Many people talk about "going to church" as "being fed" (which is a misnomer, but that's the subject for another rant). However, Daniel made an interesting analogy last Sunday: going to church is, more than anything else, like buying equipment.
Imagine Fred. He says he wants to become a rock climber. Fred hangs out with rock climbers often. He reads rock climbing publications, watches rock climbing videos and TV shows. He knows some of the terms about rock climbing. He can talk about it pretty intelligently. And he's got equipment. Every week, he goes to his favorite rock climbing equipment shop. He buys rope. He buys carabiners. He has the cool shoes and the harness vest. He has the neat hammer with which to pound in those pitons he bought. Right down to the super-strength sunscreen and an ice axe, Fred has the stuff. The right stuff. The best-quality stuff. He oculd conquer Everest with this stuff.
Fred's living room is piled high with equipment. He no longer sits on the sofa; he can only see the TV by pushing aside some piles of line. In fact, he's thinking of putting his flat screen up high so that he doesn't have to move anything...
But with all of that equipment, Fred has never put on the harness. He hasn't hammered in a piton nor clipped a carabiner to a line. He did try on his cool shoes and wear them around, hoping someone would notice that he was wearing them and engage him in conversation about rock climbing...but no one did.
Fred's gone out to stand near the practice wall. He's watched other people practice climb and even grabbed a couple of handholds once or twice. He went once to the nearest rock face--one with the routes all marked and the pitons already placed--he watched for a long time, but even with his car filled with equipment (which he later replaced in his living room), he simply could not bring himself to haul it out and commit to giving climbing a try.
This is the state of the American consumer church. We are Fred.
We 'followers of Jesus' have all of the equipment. We have the best equipment--equipment with which to conquer the biggest problem, the most daunting difficulty. But rather than using what we have, we spend most of our time getting more and more equipped. God calls us to do something that requires commitment and sweat. It might call forth everything we have! And we're not sure we'd like that.
So to avoid having to commit or sweat, we just keep showing up and buying more equipment. We figure no one will notice that we aren't really doing anything. After all, we're not the only ones! And besides, we're hanging out with some really great climbers--people who will try any face, who will clamber up any rock--and they are a really good influence, right? On top of that, we watch a lot of climbers. That's our main pastime, watching other climbers. We watch them on TV, listen to them on the media circuit, read their books, watch their videos...but there we stand in our cool climbing shoes, watching them climb, excited when they make it to the top, intimidated when they lose their grip...but we aren't climbing. We'll read publication after publication, watch report after report...but climb? Nope, too safe here, too risky there.
Mother Teresa used to say "you must be the change you wish to see." (OK, maybe it was original with Ghandi. who knows.)
But while we're in India, let me loosely quote Sadhu Sundar Singh:
On the mountains, torrents flow right along, cutting channels for themselves.
In the plain, men must painfully, slowly cut channels for the lifegiving water.
So it is with the Holy Spirit of God: He will flow powerfully and make new paths if we will let Him; but most of us would rather cut those channels, slowly, inefficiently, because we are afraid to let go of our supposed control. He might flow somewhere we don't want to go.
So it is with Fred, with us. We have met the posers and they is us, as Pogo would say.
How do we grab hold and choose to move beyond the endless equipping, the continual glut of information and enlightenment that doesn't seem to motivate us to lives beyond watching American Idol and eating delivered pizza? It's so easy, so very easy, to keep thinking we are living when we are just posing. It's so easy to say, as James noted, "be warmed and filled! I'll pray for you!" while we gently close the doors to turn back to our shows.
Maybe it's just Keith Green and the Holy Spirit nagging at the back of my own "poser" consciousness:
"Open up! Open and give yourselves away!
You see the need, you hear the cry, so how can you delay?
God's calling and you're the one,
But like Jonah, you run;
He's called you to speak, but you keep holding it in.
Can't you see it's such sin?
The world is sleeping in the dark,
But the church just can't fight, cause we're asleep in the light...
How can we be so dead when we've been so well-fed (or well-equipped)?"
Yeah, i'm preaching to me, not you. Meet you at the rock face?
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