Preaching to the Chorus Line: Part I

Keep in time. You're doing fine.

We live in technology driven service economy. Events only minutes old stream at near light speed into our living rooms from half a world away. We have cell phone and internet service to shout, text, or tweet our reaction to those events back to the world outside our living rooms.

We have lawn and landscape services to keep our sliver of the outside world looking vibrant and orderly.

We have financial services to help us accumulate a larger sliver of that world.

We have dietary services to help us lose what we have already accumulated.  

We have services which ensure other services have insurance on a third-party service.

If you think that's confusing…

We have services which are so complex that I couldn't understand what service they offered after I read the flashy brochure titled “Services” twice and had a service rep explain to me who and what they serviced. Still, I have yet to grasp what they do for a living, but not for a lack of effort. I really tried to comprehend their business because their fees seemed a mammoth amount of Mammon for such incomprehensible services.

I left that posh office of unfathomable services baffled and hungry, so I placed an order with a fast food employee who provided me with his comprehensible service and a bag of food no dietary service would approve of.

We have so many services, but there remain only three kinds of service; Bad, Average, and Superior.

Bad is the kind of service we get from the inept, the unqualified, the unethical, and the public trough where everyone is entitled, but few would choose it of their own volition.

 

Average is the kind of service which meets expectations and serves a valuable purpose. Average is good. After experiencing bad, average becomes amazing! That's how relativity works.

Superior service is generally reserved for the wealthy, the famous,  or the well-connected. The quality of care and attention is outstanding. The people who provide this caliber of service were born to do this or trained so well that they seem to be, which is the most likely case.

Sadly, these differences in service keep the world both separate and unequal.

Ministry is one of the few services  where the newcomer warrants superior service and pays nothing. That's genuinely rare. Go ahead and try to think of another.

However, after a year or maybe less, this newest member of the congregation blends into the crowd and the service slips. They becomes just another familiar face at Sunday morning services either nodding in approval at the sermon or nodding off in disappointment. Their personal attention from their pastor and fellows wanes, they become average. Don't get me wrong, average is okay. There's nothing wrong with being average. I'm average myself.

In many ways being a pastor is a sales rep position. He's recruiting souls for Christ by selling His product, His services, His Redemption, and of course this church. It's a phenomenal package with a tangible, intrinsic value, and a “Great Commission.” That's a superior package to be “selling”.

That's the Pastor's job. Isn't it?

Sort of, but something essential is missing, something that Jesus did and we don't. It's something glaringly obvious, that has been overlooked. The pastor's job should be building disciples because that is what the Master did.

There is little driving the Church to develop new members into disciples.  Disciples capable of actively spreading the Gospel with confidence, understanding, and zeal. Disciples who seek and find a continually deepening and increasingly committed personal relationship with God, then passing it on. The Ekklesia should be producing Disciples who are Alive in Spirit rather than members who are present in Sunday services. We’ve lost something, and that something is the Spirit. We have become lukewarm. We're training parishioners, not Disciples. This is a problem within the Christian church of every denomination. Attendance is good enough for the chorus line, if they show up on time, pay the entry fee, and after the show go on about their normal routine that's just fine.

Christianity was never intended to be a spectator sport. Jesus didn't settle for attendance, he recruited for active participation. He never passively collected an offering for the hungry. He actively fed them. He didn't pander for approval or seek popular acclaim. People both rich and poor, powerful and marginalised flocked to Him because they were involved. He consistently reminded the people what they had in common; the Good News of Redemption from a loving God who was working for and with them. Jesus performed miracles as proof of His credentials, and of the proactive Nature of the Father who directed Him. Christianity was always meant to be the Faith of the oppressed and never the Religion of the oppressor.

Long before the Romans razed the Spiritually derelict edifice of the Temple, Jesus destroyed the Temple system which locked God in a box behind a curtain in an restricted access alcove. Jesus set the Spirit free among the people, His people. As the Temple curtain tore from top to bottom, the show of the new High Priest in the order of Melchizedek began. The box known as the Temple would soon be discarded. Jesus is God unboxed.

Jesus taught and practiced the beautiful, radical, free-flowing, jaw-dropping phenomena of God acting by the Spirit to imbue flesh and blood people. Jesus is God de-ritualized and actualized.

Jesus broke the rules, toppled the hierarchy, and restored the relationship between man and Maker. Jesus was God unorthodox, anti-establishment, and non kosher, but God was willing to pull out all the stops to make sure it was accomplished. Jesus is the beautiful revolutionary.

He still is all the above. Amen