Why I don’t want to go to church: “I’m not getting fed.”

Previously, I brought up the phenomena of Christians complaining about their churches, “I’m not getting fed there anymore.”

Spiritual food is what Christians tend to call encounters with the Holy Spirit, and solid teaching about God. A lot of us believe—wrongly—that it’s why we go to church: We go there to get spiritually fed. Not so we can interact with fellow Christians. Not so we can encourage one another to follow Jesus more, and discourage one another from slacking. Not so we can support one another. But so we can get something out of it: So we can be fed, like those people who only followed Jesus ’cause they wanted him to give them bread. Jn 6.26-29

If the only time we ever get spiritually fed is when we go to church, it means we suck at following Jesus. Our churches are supposed to show us how to go to Jesus directly for our God-encounters and teaching. We come together, after Jesus has fed us in this way, to share with one another what he’s given us. Or at least that’s what we’re meant to do; problem is, a lot of us instead go to Jesus indirectly, through the preacher. We treat the preacher like a mama bird: We eat what he’s already chewed up, and spits into our mouths. Which is fine for newbies, but not for longtime Christians. As the writer of Hebrews stated:

There’s more for us on this lesson [on Jesus our head priest], and it’s hard to explain because you've become hard of hearing. You’ve had plenty of time to become teachers, but once again you need someone to teach you the first fundamental lessons about God. You went back to needing milk, not solid food, and those who live on milk are clueless about right teaching. They’re infants. Solid food is for mature Christians, who have the proper skills to discern good and evil: They were trained in discernment, and practice it.

—Hebrews 5.11-14 KWL

If we’re not getting fed, that’s not the church’s fault. It’s ours.

Spiritual nomads.

I know Christians who have been regulars at six or more different churches in the same town. Why’d they keep switching churches? Were the last five churches twisted, so they had to keep abandoning fake Christians and warped teachers?

Nah. It’s because they went to one church, and stayed there for years till they learned everything they could. Once it was no longer stimulating, they moved to another church, and repeated the process. Learn what you can from the church (which gets quicker each time, ’cause you already learned a lot from all your previous churches), and once you’re pretty sure you’ve emptied that can of juice, go crack open another one.

When I moved away from home to go to seminary, that’s the attitude I brought with me: I wanted a church which would tell me something new, something I hadn’t heard in a thousand sermons before. I was going to seminary to gain knowledge; I figured I oughta find a church which contributed to my quest. Problem was, I found no such thing. (Now, had I gone to a heretic church, I’d have definitely found a preacher who taught something new. This in fact is why heretic churches do so well: People crave novelty, and heretics have plenty of it.)

Here’s the thing. This quest for something new, is in fact a quest for something deep. We Christians all reach the point in our religion where we want to know God more than we do now. We’ve taken Basic Christianity 101 for years; we’re finally ready for Advanced Christianity 201. But we don’t realize 201 isn’t a class; it’s apprenticeship. It’s putting what we know, into action. It’s following Jesus directly; now we’re the teachers, building up the newbies.

But we don’t wanna do that, so instead we don’t act. We figure, “My church doesn’t offer Christianity 201. Gotta find one who does.” And we go find a different Christianity 101 class to sit in; and learn all the same things, over and over, till we become hard of hearing. We grow fat on milk. We stay perpetual baby birds.

It took a few frustrating semesters in seminary before I finally realized what I was doing wrong: I needed to get out of the nest and try flying. I needed to follow Jesus, not a pastor: I needed to stop being the know-it-all guy who corrects the teachers of every Christian class, and become the guy getting corrected by the know-it-alls. I needed to take off the training wheels. Pick your metaphor for maturity; we all have to do it sometime, and stop going from preschool to preschool in search of first grade.

Nervous Christians.

Part of the reason it never occurred to me to step up, was because I never assumed I was ready to lead.

Now, we’ve all met Christians who definitely don’t have this problem: They want to take charge the instant there’s an opportunity. They’re forever pestering the church leadership to let them teach a class, or put them in charge of a ministry, or permit them to take over a program. (And woe to those leaders who confuse zeal with maturity: Often the desire to lead is a quest for power, not a sign of growth.)

But there are plenty of Christians who do have this problem, and have to be asked to lead. And often their response will be, “Who, me? How am I qualified?” Sometimes that’s humility: They realize if it weren't for God’s grace, they’d have no business whatsoever among his people. And other times that’s a lack of faith: They don’t trust God enough to believe he can help them lead. Between the two, most of the Christians who are ready for Christianity 201, never advance.

Sometimes the reason we switch churches, is because the new church doesn’t know what we can do, and won’t call upon us to do it. Much easier to hide that way.

But in the end, “not getting fed” means it’s time our churches stopped feeding us, time the Holy Spirit fed us outside of church, and time we brought what he fed us to our church. It’s time we start feeding others. It’s time we ate solid food. And no church is gonna give us the sort of solid food we’re looking for; only God can. Your church has now become your ministry.

Don’t run away. Start feeding them.