Church

Chad sits at the edges of the church service. He can't remember the last time he really felt any kind of encounter with anything remotely spiritual or transcendent. But he believes. He understands that God is real, the same way he understands that black holes are real, even if no one can ever see one directly, there is indirect evidence strong enough to serve well enough as proof.
And so he goes. There was a time when the service would transport him, not in a physical way, but it really felt as if a part of him (not a physical part, but a part of him that encompassed his whole being just below the surface, just above the skin) was connecting, interacting, experiencing something beautiful and enormous and true. It was a kind of rapture, a kind of ecstasy that he's never experienced anywhere else. It was like sex minus the sticky, sweaty details.
It wasn't just in church where he felt this. At home in the early morning with his Bible. At night with his prayer journal. Even at these times at home, he sometimes felt this metaphysical connection. And it sustained his, drew his through all those late, lonely nights, all his mundane graduate studies, through the death of his mother and the awful drug abuse of his brother. It was his salvation - a salvation to heaven, he was sure, but also a salvation that extended to the here and now.
But no more. he can't remember the last time he felt even an echo of anything approaching worship. Now, it's all motion and ritual. It's muscle memory and habit. It's stale, dead, ineffectual.
It's taken a while but he's beginning to understand why. More and more it seems as if church (this church, but also the other one's he's visited and one's he listens to on the radio) is the object that one is driven to serve. There's always rhetoric about bringing people to church, about giving to your church, about giving up an afternoon or a Sunday morning to serve the church. And from the lay persons around his, they're always talking about how much they love their church, how they say that their church is better than the one across town because of x, y, and z.
He used to buy into this kind of talk. he used to shop around for a church to attend. he would listen to the sermons to see if they appealed to his, he would see what kind of support groups they had, he would listen to the style of music they used, he would even critique the bulletins they would pass out.
From his friends who served as deacons or worked on staff, he learned about how they would use business books by people like Covey, Buckingham, and Collins as examples for how they should structure their church to make them successful. At first, he thought that this was a good idea because he thought that spreading the news about Jesus was essentially a marketing problem to be solved, and why not use business strategies to maximize the effectiveness of the church staff?
But there was always something in the back of his mind that caused his to question that methodology. At first it was murky, vague, just a nagging suspicion but through the years it's become clearer to his. For one thing, he's come to understand that churches exist not to be self-perpetuating, they exist to help people worship God. Their aim is not become successful, by drawing larger numbers, their aim is to take a message of healing and hope into a world of hurt and angst. It's the difference between taking immunizations into disease ravaged nations and building nice hospitals, hoping the sick will be drawn to their flashy doctors.
He's come to the conclusion that God isn't dead, the church is dead. Or if God is dead, it's because the church has killed him.
And so he sits at the edges of the church service, trying to glean some meaning out of what he sees as a meaningless sermon. he looks out over the congregation and there are so many with earnest attention. The pastor is telling some good stories and making some seemingly interesting points but for better or for worse, he sees them for what they are - marketing ploys, entertainment, propaganda. He is selling church, not inviting people to experience God.
So he turns to look the other way, out the window. But that only heightens his frustration. This is a church on the side of a hill and so he can look out over the cityscape below. And he wonders why they're so far away. He thinks of all the injustices in the world and he thinks of how the church just sits idly by, afraid to offend, afraid to take a stand. AIDS is ravaging Africa, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, the homeless. All that hurt, all that need. And yet there he sits in a plush pew in an air conditioned auditorium, so far away from the messiness of it all.