or the Roman political system.
Jesus pointed out that it is the religious types that had forgotten that there was a difference between looking good and being good. Luke 11:39-41 records an interaction between Jesus and some Pharisees. “Then the Lord said to him, “You Pharisees are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy—full of greed and wickedness! Fools! Didn’t God make the inside as well as the outside? So clean the inside by giving gifts to the poor, and you will be clean all over.”
Blaming culture is easy and it is also boring. One of the major reasons why so many people are not showing up to church is not because they find themselves so enamored with our current culture. They are simply sick and tired of being treated like dirty dishes when they see the stuff Christians post on social media and how they behave at work and basically live life no differently than anyone else. Why hangout with people who seem to be unaware that their dishes are dirty too all the while pointing out how horrible others are for a lack of clean dishes? Why aren’t you cleaning your own stuff first?
WHAT DOES THIS MAKE POSSIBLE
If you had ever thought that it would be nice if the world would just slow down a bit then you got your wish during 2019-2021. When COVID-19 began to spread, so did the spread of entire nations shutting down. Many churches made the difficult choice to not gather on Sunday for months and for some churches a whole year. Regrettably what COVID-19 exposed was that many Christians had no clue what it meant to be the church outside of a building.
For some Christians during that time they saw an opportunity. They used their backyards to invite their actual neighbors over for pizza and offered up prayers. They purchased school supplies for parents who became school teachers overnight. They did things to support and encourage their actual next door neighbors. Instead of looking at what they lost, wondering when normal would return or blaming the culture they asked the question: what does this make possible? What does it make possible when Christians are forced out of their church buildings and back into their neighborhoods?
Churches of every size and denominational tradition are facing a lot of big issues at the moment. There are a lot of questions and concerns. Yet much of what the local church is experiencing is not that mysterious. Christian writer Bob Goff said “You’ll be able to spot people who are becoming love because they want to build kingdoms, not castles. They fill their lives with people who don’t look like them or act like them or even believe the same things as them. They treat them with love and respect and are more eager to learn from them than presume they have something to teach.”
The problem is not that mysterious. Start taking Jesus' call to love your neighbor seriously.
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