how to fix the church in one easy, koolaid-free step

About four or five years ago I sat down in a snug Canadian living room to an informal family-style chat with an evangelical Christian power couple whom I'll call the ChurchSmiths. These folks were leaders in an organization called Outreach Canada - the sort of people who travel widely for speaking engagements at big evangelical conferences, and know Rick Warren (slightly portly mega-church guy who prayed at Obama's inauguration) personally.

The ChurchSmiths had recently been re-assigned to Europe, where they were tasked with somehow re-invigorating a choking, gasping, dying Protestant Church. The purpose of this family gathering was to fill in their kids (and friends like me) on their vision for how to do this, a vision plucked from recent readings and experiences. The basic gist of it was this: the way to fix the church was to dismantle it. That is, to deconstruct it as an institution and re-envision it back to its original, house-church format.

If you follow my writing at all, you know I can be a bit snarkey when it comes to the North American Protestant Evangelical church. The problems with NAPE churches are obvious, so they've made easy targets for the more depressive mood-swings-of-my-pen. There are times when I wonder if in this regard I am just another angry, destructive internet voice, and if I should focus my attention elsewhere, to avoid contributing to the general nastiness of the virtual world.

Although this may be true, it is also true that, in the words of a t-shirt created by my older brother's freshmen dorm at University, "I yell because I care." These problems are not, I think, because of who Jesus was. They are not even inherent in the idea of a church. So rather than whining and pointing fingers, I have decided to do something about it by outlining what I have come to believe is the one, practical, straightforward step the NAPEs can/must take if they want to be a part of what the Christian church really is/ought to be. Here it is: abandon your buildings. Sell them, if you have to, to get out of your American-sized debts. If not, just walk away. Give them to the community, and then go start a whole bunch of house churches.

If you're a NAPE you may have just soiled yourself in anger, so let me assure you that I do not believe that every time a large group of people gathers to become a community of faith, it will invariably degenerate into the sort of vapid, consumer-conformist, image-and-entertainment obsessed spectacle it has often become today. There is always a choice, and I tend to think, rather, that the problems have arisen when some very basic human foibles - like the desire for power and control - take over.

Conversely, I do not think that if all the NAPEs abandoned their buildings and went home to create small, decentralized house churches, it would immediately fix all the problems that have come to be associated with this church. It just seems to me that it would create a context where it might actually be possible for the NAPEs to address some of their problems. Good things happen in NAPE churches, sure, but I think that more often than not it is in spite of their culture, rather than because of it.

Perhaps it would be helpful to take a moment to briefly list (off the top of my head) what I think are the major problems currently afflicting NAPE churches:

1. Misappropriation of funds.
2. The deeply lamentable tragedy of the association of Jesus Christ's name with structures of Power, Violence and Control.
3. The endorsement of a lot of truly crappy art, and the exclusion from the culture of most art that is honest, true and visceral.
4. The association of faith with entertainment and self-indulgence, rather than discipleship and service.
5. The creation of an environment that foments hypocrisy.

This may not be your church at all. I am not trying to attack your specific church, and like I've said, I don't think these problems are an absolute given. So if you've managed somehow to avoid them, well... bully for you.

But for the rest of the NAPEs, here's why I think a move back to house churches would fix the aforementioned problems.

1. Misappropriation of funds: The area where I live spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on church buildings that are almost without exception grotesque architectural monstrosities designed with little concern for either longevity or aesthetics. Granted, that's the state of most architecture in America... but to my aesthetics-loving self, this is no excuse. Within these buildings there are a number of services offered, but none that could not in all probability be provided more efficiently in other contexts. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars brought in by donations to many of these churches, only an itty-bitty percentage goes to the things that Jesus usually went on about, such as caring for the oppressed and the needy. A friend of mine dropped in on one of the fastest growing churches around here and the "tour guide" actually bragged to him that they gave a full tenth of their income to the poor. If we're going to pretend to be Christian, it would be nice to see the majority of our funds diverted away from new carpets and heating for fifty feet of head-room, and towards Jesus. 

2. The deeply lamentable tragedy of the association of Jesus Christ's name with structures of Power, Violence and Control. As much as I don't like saying an unqualified "Ra-Ra" to America, I gotta say that the concept of decentralization is brilliant. Humans are perpetually scared, and that fear pushes them to try to wrest an illusion of control from a vast, un-tameable universe. The problem is that it is an illusion, and that once we have succumbed to the fool's errand of a fear-driven power pursuit, things fall apart. We know it's not working, but at that point we're too invested in the power structures we've made to understand that the only real solution is to just give up. 

Institutions are never static. They grow or they die. This is an unfortunate rule by which our culture plays, and churches are no exception. Often, therefore, the demands of growth drown out the whispers of truth, love and faith. And although it is true that in house churches, people have all the same fears and that those fears drive them towards the same power struggles, the intimacy of the relationships in house churches means there will be less opportunities for a few people to deceive their way to having power over a great many others, which is where things always get really ugly. Jesus was a last-shall-be-first kind of guy. Let's go there.

3. The endorsement of a lot of truly crappy art, and the exclusion from church culture of most art that is honest, true and visceral. Despite being based, in theory, on a Book of Scriptures that is an often brutal, raw, angry, funny, sexy, vulgar, poetic and complicated work of Art, most NAPE churches have come to see Art as existing for very narrow, saccharine purposes. There are a variety of complicated historical reasons for this, but the bottom line is that in the NAPE church music, dance, poetry, film, prose, theater and cetera often get completely stripped of any part of reality deemed ugly or unpleasant. 

Then, in an example of Groupthink peculiar to this sort of church, the lifeless, dishonest, sweet unreality left over gets labeled "good" and held up for praise. Musicians who write uncreative, dishonest lyrics reformulated from someone else's work and put to chord progressions and melodies cribbed from the last decade's pop-top-forty get hailed as Great Artists, and make careers out of telling half-truths about themselves and the world. Filmmakers create sappy nonsense full of weak acting, weak story lines and two-dimensional characters, which leave the sheeple weeping in their seats and clamoring for more. 

"Well, yeah," they say, "it was kinda bad in all those ways you mentioned... but the message, man, the message."

The problem with this sort of thinking is that in many ways the medium is the message, and as Madeleine L'Engle once said, "bad art is bad theology."

In intimate, smaller groups, it is very difficult (and pointless) to try to lie too much about yourself and the world, pretending to like art that deep down you all know really sucks the camel's tail. It is my belief and hope that if you could get people out of these large, groupthinking clusters, their ability to honestly apprehend artwork would return to them.

4. The association of faith with entertainment and self-indulgence, rather than discipleship and service. Healing is found in community, when a bunch of us look outward and commit to the difficult, practical, often painful work of loving each other for the long haul. This may happen to a useful degree, sometimes, in some NAPE churches, but again, I think that those cases are somewhat transcendent. 

5. The creation of an environment that foments hypocrisy. I have made this my last point, but in some ways it's the most important. Each of my other points has suggested some of the reasons this happens, but suffice it to say that I think this is one of the most compelling reasons why we ought to consider abandoning the current NAPE church model. North American culture as a whole glorifies the presentation of a polished facade, but what the human soul craves is truth, in all its ugly reality. It craves honest, open communication of the self. Humans are not meant to live in lies and pretensions. They are meant to live actual, abundant lives. 

It is far too easy in churches to disappear into the faceless crowd. Even in the smaller programs offered, it is far too easy to mouth the "right" words and hide the truth about who you really are - your fears, failings, yearnings, and hopes. Anybody can fake anything for a few hours a week, but with people we interact with regularly as part of our daily lives, we are free to work out our faith with an other-centric love. Why? Because we know and are known. 

We could do this, of course, in larger groups. We could fight back against the alienating effects of our modern lifestyles. We could let the truly amazing message of love and grace and self-sacrifice taught by Jesus to infiltrate our lives. We don't, though, and I think it has to do, in part, with the sub-culture created by the things I've been mentioning - a sub-culture that is largely just a re-packaging of the culture in general. 

We are afraid to dismantle this sub-culture because a good many of us don't really believe in Jesus, and think that without our help and our structures and our programs, nothing would ever change. So we stick to our broken systems, counting our numbers and imagining they actually mean something. They don't, and the facade is crumbling. Church attendance is down, and its not because Hollywood made movies out of too many Dan Brown books. It's because the church - by which I mean the collection of buildings and publishing houses and weird habits that make up NAPE culture - is in many ways broken. We are not victims of our culture, though, we are shapers. So let's shape and un-break it, by breaking it and building it into something new.

This isn't really my idea. It started, as I've said, with a couple of dyed-in-the-wool NAPEs, and grew in the soil of my discontent. Do I really think it will ever happen? No. Peoples is peoples, after all. But a boy can dream.

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*Note: this post was getting really long, so I ignored obvious questions like, "but who will protect us from heresy?" and "but what about 'worship'?" I am eager, as always, to give my opinions on these things, so if you wish to know them, feel free to push back in the comments.