How to Be Miserable in Your Christian Life
Chapter Three: Avoid the Institutional Church
(Section Three: Kinds of Churches to Avoid)
Above all, avoid churches that hold onto a denominational
identity that goes back more than a decade or two. Such churches, whether they
are Baptists or Orthodox or Lutherans or whatever, are all beholden to patterns
of institutional church life that come from the moldy coffers of worthless old
tradition. If you think getting along with people of other generations is hard,
then try to get along with a whole tradition that is many generations older
than you! Go to one of those churches, and you’ll end up having to connect not
just to the people in the pews around you, but to the whole vast and varied
array of the Church of the living God, the saints of his Kingdom, many of whom
died and became irrelevant long ago. So avoid any hint of a rich denominational
life, because this is simply a further complicating factor that will likely
steal from you the necessary narrowness that you need to live your life the way
you want to.
While we’re
at it, avoid small and medium-sized churches too. You should definitely listen
to the current mythology in Christian circles, the advertising and marketing
metrics that magnify big churches and megachurch pastors as the pinnacle of
what churches and pastors should be. Big churches are a whole lot easier to
remain anonymous in, and so they are far better places to avoid being stretched
out of your comfort zone than are small churches. Now, a lot of big churches
will still go out of their way to ferret you out and make you plug in to some
kind of smaller and more intimate ministry—don’t be tricked, though: “small
groups” are just small churches in disguise. With a little polite and
persistent deflection, it’s easy enough to sidestep that particular big-church
tactic.
It should
be obvious why big churches are better anyway. After all, we live in a culture
that is at least partially based on the principle that “bigger is better,” so
it ought to be clear that God loves big churches best of all. The mere fact
that the vast majority of churches in the world are small doesn’t count for
anything; it just means that they’re bad at doing their job. And unless you can
make the case that the Holy Spirit’s work is evident in such trivial things as
mutual love and growth in godliness, then it’s clear that the Spirit does not
work through small churches in anything comparable to the way He works through
big churches. So stay away from small and medium-sized churches—you’re more
likely to be noticed, more likely to be loved, and more likely to have to learn
to love others in return. And we know what dangers that can lead to.
Of course, that’s not to say that
attending a big church is an easy road to Christian misery, either—many of them
are frighteningly good at subverting that most popular of Christian lifestyles.
Thankfully, as we’ll see a bit later on, there are a few non-church options
that are altogether safer than either big or small churches.