Church As You Would Like It To Be?

by Adam Harbinson

Maybe I keep strange company, but I was with some friends the other night and someone made the comment, 'Wouldn't it be great if being in church was as much fun as being in a pub.' For some, maybe it is, but in my experience, for most I fear it is not. Perhaps there are many and varied reasons for that, but I think the most obvious reason is that being in a pub is not a spectator sport. It's all about participating, talking, listening, and laughing together, maybe crying together. On the other hand, church in the form of the Sunday Service is often little more than a weekly theological lecture.

No doubt those of us who are avid readers of the Bible or who are fascinated by theology can find the exposition of Scripture up-building and helpful, but what relevance does it have for the vast majority of churchgoers? - not to mention the un-churched. And what about the de-churched? In a recent survey, a sample of the members of a number of congregations in the UK were asked why they go to church. Something like 80% of them said they go because they have always gone. Fifteen percent said it was because they were expected to go by friends and family and 5% said it was because they enjoyed it. [1] But how do the majority of people feel, Sunday after Sunday, going through the motions of what they themselves consider to be a meaningless, irrelevant habit?

The American theologian and preacher of some renown, Jack Deere, tells how he reached the point when he said, 'I'm not going to that sort of church ever again!' And he didn't. What did he do? He said, 'Together with about 40 like-minded burnt-out Pharisees we decided to meet as they did in New Testament days. We wanted to meet in order to hear from God.' Now, God did speak, although not audibly. He spoke to each through the others, but is there a Biblical precedent for such a gathering? Yes there is, for when Paul was addressing some of the problems in the early church in Corinth he gave them an interesting piece of advice. Here's what he said, 'When you come together to worship, each of you should be prepared with something that will be useful for all: sing a hymn, teach a lesson, tell a story, lead a prayer, provide an insight . take your turn, no one person taking over.' (1Corinthians 14:26-31 The Message).

What about that then? What on earth would the Sunday Service be like if everyone brought something with them to give to the others? And what would it be like if no one was allowed to take over? Jack Deere tells the story of an occasion when a young lady, one of his burnt-out Pharisees, stood to her feet and said, 'I believe there's a young man here tonight for the first time who is addicted to pornography. If you come to the front for prayer, God will help you deal with it.' Can you imagine the atmosphere? Especially when no one came forward; people looking around, 'Young man? Here for the first time? Mmm.'

However, at the end of the meeting a young man spoke to Jack, and they prayed together, and God intervened, but the point he was making was this; as a regular church attender, that young man never had the opportunity to have his addiction dealt with. For years he had gone to church regularly, he even had some pastoral responsibility, but it wasn't until he was in an environment such as that described as the ideal by Paul, that God was able to use the young man's spiritual siblings to rescue him. I can detect a great yearning for gatherings such as that.

A friend of mine who pastors a church in North Belfast is on record as saying that if he had his way he would abolish the traditional Sunday Morning service. He would get rid of the rows of pews; people would sit together with chairs arranged in a circle with the preacher strolling about in the middle. He would read a few verses of Scripture, perhaps make a few comments and then leave it open for debate. Everybody would get the chance to throw in his or her pennyworth. He adds, 'We trot into church, sit and stare at the back of somebody's head for an hour and then trot back home again. That's not fellowship!'

Sadly however, my friend's church is run by a committee, and the inefficient system will never be dismantled, it's too deeply embedded in the religious psyche. But we can take the Great Apostle at his word. We can and should courageously stretch after the ideal as presented to us by the master-architect of the church. It's worth a shot, unless of course what you've got is already working.

[1] An unofficial straw pole conducted by theology students in Belfast in the summer of 2004 in which 300people were interviewed.

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