Still clambering over the wreckage - Part Four

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 13 October 2007 08:19:06

"Social clubs full of back stabbing hypocrites" or "more interested in making everybody conform to their way of doing things than following Jesus"

Ok so today I'm dealing with the side of the church that is the disillusionment between the way we reckon things should be and the relationships within churches and the way they actually are. If you've been within the church for any period of time it is unlikely that you have escaped atleast one of the following:
(i) people talking behind your back and dressing it up as a concern of some sort - the words prayer or pastoral are normally inserted before the word concern in order to justify the gossip / inference
(ii) normally perfectly reasonable people arguing about something which you find insignificant and daft
(iii) somebody talking to you about somebody else in a way which is not exactly positive and dressing it up as the type of concern expressed in point one.
(iv) a social diary filled up with meetings and events which are meant to "promote the gospel" or result in action which promotes the gospel which are all attended by the same people and never result in much more than ensuring the people attending these meetings and events sit there and do alot of talking with each other and end up living in worlds where they have little social contact with "non-Christians" or people outside the church.
(v) somebody spouting on about some moral issue or how x, y, or z has done something awful to them without having any concept of forgiveness.

The list could go on but all you all get the types of things I'm talking about. The level to which we experience things differs and depends on (i) where we are and (ii) what's going on in either the church or our lives at that point but I guess most of us in churches have at best experienced being pissed off by these types of things and at worst deeply hurt. Personally I come in the category of having been deeply pissed off but not too badly hurt particularly by point 1 on my list. As somebody who doesn't always follow the same norms and values as everybody else, has a few different labels to most other people and occassionally "does life" in quite visible ways I have become aware that I have, on occassion, been that cause for concern.

Now, what really gets me about the cause for concern thing is the way those concerns have either been expressed or who they have been expressed to. In the dim and distant past of the period I was really falling apart the concerns were also often wrong and based on pre-conceptions about a situation nobody had really spoken to me about until I got a pastoral visit where I discovered people thought x, y and z about me.

As for the gap between our social clubs and the gospel and what Jesus did and what we're doing well it is one more books than I care to think about have been written on.

BUT is it really that bad and is it a church thing? Well, on one hand yes even if you belong to a cool church like the one I am attached to these issues are there on some level at some point. However, there are a couple of things you need to get a grip on with this though:
(i) people do genuinely do some of this stuff because they care, they just don't always engage brain and common sense in that caring.
(ii) sometimes we do actually need some help but refuse to ask and can put up walls which mean it is difficult for people to directly approach us.
(iii) people in churches are generally messed up (whether they will admit it or not)
(iv) it's not just a church thing, backstabbing and politics takes place in most organisations
(v) for every two Christians who've hurt us we can probably name another who was amazing and really helped us
(vi) churches are households and so by definition they are likely to be disfunctional and uncomfortable places to be (the Waltons were only ever on TV)
(vii) our culture has privatised religion to the extent that going to church is a social activity with religious significance
(viii) the church is the people in it and we are sometimes as guilty as other people on this stuff. If the church is to change and become more like Jesus it's going to have to be us who change it by individually living different lives within it
(ix) if we can identify the other people who are individually struggling to live the kind of Jesus life we want to see and join with them, (and not just turn into a clique or another talking shop), the difference will start to be magnified
(x) Jesus actually struggled with much of the same s**t. If we read the gospel we find he was a good Jew who attended synagouge but whose head was done in by it sometimes. Think about how long he probably got wound up by seeing the money changers ripping people off in the temple courts before he threw his righteous hissy fit or about how he got repaid by the rest of the people in the village when he got up and chose the passage to read in Nazareth. In the end it was the backstabbing actions of one of the other members of the church (i.e. Judas) which got him arrested yet throughout it all he remained an observant Jew, (just one who worked outside the usual framework and ignored the norms and values of all the "nice", "establishment" people and their attempts to make him conform).

Um, think I might have found a significant bit of wreckage but also come up with the reasons why we need to work around it.
As for books to help you on this one, well if you are looking for anything different to the bible Christi-Anarchy by Dave Andrews is probably a good place to start.