Why I Can't Work in a Church

That’s a provocative title, so maybe I’ll come up with something else to call it by the time I’m finished writing. (Here’s hoping)

Here’s the deal. I work at a desk job where I do nothing but stuff envelopes all day (and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for it in so many ways; it’s teaching me a thing or three about grace, and I’ve already made more in 5 months than I’ve ever been paid in an entire year, so that's cool), but my point is, it’s not exactly what I want to be doing. I have a lot of time to listen to podcasts and reflect on my life and the deeper questions and issues therein, though. And in the process, I’ve discovered a few things about myself and my decisions and the shape my life has taken.

So naturally I’m going to talk about it on the internet.

First, (and these are in no particular order), I’ve noticed that it’s really, really hard to teach the way of Jesus inside a church. Here’s why: people who go to church already think they know everything. Most of them (or us, because let’s be real, their story is just as much mine) grew up in the church and were taught all the Bible stories since before we could walk. We have become so familiar with the message that we’ve become inoculated to it; for many, Sunday School and VBS were just vaccines that prevent them from really experiencing Christ.

How so? Our culture is so defined by knowledge and knowing the right answer that we stop digging deeper once we think we know enough. (Standardized tests taught us that. Just tell us what we need to know to get an A, right?) Another thing we do as teachers is break down complex systems into the simplest chunks so that they are easier to understand. What happens when you mix these two together, especially in the context of young American church-goers, is that we remember the most basic facts about the Bible stories we were told as kids and we were never invited to dig any deeper. 

Think about it. In some (albeit oversimplified) way, I think this explains a lot about why millennials leave the church: because we’re finding out that, oh my gosh, this faith is so much richer and deeper and more relevant and more powerful than we ever imagined and no one ever told us. And this stunted education has been in cycle in the church for so long that we can’t even see examples of older generations who are enacting this “newfound” (but actually just really old and original) way of understanding Jesus, so we’re looking elsewhere.

So essentially: We were taught a lie (or something that wasn’t fully true, or was only the very shallowest layer of true, which still feels like a lie) and now that we’re learning the full richness of our faith, not only can we not find people to be wise elder examples for us, but we often feel like we can’t trust the people who are left in charge. On top of it all, we are treated like heretics because we’re asking questions and using new language that makes people feel threatened. (And why do they feel threatened? Because they have a shallow, untested faith built on static truth statements that don’t allow room for growth or change.)

Which brings me to my second point: Truth isn’t static.

I believe in absolute Truth, but I don’t believe that the things most Christians say are true are absolute Truth; I think they are simply expressions of that truth for a particular time and place and culture and people. And to say that an expression of truth that worked 5000 years ago can still be applied in the same way today is such a massive misunderstanding of how reality works; it’s a static view that doesn’t allow room for change.

Things are constantly in motion. Nothing ever stays the same. There is no “ideal” in reality outside of abstract hypothetical thought. Even on the scale of language and culture, on seasons and the distance between stars in the universe, on personal beliefs and experiences. They all shift and morph and sometimes cycle back on each other. We are not the same people individually that we were 5 years ago. We think differently. We know more. We’ve lost people. We have experienced new things. Even our language is adapting and expanding and warping; the word “gay” today means something completely different than it meant just 100 years ago. We are constantly growing and changing, and yet for some reason we prefer to cling to truth statements that never change, instead of a deeper Truth that is constantly evolving with us, allowing us to continually grasp it and hold onto it and understand it and apply it and trust it.

It’s like those songs in church about the blood of Jesus washing away our sins. Yes, that’s absolutely true and beautiful--but it’s also completely irrelevant to our modern culture and way of life. We don’t actually understand that image (and in fact, most people who didn’t grow up in church are kind of repulsed by this and a lot of other Christianese images). That image or metaphor doesn’t work for us because we don’t live in a blood-guilt culture where we are just naturally accustomed to sacrificing goats every Sabbath (or whatever). That doesn’t mean the song itself isn’t true--it just means that we need to find new ways of expressing the underlying Truth that the song is trying to convey. There's a richness and a depth to the Truth behind the words, but it is inaccessible to us when it is locked in that static form. (And I hope the subtext is clear here that there are so many static objects in Christian culture that need to be allowed to breathe! I'll leave you to figure out which ones I'm referring to *cough* but the Bible is one *cough*.)

Unfortunately, church culture doesn’t really have room for that kind of change.

They want everyone to use their carefully cultivated language, and they question anyone who tries to find different words to express the Truth. It’s so easy for them to use certain key phrases or buzzwords as a litmus test for determining whether someone is in or out, whether they are worth listening to or if they can be avoided and ignored.

(Also, their definition of change itself is limited to moving from yellow to more yellow, and is at best a variation of shades. They will spend lifetimes arguing about the difference between canary and lemon and butter and corn, and whether or not gold can still be considered “yellow.” But that’s not what real change actually looks like; what about the whole spectrum? We’re over here moving to blue and purple and red, and they have no categories for accepting or understanding that within their world, so it’s easier to just dismiss us.)

As a result--and this is a bold, outrageous, probably hyperbolic statement, so brace yourselves: that institution has almost nothing to do with the God, the Christ, I follow. The real, actual message of Jesus is unrecognizable to these people. It’s heretical and blasphemous. They’ve taken this beautiful thing given to us by God, and they’ve turned it into a literal system of rules, a transaction where our worth is based on what we do, building up rules around the rules, clarifying who’s in and who’s out and what’s OK and what’s not and how much is enough. (Do you not see how ironic that is? In essence, they’ve unwittingly become the very people they were taught not to be like: the Pharisees.)

But I have a bigger view of God, a bigger view of the Bible, a bigger view of Jesus, a bigger view of creation, a bigger view of what it means to be human, and those perspectives are not allowed, approved, or accepted.

Thus, I've kind of reached the conclusion that you can’t follow Jesus and be a Christian today, in the same way that the disciples couldn’t follow Jesus and remain Jews back then. He was calling them to something more, something different, something better. He was inviting them to step outside the idol of their religion and into God’s original intended purpose for humanity. Jesus actually showed us how to live this new way, yet if anyone actually practiced it 100% today, they would probably be thrown out of their churches (or would at least be considered very, very weird).

…

There’s a whole ‘nother section about why I would never work in a church (which is where I originally got the title/idea for this post) but that’s probably too personal to share, and anyway I had to unpack a lot of these underlying concepts first to lay the groundwork for that discussion, and it ended up being way longer than I anticipated, so.

Maybe I’ll write a Part II later on, and it will actually be about Why I Can’t Work in a Church.

Until then, I hope this will spark some good conversations in your life, because this one threw some doozies. *playful grin*

Dive deep, always

--JD



*Note: While I do actually believe everything I just wrote, I could also write an equally true and heartfelt piece from a completely different perspective, about how I love the Church and I think local bodies of believers are absolutely necessary for living the Jesus path and how there’s so much good happening from within the belly of the beast. So please don’t misunderstand those bold (get it? bold?) statements and mistake them for saying something they aren’t saying. (Because if I read those in isolation, shoot, you’d better believe I’d be having some words with myself too.) Anyway, the veracity of my writing isn’t the point; my point, as always, is to try to come up with new ways to help you think differently about your faith. If that means deliberately phrasing something in a way that gets your goat, I’ll do it. If that means using harsh analogies or adult language, so be it. I don’t want to say the same things that have already been said before, and I don’t want my words to pass by unnoticed, to go in one ear and out the other. I want to spark your creativity, get your mind fired up and your wheels turning, so that you can have the rich, vibrant, abundant faith life that Jesus desires.

**Also, this is a blog post. I lightly skimmed over some things that should really have whole books written about them (and have). If you think something's missing, that's because it is, and if you think I left something out, I most definitely did. I would have loved to go much deeper into each one of these topics, but it's already 2am and this post feels long enough as it is. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to explore any ideas further, or just write your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading!