The Dangers of Being “Churched” and “Worshipped”
By Joel Kurz
Just when I thought things could get no worse than the service-sector-type categorizations of “churched” and “unchurched” populations, what arrived on the scene but “pre-churched” and “post-churched” (and lest we forget, “de-churched”)—all rather puzzling terminology to consider even before the COVID-19 pandemic when steady estimates for a while already held that only one-third of church members, or less, actively “practiced” their faith on a regular basis. It might just be my lack of understanding, but doesn’t that render the majority of the “churched” actually “unchurched,” let alone whatever other blurring gets introduced by those “attending” a streamed worship service on their couch? Is the goal of Christianity to get people to attend services and affiliate with a congregation or enter into the entity the Apostles’ Creed defines as “the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,” or both? Soren Kierkegaard was on to something when he prayed, “Let us never forget that Christianity is a whole course of life.”
In this second half of the liturgical calendar known as “the time of the Church,” it’s only fitting to discern whether the emphasis of such language and self-understanding is on “going to church” or “being the Church.” Is “worship” simply a service with a clear starting and ending (whether indoors, outdoors, or on a screen), or is it the ongoing reality of existence and dependence upon the One who brings us to grace and keeps us in faith? A disconcerting outgrowth of such service-sector terminology is the widely accepted and used language of “worshipping” five hundred, a thousand, or more on any given weekend; making it clear that the object of worship, as least as spoken, is the number of people in attendance—including online. (One could speak of “worshipping” fifty, but I have noticed that such newspeak is best applied only when one has a number with a great wow-factor.) We do well to ask, however, what this understanding does to the knowledge of the Church as the body of the faithful who are baptized into and live in the unified reality of the Holy Trinity.
If the emphasis of “churching” people revolves around getting them to attend a service or log-in on a regular basis, then it often follows that such “worship” must be enticing and attractive. Therein is the drawback, especially if what goes on within sanctuary walls is viewed, either in-person or “virtually,” as dull, boring, or irrelevant to the exciting entertainment-driven life “everyone” is aspiring for and is advertised at to want. In his classic work Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman—not a Christian himself—wrote with keen observation: “I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”[1]
It is just this desire for an easy and amusing religious experience that makes many a child and adult dismiss corporate sacramental worship as boring. If you plop your rear in a pew, or on your living room couch, and passively expect to take in just another one of society’s endless diversions, how could you not be disappointed and bored—that is if what you’re after is diversion from life rather than conversion to it? But if you come knowing that you are part of a whole and apply yourself toward the greater living of that reality, how could you do no other than scavenge for any life-giving bits wherever they are found?
I find it helpful to transform boring from an adjective of dull passivity to a verb of mining activity. One bores a hole in the ground in search for the water of life. Can the process be long, laborious, and even burdensome? Yes, but the result will most likely yield that which ensures vitality. Rather than speaking of being bored to death, maybe the Church can start speaking of boring for life. Amidst the rampant desire for entertaining distractions, maybe the Church can start entertaining what it means to be “crucified and risen” (Romans 6:4-5)—what it means to be “the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11-16). In this “time of the Church,” also known as ordinary time, perhaps we can abandon the lackluster understanding of ordinary and return to the Latin root (ordinare) meaning of ordering, or orienting, our lives anew. Isn’t that what Paul set forth so beautifully to the Colossians (3:1-17) as the life of a people risen with Christ who live in the here and now?
John Chrysostom preached in 4th century Constantinople, “I see empty churches, because people know that the teaching goes against all they want to achieve.” In 19th century Denmark, Kierkegaard observed that we Christians are “a bunch of scheming swindlers” who pretend the Bible is difficult to comprehend because we know that “the minute we understand,” we will say, ‘My God, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.’” Just six years before Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his dissertation, The Communion of Saints:
…it is precisely in the commonplace surroundings of every day that the church is believed and experienced; it is not in moments of spiritual exaltation, but in the monotony and severity of daily life, and in the regular worship of God that we come to understand the church’s full significance. All else merely veils the true state of things…. Until people understand what the church is, and that in accordance with its nature we believe in it in spite of, or rather because of, all it’s visible manifestations, it is not only dangerous but thoroughly unscrupulous and a complete confusion of the Protestant understanding of the church to speak of experiences that can never constitute a church and in which there is no grasp at all of the church’s essential nature. Our age is not poor in experiences, but in faith. Only faith can create true experience of the church, so we think it more important for our age to be led into belief in the church of God, than to have experiences squeezed from it which as such are no help at all, but which, when there is faith in the sanctorum communio, are produced of their own accord.[2]
In the same homeland only twenty years after the end of World War II, Helmut Thielicke lamented in The Trouble with the Church: “We are pragmatists, awed by the art of influencing people; we have forgotten the lesson of the grain of wheat about dying in order to be.... Because we do not live in the magnetic field of Good Friday and Easter we merely act ‘as if’ he had risen again. That is why the handy formulas and well-aimed addresses help us not a bit.”[3]
What are the dangers of being “churched’ and “worshipped”? In short, the compartmentalization, commodification, and comic reduction of what God desires to be an integrated community of life. Instead of relegating “the church” to a mere place one goes or links to electronically, along with confining “worship” to what goes on inside four walls, how much better wouldn’t it be to embark on the boring and ordinary work of being “the Church” and living “in worship” toward the God of Life. If the widely varying responses different Christian congregations have made during the coronavirus pandemic do nothing other than to provoke deeper reflection and action for being and living as Church, at least a good endeavor has been undertaken and gain has been found even amid loss.
Joel Kurz is the pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Warrensburg, MO and the author of numerous articles and poems.
Notes
[1] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 121.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Communion of Saints: A Dogmatic Inquiry into the Sociology of the Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 198.
[3] Helmut Thielicke, The Trouble with the Church, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 130.
