It’s been two weeks, and the ramifications of a fight I had with my friend over blogging I did on another site had an obvious impact. I’ve also been busy, but that’s never a good excuse not to blog.
I went to a church in Seattle with my family, and I was once again disenchanted, but not alone. I need to explain some background to show the brevity of the following recollection. My father has, in my mind, a vague connection to the church, and a hidden spiritual life in general. We don’t talk about church really, not even when we’re particularly unhappy with it. My dad stopped attending my home church in my younger years, and I never knew why. He’s attended other churches, been pleased and displeased with them, had long stints without any church going, and has otherwise stayed outside the circles that I lived so directly with during my years at Bible college, having most of my roommates and friends connected with salaried positions with churches or similar organizations. So my papa isn’t too interested in church, at least, that’s what I thought. Then we walked into this church in Seattle, with several services of hundreds of people, and in the foyer was a half-dozen booths set up with various internal and external groups wanting to connect people to their specific “brand” of doing things. I’ve never seen my father disgusted with church happenings, especially not on an issue that is high on my hit list, but he was audacious enough to start loudly complaining that he felt he was at a convention and everyone was trying to sell him something. I saw the open door and explained to my papa that I felt this was a good example of the church buying the corporate-capitalist mentality of life, making the church a copy of the business world rather than a safe haven from the woes of the free-market. Maybe it’s because I consider him an outsider to the church scene and the nuances of church going today, but it was powerful to see my father interested in ideas concerning church that my own church is dealing with directly.
Now, one of those ideas is not complaining about how other churches church, so I am a rule breaker within my own system. But that church got me fired up all over again about the plague on the Church in our culture today. In other eras it was styled after feudalism or the Roman government, or intellectualism, or whatever else could corrupt more flagrantly than the little things we do to keep churches from enjoying unbroken connection with the head of the Church. We are broken in those things. That doesn’t mean we leave things as they are, or as they are developing to be. True, I will not go to that church again. It was just wrong, and wrong from a point of view that I would say rarely connects with my own on church issues.
Early in the service, the pastor spoke about a petition that he supported that would ban homosexual marriage. I am not concrete about my feelings on legalized homosexual marriage or anything like that, but the church is not the place for exclusion and attack.
It was also a sermon filled with happy-Christianity as its desired outcome. Disappointing.
And, it was a place filled with wealthy older people, not a balaced community that is connected and connecting. Okay, I’m out of time. I wanted to really talk about this stuff, but I’ll have to later. Oh well. Safe for you.