In the churches I've been involved with over the last twenty years, I've seen a kind of mass deflation. It's not the churches that have gotten smaller, it's the people. Churchgoers attend less regularly. They give money less consistently. A smaller and smaller core serve a larger and larger clientèle of punters. When I meet people on Sunday mornings, many seem furtive and desperate. They avoid eye contact. They talk in generalities and stick to safe topics—"Awful hot out there," "Rangers seem to be picking up this year." They love Jesus, apparently, but won't talk about him. Sometimes I feel like I've landed in a spiritual horror movie where it's the good guys who have become the zombies, The Night of the Dead Living.

I see Christians struggling to explain what puts the "Good" in Good News. We each remember some poignant moment when we "accepted Jesus," "got saved," and our lives began to turn around. But for many of us, somewhere along the way, our lives stopped turning around. We stopped drinking but not smoking. We stopped sleeping around but not looking at porn. We stopped cussing around the office but not around the kids. We gave up greed but can't get out of debt. We learned how to love, but still got divorced. Where, we ask, is the abundant life that Jesus promised?

So now we drift in and out of our churches, hoping against hope that someone will have some answers. We sing worship songs we've long since stop feeling. We rub shoulders with brothers and sisters but the love of most has grown cold. Pastor's got lots of nice things to say, but they don't amount to the crowbar we need to pry our lives back into shape.

In the last ten years, a string of writers has diagnosed the church's problems and offered solutions for how to fix it. George Barna produces a wealth of data exposing the heart rate and blood pressure of a sickly North American Christendom and advances his own prescription for how to heal it. Brian McLaren and others have founded the emergent movement trying to get the church back in step with a rapidly changing culture. I've just been reading Reggie McNeal's The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church, which exposes the moral and practical failure of the megachurch movement and pushes a "missional" approach. Some friends of ours are starting a family-based church that upholds the nuclear family as the center of God's work on earth. Christian pundits have advanced 101 suggestions for what is wrong with the church and how to fix it. My heart is drawn to these writers and ideas because I'm aching—really aching—about the condition of the church and yearn to see it revived.

But I don't believe that anyone has uncovered God's official new way for doing church—not Barna, not McLaren, not McNeal, not nobody. And I don't think we'll uncover what God has in store until we give ourselves the time to become truly empty.

Emptiness. That's my contribution to the discussion. Emptiness.

Solutionism

It's amazing how few people even realize something is wrong with the church. Those who do realize it often don't understand their own thoughts and feelings—"Why am I so unhappy on Sunday mornings?" "Why don't my Christian relationships seem as open as they used to?" "Why doesn't anyone else see what I'm seeing?" And when we tell others what we're feeling, we're often rebuffed.

A few years ago I pointed out to my then-pastor that our local church had become a revolving door where visitors left as quickly as they arrived. I suggested what we needed was not more churchgoers, but deeper churchgoers. His goal was to pastor a megachurch, and he wanted to crank up the appeal of Sunday morning music and sermons in order to draw in the masses. So he didn't appreciate it when I pointed out that finer showmanship on Sunday morning would only promote a thinner, shallower, less committed congregation, not a deeper one. Evidently something about this suggestion tweaked him because he reacted aggressively, accusing me of arrogance (a tactic he used many times against the many people who questioned him over the years that followed). His hostility shocked me, but since then I've seen it again and again. The last people to accept that the church is in trouble are the people who have the most to gain—or think they do—by carrying on with business as usual.

The result of this hostility is that we who question the health of the church quickly find ourselves alone and misunderstood. Our isolation opens us to many temptations: defensiveness, divisiveness, insensitivity, and—indeed—arrogance. I'm not saying Brian McLaren is arrogant and self-absorbed, but have you seen his book, A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN? You don't get that way—the way I'm not saying he is—without fighting for change alone and unsupported for a lot of years. When people do begin to agree with you, you feel vindicated and relieved—jubilant, even. You feel ready to find a solution and fix the problem—stat.

Loving a wounded church hurts. It hurts to see the church hurting. The hurt can draw us into desperation. So when we see a chance to help the church, our temptation is to jump at the solution without too much discernment. "Corporate model? Emergent? Missional? Family-based? Pick whatever buzzword you got and give it to me," we say. "Anything would be better than this."

But of course: no. Many things would be worse than this. And when we uphold solution X as God's New Way of Doing Church, we subscribe to something much worse: we love the solution rather than God or the church.

This is the catch with the umpteen new models for How Church Should Be. They are all about The Problem and The Solution. But there is no one problem and there is no one solution—there is only Jesus and his Bride struggling to love one another. When we forget that, we fall into solutionism and worship the fix rather than the Lord who gives it.

Say I'm a disenchanted middle-aged pastor. I've been reading church health books and going to conferences for years, struggling to grow my church and see it shine with spiritual vibrancy. Sometimes I see growth, yet our vibrancy continues to dim. Or a growth spurt occurs, but then diminishes as our members siphon off into the megachurch down the road. Finally, starving to see real ministry happen, I crack, declaring, "This is not how church was meant to be!"

I wander lost and alone, but finally come across a writer who says what I've been thinking all along. I'm not alone! I discover that just the sort of decay I've seen has happened in churches around North America. My writer-guru and I agree: the church is sick and needs healing. But what do we do about it?

It's at this point we make our mistake. We immediately search for The Fix—the New Way of Doing Church—and in our desperation quickly find it. When we do this, we skip a step, the all-important step of Emptiness.

Emptiness

When God takes someone from one place to another, he often brings them through a time of emptiness. This happened with my wife and I when our marriage was on the rocks. Our old way of relating to each other—the childish, selfish way we had practiced since dating—collapsed into resentment and bile. We desperately needed to learn how to love each other as God intended. Yet he let us wallow for a while in brokenness. After we had despaired of each other and turned our tearful eyes upon him, he didn't immediately give us bright feelings of delight and service for each other. He let us wallow, not out of cruelty, but in order to let our old ways fully drain from us. Only when we had become truly empty did he begin to build up the new ways.

Emptiness is part of transition. We see it in Christ's forty days in the desert, his time of preparation for ministry. We see it after the Exodus in the desert wanderings as the sands of Egypt fell away and God prepared Israel for the Promised Land. We see it in Job's despair, in Paul's years in Arabia, in John's isolation on Patmos.

God does not like to put his treasures into cluttered vessels. He likes to clean out his vessels—slowly, thoroughly—before depositing his treasures into them. It makes good sense for him to do this—the vessels would not gain by being stuffed with jumbled oddities, and his treasures deserve a fitting home. Yet it's very painful for us. When we give up our old ways—old habits, old ambitions, old securities—we're filled with longing for the new ways. Yet it's at that moment that God "deprives" us (so we think), and we begin our wait—the long dark night of the soul.

Jesus didn't burst from the tomb the moment he was placed into it. Between the crucifixion and the resurrection is the long silence of Jesus' death. What incredible terror and doubt the disciples must have gone through! But their emptiness no doubt had a purpose: to prepare them for the changes to come. Likewise, the Holy Spirit didn't come at the moment Jesus ascended. There is emptiness between the Ascension and Pentecost.

So it is with the church now in its dark and stumbling days. We're praying for rescue, for revival, for God to show us where he wants the Bride of Christ to go. But this transition is too big for an easy answer or one-size-fits-all solution. No doubt God is calling his church to be culturally relevant, missional, and family-oriented. But why stop there? Mightn't God call us to rediscover worship, or prayer, or spiritual gifts? Perhaps his "new direction" for the church will involve rampant persecution or widespread poverty in a collapsing global economy. I don't believe we'll experience God's revival until we empty ourselves of all expectation, of all solutionism.

Witnesses

It's funny, because the one model of church that everyone admires—the first church as illustrated in Acts 2—is the one model nobody is quite willing to follow. We all want to break bread in our homes and eat together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. But who wants to go to church every day? Who wants to form a commune in which we all sell our SUVs and pool our incomes? How do we really feel about our apostles freaking us out with miraculous signs on a weekly basis?

We admire the Acts 2 church, yet fail to emulate it, because it represents a reality we're too afraid to embrace: the reality of people who have truly been changed by Jesus. Christ calls us to be witnesses to who he is and what he has done. Being a witness is easy: you see something, you say you saw it. The problem many Christians have is that we haven't really witnessed Christ doing much. We've read about him but haven't experienced him. So we don't have much to say, and our Good News comes across to non-Christians (and ourselves) as neither new nor especially good.

We can talk about revival, but until we can talk about what Christ has done for us, what business do we have fixing his church? We don't need a new model for church. When we let Christ change our lives so deeply that we can't stop talking about it, we'll be living the new model. Then revival will come, and we won't be able to stop it.

Labels: faith