Who
sits in the pews on Sunday in the United States? Americans or Christians?
Don’t
answer too quickly. I did, and I answered it wrong.
The
deeper I get into reading David Platt’s Follow
Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live, the greater my discomfort is
growing. Not with the book; not at all. My discomfort arises from the growing
certainty at how much American culture has captured the Church in the United
States.
How
much? A lot.
Two
major strands of cultural influence have fused in the church today – American individualism
and American consumerism. If we’re not toting around our focus on self and
trying to discern “God’s plan for my life,” we’re telling ourselves that we’re
not “into church” but we are “into Jesus,” and we go shopping for the right
church to meet our needs (Platt and others refer to this as “dating the church”).
Or we choose to abandon church altogether and stay at home on Sunday’s with our
bibles and internet worship services.
It’s
not about determining God’s plan for your life, Platt says. It’s about living
each day expectantly, knowing that God is going to do something with you, and
likely something surprising, and being open and available. A friend of mine (a
young pastor) once scandalized older pastors and elders alike when he said that
90 percent of missions was simply showing up.
“So
we go to him,” Platt says. “We spend time with him. We sincerely listen to his
Word as we walk in obedience to it. As we do these things, God leads us and
guides us according to his will, and suddenly we realize that the will of God
is not a road map just waiting to be unearthed somewhere. Instead, it’s a relationship that God wants us to
experience every day (emphasis added).”
And
if you’re truly “into Jesus,” you’ll know that church is not optional. It’s
designed by God, and we are all parts. It’s how the work gets done. God’s work.
Not by people sitting at home by themselves, but by people in community, who
come together with all their hopes and joys and aggravations and dreams and
irritations and failures, and somehow God creates something beautiful out of
all it.
Church
is not about meeting our needs. We’re looking at this through the wrong end of
the telescope. It’s not about us. It’s
about what God wants us to do in the world.
The
church is supposed to be countercultural – that what has given it its strength
for than two thousand years. It runs into trouble when it embraces the culture,
whether that’s culture left or culture right.
We’ve
been embracing the culture for a long time. Too long. We need to stop, and be
the church we’re meant to be.
We’re
discussing Follow Me over at The HighCalling. Visit the site to see what today’s post is about and what’s happening
in the comments.
