Our pastor recently stated that I live in one of the most “un-churched” communities in the U.S.
I’m not sure how closely church attendance correlates to an authentic relationship with Jesus, but it’s worth asking why a large percentage of my hometown isn’t attracted to the message the institutional church offers.
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After hearing the confusing verdict in the “loud music” murder of Jordan Davis, I re-read Letter From A Birmingham Jail. Martin Luther King wrote the letter in 1963, responding to white pastors who objected to his tactics. The letter speaks to the institutional church’s inability, or unwillingness, to risk its position in the community for what Dr. King viewed as timeless biblical principles.
We’re lying to ourselves if we pretend the racial divide has been bridged in the U.S. Yet, from my perspective, the institutional church largely ignores this, and other, difficult political/moral issues. It’s content to hide behind mostly segregated walls, what Dr. King called “the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows,” and snipe at the relatively easy targets of abortion, homosexuality, and conventional organized missions.
I have to pause here and distinguish, as did Dr. King, between the institution and individual followers of Jesus.
“Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”
If that’s true, is it any wonder that people in my community reject an institution and, sadly, the One it claims to represent?
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Dr. King observed that the early church’s power resided in their refusal to conform. In King’s words, “Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators.’”
It must have been uncomfortable being one of those folks. All they did was get beat up, tossed in jail, and change the world.
Today, quite frankly, I see little substantial difference between the message of the institutional church and the conservative political agenda. Again, Dr. King’s words: “So often (the church) is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.”
He goes on to say the church risks being “…dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
If he’s correct—and I believe he is—how can we imagine that what’s perceived in much of our community as an “irrelevant social club” and an “archdefender of the status quo” can ever again become the world-changers from whom we descended?
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I don’t have an easy answer, but then I’m not a church leader. I’m just an old, bald writer with access to a few hundred eyeballs.
I do, however agree with Albert Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
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