Reality Check

Okay...I'm usually pretty hard on the whole "seeker-streamlined-plastic-programmed-contemporary church" thing, but this weekend I had a reality check. We were visiting some of my family for Easter, and we thought it would be great to worship together as a family. As a pastor, I can actually count on one hand the times that I have worshipped with my entire family over the last 12 years. Needless to say I was looking forward to it. My sister had just started visiting a new church, and so we all decided to join her. Easter came, and we all filed in to the sanctuary. We sat in the middle, and I started looking through the bulletin. I saw that we were getting ready to sing some hymns, have some kind of prayer about a list of people, and hear a message from someone who was not the pastor. I thought to myself, "Cool...it's Easter, and this pastor is secure enough to share the pulpit with someone else." This was going to be great! The guy (I think he was a deacon) got up to welcome everyone. He went on for about five minutes about how many people they had at the sunrise service. Then he made some comments about one side being full while the other side needed some more people. Then he said that they had some land they could build on if they got enough people. I felt like throwing my hand up and waving, "Here I am...I'm here...aren't you at least as happy that I am here as you are upset that some people aren't here?" But I just sat there. They eventaully took up an offering. When they passed the plate down my row, they also sent this metal bucket full of cards. I didn't know what they were, and since I was the first person on the row and couldn't follow someone else's lead, I took a card. Turns out it was an information card for visitors. I started filling it out. My mom asked me why I was filling it out, and I told her that I like to see how churches contacted visitors. But since I received one at the offering, I didn't know what to do with it after I filled it out. I just left it on the seat. They never communicated to me what to do with it. Come to think of it, they never even communicated with me what it was. When the preacher stood up (it was a struggle, I think, because he weighed about 400 pounds), he started making all these jokes (jokes that weren't funny) about how he had more time to preach. He started in on how people ought to bring their Bible (He called it "Your Word") to church. He said that it was okay for visitors not to bring their Bibles because "they don't know any different." He said that everyone needed to bring their Bibles so that they could underline things and see if he was preaching the right things. I was one of those visitors who "didn't know any different," so I grabbed the KJV from under the pew in front of me. It's funny; as I checked him, I noticed that he took many exerpts from scripture out of context. He said quite a few times that he wasn't going to be finished preaching by the assumed 11:30. I wondered about all the people who, like ourselves, had made plans after worship based on the advertised 10:30-11:30 timeframe. I thought about the guy who was meeting us for lunch who had to leave by 12:15 for work. And when we passed him on our way back to the house and I realized that he was going to work with no lunch, I didn't think the preacher's jokes about his long sermon were very funny at all. By the time he stopped preaching at noon, he had said numerous offensive things to unchurched people including, as he asked us to turn to some passage in Psalms, "If you don't know where it is, it can't do you any good." I thought about how people who might have come on Easter searching for the meaning of the holiday. I thought about people who may have entered a church building for the first time, all because they were searching for something true. I started thinking about how that church would affect someone like that. I imagined them feeling insulted. I imagined them leaving and never wanting to visit another church again. I felt dirty after I left. I felt like I had been part of something wrong. I know, we're not supposed to leave worship asking what it did for us. I know we are instead supposed to leave asking what God thought of it. And I also know that this is a very strong, judgmental thing to write here, but I think God was not pleased. I think God loves lost people so much that He was offended.

When I look at this church, like I said, I get a reality check. Maybe the consumer-driven contemporary church is better than I let on. It's certainly better than this. At least it's trying to be relevant! At least it's not trying to insult people who don't know Jesus or belong to their church. Maybe I just needed some perspective.