It's Sunday morning. I used to go to church on Sundays. For most of my life Sunday was “church day,” a “day of rest.” Maybe you can relate. On Sundays Mom and Dad would get into their nicer clothes (Dad wore nice suites for work, but his Sunday clothes somehow looked better). My two older sisters and I would do the same. As we kids got older there would invariably be some amount of chaos in the bathroom as three women got themselves church ready. Someone's curling iron was always broken or left unplugged or nylons ripped or clothes wrinkled. And if it wasn't that, we were just behind schedule for unknown reasons. Overslept a bit, took too long to eat, poorly timed bowel movement etc. Whatever the cause, my memory is of many abrupt departures and slightly illegal speeds on the way to church. But we were always there, and pretty much always on time.
Once there, we did churchy stuff—I learned about Jesus and Bible stories in Sunday School while my parents taught or went to Bible study. Then the service: organ music, prayers, organ music, sermon, organ music, offering, organ music, line up to shake the pastor’s hand on the way out. My dad was an usher. Sometimes I would get to sit in the back with him and his crew (he liked to leaf through the bulletin during the sermons). Speaking of which, the sermons where always the same: "good" Lutheran law and gospel, they would remind us how sinful we were so they could remind us how gracious God was in sending Jesus to save us. It was like an inverted roller coaster every week. They took us down, down, down, so they could shoot us back up and send us on our way for the week feeling uplifted.
That may sound like an over-simplification, but it really isn't. That's how we were "fed." Walk into any conservative Evangelical or Protestant church and you will likely encounter the same. To be reminded of God's love was to first be reminded of our guilt. And that was the story, the "good news," told time and time again. People are sinful, but God is loving. It's not a bad starting point, necessarily, but nor is it always a good one either. It doesn't say much about the messiness and pain of life. Nor does it have much of anything to say about complex social and political issues. (And, it just isn't theologically honest to hold the great, multifaceted mysteries of God and life in such a static and elementary state--not to mention the oversimplified and negative anthropology*).
Anyway, that was Sunday: nice clothes, organ music, and a selection of stories about Jesus. My wife and I have done a similar thing with our kids for most of our marriage. We've had our share of mad dashes out the door too! Which I am both a little embarrassed and kind of proud to say.
But over the years we've found different stories in the churches we've attended. They are still the Christian story, but with various places of emphasis. Some try to avoid the weekly down and up roller coaster by simply focusing on God's love as the beginning and end of the story. Again, it's not a bad way of telling the "good news" (sounds a little better than the other way), but it isn't very developed either. "God loves you, and Jesus was a cool guy, and God still loves you" also doesn't really get into the nitty gritty of life. It's definitely not a bad thing to be reminded of, but it doesn’t push you into deeper levels of conversation.
Other churches we’ve visited have focused almost solely on community. These are usually lovely places with loving people. They use God's love as the complete starting and end point and then simply preach and teach the beauty of fellowship and our relationship to all of life. This seems to invite more thought and engagement with the complexities of life. They talk about the issues facing individuals and society quite a bit. But as with any of these, it isn't very attractive or inspiring to those who aren't already drawn to religious community in the first place (I mean, if you're not into organ music or praise bands why sit through it?). All of these types of churches tend to rely on societal norms that have simply changed over the past 50 years.
About that, the institutional church as we once knew it is dying a long, slow death in the United States and has been for more than 50 years. Let that sink in for a minute. I'm 41 years old. That means that my entire lifetime has been lived amidst the slow decline of the church that my parents knew growing up. And the trends still continue. We are witnessing the painstakingly slow death of institutional Christianity. (Note that I did not say the death of the Christian faith, that is a different thing entirely. It is the institution that is dying away.)
Again, this isn't a bad thing, necessarily. It's just a thing. People are changing. Society is changing. We don't gather regularly as we used to, we don't join organizations like we used to. This can all seem a bit unsettling, I suppose, but then you realize that we didn't used to do those things before we used to them either. That is to say, if the institutional church is dying and needs to be reborn, it's not as if it is just now, in our lifetimes, changing for the first time in 2000 years. The church is always changing. There was a time before organ music and wooden pews. There was a time before praise music. There was a time before vehicles and roads made it possible for people from far and wide to gather easily every week. There was, apparently, a time when the "followers of the way" met every day for the reading of scriptures and prayer and shared all of their possessions in common! That time just happened to be what we now call the early church and our society and norms certainly don't compel us to do anything like that anymore... The point is, things change—get over it.
And yet, the title of this piece—I am lonely on Sunday mornings. I can fill them with youth sports or projects or the NFL or fishing or work or friends or whatever. Seems like that’s what most of us try to do. But I want more. I want to be part of a community, something bigger than myself or my friends. I need it. And I want a regular chance to connect with something bigger in a meaningful way.
I’ve always looked to church to fill that desire for committed, intentional community, and spiritual growth. But here’s the thing, even when I do go to church these days, I feel lonely. Something isn’t quite right. The churches that I want to attend tell a beautiful, compelling Christian story of God’s love for the world. They are inclusive and loving places doing their best to be the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.
Yet they are also fractionalized; their energies are split as they attempt the impossible task of being both open and responsive to their community while also propping up a substantial version of the old way of being church for their more traditional, often older--and often affluent--members (i.e. the ones who have the resources to keep the doors open--you see the dilemma). So the energy is off. The story hits home, but the life is restrained and channelled into dying forms (traditional programs and committees and rhythms) that simply require too much energy. Members are anxious or burning out trying to do both (especially alongside societal expectations that they can have it al in work and family lives as well).
So no matter what I do on Sunday, it feels lonely. And maybe just naming it is the first step toward something better. Maybe stopping long enough to feel lonely and owning that feeling can help me figure out just what it is that I’m looking for. Maybe it is a nudging of the Spirit. At the very least it is honest. Perhaps it is enough to simply rest in that for now.
