When The Church Realizes Nobody Wants Church
For years in the 1990’s I walked the streets of Pine Hills in suburban Orlando (Florida), knocking on the doors of homes, inviting. I held weekly Prayer Meet-Ups in the Affordable Housing Apartment Complex down the street on Silver Star Road. No one came.
“Jesus said, ‘Don’t bicker among yourselves over me. You’re not in charge here. The Father who sent me is in charge here. The Father who sent me is in charge. He draws people to me – that’s the only way you’ll ever come”” (John 6, The Message Bible).
What is this? Nobody wants to come to a church congregation, let alone a church building, anymore. This has been a long time coming (ever since Constantine in 312 CE hijacked Jesus for his own Empire need and greed) and a long time occurring (ever since God was declared dead in the 60’s and Vietnam and Watergate and religious leaders’ sexual criminality and personality showpersons’ (not just men!) maleficence destroyed public trust in any institution).
Culture and identity tribalism kept the church going for quite a while but now we as a nation are actually that “melting pot” and none of that holds anymore….though we keep turning to it and bashing others up (and going to war) thinking life will come if we just get our boundaries right (be that Palestine/Israel or abortion at 6 weeks or 15 weeks, or whatever.)
And all this time, all this time, through the thick (what did America have, maybe 20 to 25 years of growing and significant Sunday worship attendance in the late 1940’s to the early 1960’s?) and thin, none of our efforts to bring others along to what we know and do and love were ever going to do anything. “He draws people to me – that’s the only way you’ll ever come.”
God brings people to God. That means a couple of significant things, both being hard to swallow. One, we can do stuff but when the stuff fails it should not depress us or surprise us because it caused nothing anyway. Two, the thing and place God brings people to is God-Self, not our culture, traditions, activities, ways we like to live and language we speak. Jesus said that he is the “Bread of Life” (John 6). That such sustenance (and Fragrance unsuppressed – that fragrance of freshly baked bread!) is set out for us daily is simply good news for mere mortals. Sharing this bread is evangelism: “evangelism is simply one hungry person telling another hungry person where to find food”. We don’t have to do anything with the bread but enjoy it, but there is simply so much on the Table (again, John 6, the five loaves fed a multitude) and there is so much hunger in the world it is simply a shame, wrong, not to do everything we can to share it down to the last bite.
Now that nobody likes church anymore, maybe we, the church, will see that it’s the Bread that matters. And be about that. And God will draw people and feed people, with God.
