The Way We Do Church

I remember the first day that I drove to my current church appointment in the heart of downtown Little Rock. I had no idea what I was getting into. As I reflect on that day and that drive to Canvas Community UMC, I now know that when I drove across the river into downtown Little Rock to my church, I passed the Stephens Inc. building, one of the largest investment banks on the planet; but I also passed the corner of Cross St. and Markham Ave., which is the only place in Little Rock where you can actually sell, buy, and smoke crack. I drove to an area that is just a few blocks from where the HBO special “Banging in Little Rock” was filmed to document the worst gang violence in American during the ’80s and ’90s. Then, I turned onto 7th street where, between Little Rock’s first beer brewery, a strange little theater, a junk store that has a camera room in the back to film homosexual pornography, and the Capitol building, I would find my new church across the street from Arkansas’ Goodwill corporate headquarters in a little storefront that is about 7500 square feet.

Again, I had no idea what I was getting into. I also had no idea that this little church would have more lessons to teach me than seminary ever could about the nature of church and the failure of how we’ve done church for the past 50 years.

At a church that is about 65% homeless in terms of its population, and whose second and third largest demographics are single/divorced females and homosexuals, there are two things that I’ve learned about the way we do church and how it’s wrong:

1. The Worship Service isn’t the most important part of Church
Most Christians that I’ve come to know tend to associate “Church” with the worship service alone; and thereby believe that the legitimacy of a church, along with its success, is determined by the quality and scope and sometimes the diversity of the worship service(s). This is how we choose a church often times, and because of this tendency, this is what churches try to provide first and foremost — good worship.
The problem I have with this is that I don’t really read many commands to have great and glorious worship in the Old or New Testaments. While you could argue that Jewish worship, particularly in the temple, was pretty extreme, when you read passages like Isaiah 58:3 that tends to go out the window as a model for success,

“Look, you serve your own interests on your fast day,”

I cannot help but think that our “worship” services, designed to worship and glorify God, often seem to be for ourselves and serve our own interests, meaning that we worship not in temples or sanctuaries dedicated to the Almighty, but rather in mausoleums to our pastoral and church egos; and then we wonder why our voices are not “heard on high,” as is referenced in this chapter of Isaiah.

We’re not cheerleaders who are called to cheer God onto the football field of life as He leads us not into temptation, delivers us from evil, and services to guard our backsides from attack. We’re called to act and to live and to be a source of significant change and healing in the world around us; yet we seem to be missing the point in the same way the ancient Jews so often times did.

What we are called to do is simple:

“Is this not the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
undo the burdens of others,
to let the oppressed go free…
share your bread with the hungry,
bring the homeless into your house,
and cover the naked…” 
Isaiah 58:6-7

We’re called to action, not to be buzzards resting safely in the tree tops, because you know what a group of buzzards resting in a tree top is called? A Committee.

Bet you don’t have any of those at your church.

2. Stop covering the dagger of evangelism with the cloak of social justice

I get miffed when I see a church that goes down to feed the homeless in Little Rock but makes them sit through an hour-long church service before they can eat. As one of my friends on the street would say, “Is you stupid? You think I don’t read the Bible more than you? Well I do.”

The issue with much of the current state of the church is that we try to use social justice as a vehicle to convert people to the world of our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s manipulative and if you do that you’re a punk, because, as the great John Stott wrote,

“Social action is not to be equated with evangelism, nor is it primarily a means to evangelism (hospital patients and school pupils being a conveniently captive audience for the gospel). Like evangelism, social action must stand on its own feet and in its own right: both are services of love, a part of the teaching of Christ.” (Our Guilty Silence, pg 31)

We do social justice, we do the mishpat, the righteousness of God in the world because it’s. the. right. thing. to. do. 
Stop trying to convert people all the time and just love them. God will handle the rest.