As I recently said elsewhere, a lot of Christians don’t like to consider themselves religious. To them, religion means ritual. Usually formal rituals. But for some Christians, it means any rituals: We don’t want to feel like following Jesus is an obligation. We want to feel like it’s a choice.
Freedom in Christ is a big, big deal to many Christians. Particularly American Christians. Because freedom is a big, big deal to Americans: We consider ourselves slaves to no one. Not the government, not our bosses, not the banks, not our landlords, not our parents: No one. We live in a free country. (Depending on your political stripe, you might consider this freedom an illusion, but that’s a whole other issue.) And we want to apply that same sense of freedom to the way we worship Jesus: We want to worship him however we choose to.
So when Sunday morning comes around, and we don’t feel like going to the service—’cause it feels too much like something we do because we gotta, and not enough like something we do because we wanna—many of us will exercise that “freedom in Christ,” and skip a Sunday. Or two. Or fifty-two.
Romancing the church, instead of loving it.
One of the eight definitions of love our culture has, is romance, or éros. It’s intimacy, passionate desire, a strong mania for the object of one’s affections—ranging from harmless crushes, to lust, to obsessive behavior. We tend to only think of romance in terms of sexual behavior. But for the purposes of this discussion about the church and Christ, let’s take sex out of the equation. (’Cause eww.)
When we romance another person, we’re with them because we want to be with them. Not because we have to be with them. There’s no obligation in romance. It’s entirely based on feelings and emotion. When the feelings wear off, it’s not romantic any longer. (In fact it’s kinda creepy. When someone breaks into your office and fills it with flowers, it’s romantic when the feelings are there, and obsessive and stalker-y when they’re not.) So since it’s not romantic without the feelings, if you’re not feeling it, you don’t do it. When you’re angry with one another, you skip the date. Or even end the relationship.
Well, this is precisely the sort of relationship many of us Christians have with our churches. We’re with them because we “love” them. But once we’re no longer feeling it, we put this relationship on hold till we can get the feelings back. We skip our churches’ services. Or leave the church altogether, and try “dating” another one. Or give up on romance altogether, and quit church. God forbid we act the same way towards Jesus… but sometimes we do.
It’s not a healthy relationship. But it’s the sort of religion we Americans prefer to practice: A commitment-free, go-as-you-please faith, where part of what keeps it exciting and interesting is the knowledge (whether we admit it to ourselves or not) that we don’t have to struggle with it. We don’t have to deal with difficult Christians in our churches if we don’t wanna. We don’t have to deal with practices and rituals which make us uncomfortable, which aren’t as fun. We don’t have to love one another through thick and thin. We don’t have that kind of relationship. Nor do we want it.
This sort of relationship is destined to never grow. Growth comes as the result of struggle, but we don’t ever want to struggle. Certainly not in our churches; sometimes not even in our own personal relationship with Jesus. So we won’t. And when Jesus challenges us in our personal relationships with him, that growth is gonna be hampered, ’cause we won’t have a church to share our struggles with. (If we tried it, with the superficial, romance-focused Christians we currently gather in church with, they’d bail on us just as fast as we’d bail on them.)
So how do we know we’re in this sort of unhealthy relationship with our churches? Simple: It’s when we refuse to commit to our churches. Just like a man who never intends to propose to his girlfriend, or a fiancée who never sets a wedding date, we never formally join the church. We never obligate ourselves to attend its services. We never take leadership roles. (We never bother to become qualified for it, either.)
“I follow Jesus, not the church.”
Our usual excuse for avoiding commitment? “That’s religion. I don’t do religion. I have a relationship.”
Well, an irreligious relationship is a lousy relationship. A relationship based on romance and feelings is an unstable, unhealthy one. Our relationships with Jesus mustn’t be based on romance. And if they’re not—if we love him no matter what, in the same way he loves us no matter what—the fruit of such a relationship should be other unconditional relationships like that. Like with our churches.
True, our churches aren’t perfect. No human relationship will be. That’s why we gotta work at it. But a romance doesn’t work at it; it lasts only as long as the feelings do. And if that’s the way we are with our churches, with our fellow Christians, it’s only a matter of time before our relationships with Jesus degrade into the same sort of thing. After all, Jesus demands way more of us than our churches do, and he can’t go on being the only exception in our lives.
We gotta stop romancing our churches. We need to commit. We need to ignore the fact that sometimes we don’t feel like going to church, be adults, and go anyway. Because Jesus commanded us to love one another, we gotta go to church and put his order into practice.
It’s time our relationships with our churches grew up.