What I Want From a Church
Whether we are tempted to leave one church for another over a matter of mere preference, whether we are tempted to remove an element of our worship service because it no longer resonates with people, whether we are tempted to try something novel and new, we must always turn first to the Word, first to the one who knows exactly what we need. He will lead us, he will guide us, he will help us to worship in the ways that please him and that satisfy our hungry souls.
NPR recently ran an article about the future of the Christian church. Church attendance is in decline, they said, but some creative leaders are finding ways to keep it relevant in a new cultural context. Pastor Chris Battle has walked away from traditional church because it “was not connecting with people” and now leads a “spiritual community” called BattleField Farm & Gardens. Rector Billy Daniel and Pastor Caroline Vogel of an Episcopal Church in Knoxville use their sanctuary for yoga, breathing exercises, and other alternate forms of spirituality. “Just because you leave organized religion doesn’t mean the hunger to connect with the divine is going to cease,” she says. Bradley Hyde, a Methodist minister, sees churches like his hemorrhaging members and is also turning away from traditional services to focus more on community involvement.
It needs to be said: I care what NPR thinks of the church about as much as I care about what North Korea thinks of democracy or what Jehovah’s Witnesses think of the Trinity. But the article did have some tremendously revealing components to it and ones that are worth considering because they reveal universal human tendencies and temptations.
One of these comes courtesy of a participant in Chris Battle’s church who describes herself as “a refugee from fundamentalist churches.” When asked why she is part of BattleField Farm & Gardens she says, “Generally, I’m here because I want two things out of church … I want time to sit down, like we do on Sundays sometimes or around the fire, and, like, pray and re-center and figure out what we’re about in the world. Because the world is very noisy. And then I want a church to get [expletive] done with your community and for your community.”
The key part of her comment is not the bit about sitting around the fire and re-centering and it’s not the bit about getting [expletive] done within the community. The key part is at the beginning where she says, “I want two things out of church.” The assumption is that her desires are relevant, that what she wants out of a church is even the least bit consequential.
But then she is well-trained because the pastor, when he became convinced church was no longer relevant, said to himself, “maybe we need to begin to do church differently. But what does that look like? And I didn’t know until I got to the garden.” There’s no indication that he looked outside of himself for answers, but only that he looked inside. He asked what he wanted, not what God wanted. He indicates no source of authority beyond his own desires or his own reasoning.
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May the Force Be Ever in Your Favor
The New Testament authors do quote from the Old Testament, but most of their uses of the Old Testament are allusions. And these allusions sometimes come back-to-back. Like those who understand the expression, “May the force be ever in your favor,” we need to be diligent readers of the Old Testament so that the allusions to it in the New will be more evident to us. We can read how an author uses an earlier text and smile and say, “Ah! I’ve seen language like this before. I know this phrase is pulling from an earlier source.”
I can’t remember the first time I saw someone write, with a smirk no doubt, “May the force be ever in your favor.” It’s like those memes that attribute a Lord of the Rings quote to Harry Potter. I smile at these things when I see them, and maybe you do too, because we know what the writer is up to. The conflation is deliberate. We’re “in” on the joke.
With the statement, “May the force be ever in your favor,” the first half is drawing from Star Wars, and the second half is drawing from The Hunger Games.
Years ago I heard someone use that deliberately-melded line to make a biblical point: “The New Testament authors do this all the time.” Now that got my attention. What did he mean?
The New Testament authors don’t mind putting back-to-back allusions to the Old Testament together without telling you that’s what they’re doing. In order for you to understand what the biblical authors are doing, we must be careful readers who are immersed in earlier Scripture. If someone isn’t aware of Star Wars or The Hunger Games, then the statement, “May the force be ever in your favor,” won’t have the effect that it should.
As a biblical example, the Gospel of Mark opens like this: “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’” (Mark 1:2–3).
These words in Mark 1:2–3 push several Old Testament lines together.In Exodus 23:20, “Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared.”
In Isaiah 40:3, “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”
In Malachi 3:1, “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me.”Read More
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My Complicated Feelings about Tim Keller
It was his focus on the eternal issues of life—of issues of meaning—that really hooked me. Nowhere else was anybody I knew talking about these things in the way that Tim was. He illustrated his points through philosophy, art, pop culture and yes, the Bible. But it was a Bible I had never been introduced to, despite attending church and Sunday school every weekend of my childhood. He brought it alive and showed how it was actually relevant to my life.
Tim Keller, one of American Christianity’s giants, passed away this week [May 19, 2023] at age 72.
As some of you may know, I somewhat improbably spent years in the evangelical fold starting in 2005 following the sudden death of my father at age 61 and the passing of my beloved grandmother the year after. It’s hard to imagine that I would have headed down this road but for Tim Keller.
I entered Tim’s church, Redeemer Presbyterian, as a fairly committed atheist. I had long ago dispatched with my Episcopalian upbringing and other than the boyfriend who brought me to church, there were very few religious people in my Manhattan friend group, which consisted primarily of people working in or dedicated to Democratic politics.
Sunday was for brunch, not church.
A year later, I was all in with Christianity. And not just any Christianity—I had signed up for Tim Keller’s brand of evangelical Christianity, or at least what I thought was Tim Keller’s brand of evangelicalism.
My feelings about Tim Keller the person are straightforward: I knew him to be a thoughtful, brilliant, kind person. A devoted husband and father; humble and generous. I was often the beneficiary of his wisdom as I navigated various issues. His wife Kathy, just as brilliant as he, was my Bible study teacher for years. They were intertwined heart, mind and soul—it’s hard to imagine the grief she is experiencing as she faces life without him.
What was it that was so alluring about Tim? David Brooks does a good job of capturing it:
American evangelicalism suffers from an intellectual inferiority complex that sometimes turns into straight anti-intellectualism. But Tim could draw on a vast array of intellectual sources to argue for the existence of God, to draw piercing psychological insights from the troubling parts of Scripture or to help people through moments of suffering. His voice was warm, his observations crystal clear. We all tried to act cool around Tim, but we knew we had a giant in our midst.
He didn’t fight a culture war against that Manhattan world. His focus was not on politics but on “our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things that control us, that lead us to feel superior and exclude those without them, that fail to satisfy us even when we get them.”
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Why Generation Z is Drawn to Roman Catholicism
Members of Generation Z who desire a sense of transcendence in their worship may simply need to look a bit harder. By fostering a dogmatic commitment to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture while retaining a deep respect for church history, much of evangelical, conservative, Reformed Christianity has managed to guard itself from the spirit of the age. Young people should by no means compromise on the true gospel (Galatians 1:8-9) to find a tradition that has retained its sense of reverence.
Polls consistently show that members of Generation Z—loosely defined as the cohort born between 1999 and 2015—are far less religious than their parents and grandparents. Young Americans are twice as likely to identify themselves as atheists in comparison to other adults, while a mere 59% identify themselves with some form of Christianity—a significant decline from the 75% of Baby Boomers who say the same.
Surveys also find that members of Generation Z are more socially progressive than other Americans, with as many as one in five identifying themselves as “LGBTQ.” Although some young people certainly attempt to blend the doctrines of biblical Christianity with the falsehoods of modern leftism, there is a remnant drawn to conservative religious traditions with weightiness and transcendence—which may even claim to uniquely feed the soul in a relentlessly materialistic era.
Talk to members of Generation Z who grew up in loosely evangelical households and you will discover that many have since turned to Roman Catholicism rather than the generic version of megachurch Christianity. The ornate architecture of cathedrals, the advent of the Latin Mass, and the otherworldly nature of chants are, to many young people, a departure from the emptiness of the modern age.
Take, for example, actor Shia LaBeouf, who recently made headlines for converting to Roman Catholicism. In an interview with Bishop Robert Barron, he explained that “Latin Mass affects me deeply.” When asked why, he said: “Because it feels like they’re not selling me a car.”
Big-box evangelicalism, on the other hand, is by no means transcendent. Pastors and worship leaders often find themselves limping and thrashing about their altars (1 Kings 18:26) with moralistic, therapeutic sermons and emotionalistic, shallow music. As LaBeouf correctly diagnosed, many evangelical churches merely make attempts at “selling Jesus” to their members. In the words of Pastor Rick Warren, you can simply give Jesus “a sixty-day trial” or get your money back—a tactic that is quite literally taken from car salesmen.
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