Why is our faith shallow part I
I’ve argued that we have a discipleship crisis, and outlined some of what I mean by that. I intend to take a few posts exploring why that might be. There are, I think, five causes: what our gathered worship is like, the loss of thick community, the loss of catechism, the application ‘cart’, and the attention crisis. We could probably get underneath these into philosophical waters and deeper causes in our culture(s), but I’m not intending to in this set of posts.
To start at the beginning: our gathered worship is shallow.
Cue sudden intakes of breath. Of course, and any writing like this needs it, there are exceptions. Your church may well be one of them. That’s wonderful, may your tribe increase! I am stating strongly to make a point, too, as is the way in the medium you’re reading. That doesn’t take away from this wider trend and we shouldn’t have to nuance our rhetoric to death in order to actually say something.
This is true of churches I love dearly, near and far, and I’m as complicit as anyone else. But we can change tack.
When I say shallow, I mean that it’s aimed in the wrong place. We are concerned about ‘quality,’ whether the band was on point, whether the speaker communicated well or not, how a visitor would feel about it, what information we need to give about other things that are happening, and about ensuring that people understand everything that’s going on.
On the face of it, none of these are bad concerns. They aren’t all equal, but they aren’t bad things to want. Except my fear is that, for a number of truly good and godly reasons, we have stopped saying the hard things, stopped challenging people to live like Christ, stopped teaching the really weird parts of the Bible, stopped confronting our culture where it needs confronting, and stopped ‘keeping the main thing the main thing.’
To summarise there are two problems I see that contribute to our wider shallowness: what the Sunday is for and our gagging of ourselves.
What is a Sunday?
Firstly, what is the gathered worship of the church for? It’s for the worship of God.
It is common in evangelicalism in the UK, especially in charismatic evangelicalism, for people to act—and sometimes even talk—like the Sunday meeting is for the unsaved who are amongst us. My contention is that the Church’s gathered worship is for the Church to worship God. We could go further, ultimately our meetings are about God more than they are about us.
This tendency tends to mean that we dumb things down, move things away from Sundays that we think are complicated or unappealing. We make everything shiny and attractive, including the faith. ‘Come and die,’ doesn’t tend to be our gospel appeal, even when it was one of Jesus’ (Matthew 16).
You can see this in lots of little ways, but the big two are:
We sing songs with simple words and simple concepts. We won’t sing anything that requires a little theological knowledge. We’d rather sing the Chris Tomlin chorus than the original hymn, if you like, but my point isn’t just one about taste: there are plenty of modern songs being written which are big and full of truth. I’m sure we all sing some of them. Instead, we spend most of our time singing about ourselves in simple words and simple concepts.
I’d love it if we sang a few more old hymns, but that’s not the point: sing songs that widen our vision of the glories of Jesus. Sing songs about the gospel. Sing songs about God.
Some of those songs about us would be much more meaningful used occasionally in a meeting full of the praise of Yahweh-of-Hosts. I’m not arguing for balance, but a deliberate paradigm shift to keeping the praise of God central.
A personal soapbox: please for the love of all that’s holy stop singing I Speak Jesus, it’s silly and the Lord’s name is not a magic word.
The second way we see this pattern play out in our worship services is in our preaching. We want to make it accessible (that’s good), and so we keep it shallow (that’s bad). It’s alright to dig deep as long as you resurface so people can rejoin you. Then you can dive deep again.
Does our preaching challenge our people? Do we turn every passage into ‘God loves you,’ in a way that flattens out all its unique textures? It’s good to preach the gospel in every message, but only in the ways that it’s present in that passage. Don’t pivot to Jesus until you’ve found him in those words. Earn your pivot.
I’m not anti-topical preaching, though I wouldn’t make it a mainstay personally, but make sure you’re tethered in a text. I’ve visited churches and essentially heard a TED-talk. Some of them were quite good, but they had little to do with the text at hand. Get into it, get under it. As another Pastor I know off the internet likes to say: give people inky faces because you’re rubbed the text all over them.
This is hard work. Especially if you’re in a setting that uses a broad range of speakers, lots of whom are fairly new at this; they aren’t always equipped to do this. Perhaps—to make a radical suggestion—the majority of your preaching should be done by the men the Bible asks us to set apart to preach. Then we’ll have to make sure our elders are equipped, but that’s an easier task.
Because we think people who don’t know Jesus wouldn’t understand, we just don’t say it. Pastors, our task is to preach the whole counsel of God (Acts 20), teach them all of it. Make it about God. We’ll return to this idea when we explore the application ‘cart’ down the road.
Our self-imposed gags
The second reason our Sundays are shallow is that we gag ourselves. Often for the same reason we turn our focus away from God: evangelism. Though sometimes I suspect it’s also about respectability.
If you canvas big, growing, urban churches you’ll probably find that few of them speak about the Christian sexual ethic. You will find exceptions who did a series on it at some point—which is great since these are the battles of the day—but it’s a much rarer group who make frequent reference in their preaching to the most obvious cultural opposition to the faith right now. Of course, your context will dictate how much that last claim is true, but I suspect it’s true in most places: even when it’s not the biggest cultural opposition, I think it’s still the most obvious.
This could be because we’re in some way ashamed, but I don’t think so. I think we think it’ll turn people off, so we don’t tell them until after they’ve decided they quite like Jesus and all this dying to rescue me stuff. I think that’s disingenuous, especially if the demands of being a disciple will be seem unusually high for that person (I dispute that they are, but it will definitely feel like that). We should be honest with people.
I suspect it’s not just evangelism but also a sense that we want to be respectable. We don’t want people to think badly of us. Perhaps we even fear the results if we rent a venue for church and the venue heard our preaching. Friends, we’re the scum of the earth (1 Corinthians 4). We aren’t respectable. We’re both an insurgent movement against the Powers of darkness that rule this world and the inheritors of the new world to come. A city on a hill. Teach the faith and teach it as good news, even the stuff you know our culture will think is really bad news.
Of course, we then have to live the kind of lives where people hate what we believe but see our good deeds and are befuddled by them (1 Peter 2).
I struggle with preaching like I’m describing and haven’t often seen it done well. I’d like to learn to be much bolder. An older man I was talking to reflected that ‘we never preach on hell anymore.’ He’s from a very different kind of evangelicalism to me, but a brother. I have also rarely heard anyone talk about hell. I reflected to him that I wasn’t sure it came up in my preaching very often.
I did take some time to do so in a recent message when talking about the anger of God. There’s something oddly vulnerable about standing in front of a hundred or so people and saying, ‘I deserve Hell, and so do you.’ It’s not respectable though.
Of course, the news that makes us laugh is that we won’t get what we deserve, instead God-in-Christ has made it so that we will rule even the angels in the age to come. What a beautiful sort of nonsense that is, the nonsense that’s true.
Don’t be respectable. The world isn’t going to love you. We’re the harbingers of doom and the heralds of unending joy. The powers array against us in endless panoply. And they’ve lost.
Sundays are culture-shaping
Why is our faith shallow? One reason is that the gathered church worships in a shallow way. Our Sundays are culture shaping, they define what the life of the Christian—and the cities of men—should look like. Not that your life is one big worship service in form, but you learn the way to be and the way to behave in what we do when we gather, what we’re told, and how we behave towards each other.
The answer isn’t Sunday meetings that are dense and confusing. It is Sunday meetings that are about the worship of Jesus and him alone.
Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash
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