How to Be Miserable in Your Christian Life
Chapter Three: Avoid the Institutional Church
(Section Two: Church Will Destroy Your Comfort Zone)
One of the main things that churches do to threaten our
preferred manner of Christian living is to stretch us out of our comfort zones.
To be a part of a local church, you’ll often have to get to know people, a lot
of people, many of them quite different from you. You’ll be in close contact
with stultifying olds, and nauseatingly bland middle-agers, and much-reviled
millennials, to say nothing of the untouchable youth. (By the way, if you
happen to be a member of one of these age groups, rest assured that you defy
the stereotype of your generational set, and that everyone else agrees with me
in thinking that you’re actually really cool.)
And it’s not only different
generations you have to watch out for. It’s different cultures, too. In many
places in our world today, you’ll find churches that harbor several distinct
ethnic and linguistic cultures within them. But even in places where there’s
only one ethnic or linguistic culture, you’ll still usually find a diversity of
economic or class cultures in a single local church. And if you thought that
generational differences were hard to swallow, watch out. Cultural differences
are far worse, and require a good deal more time, effort, and intentionality to
bridge the gap of understanding and move toward the deep love of true Christian
fellowship. If that last line doesn’t send a shiver of terror down your spine,
I don’t know what will.
As we all
know, the trouble with people who are different from us is that they’re
different from us. They like different things than we do. They think
differently about issues. They dress differently. I, of course, being enlightened
and hip, know that no form of worship music has ever surpassed the monophonic,
unaccompanied singing of the Scottish Metrical Psalter, but if I’m part of a
local church, then I might have to submit to fog-inducing theological hymns or
the overwrought, broken-record refrains of modern worship choruses. (I’m just
kidding about the Scottish Metrical Psalter, by the way. It’s still a clear second
to Byzantine chant.)
The point
is, if we are members of local churches, we’ll have to learn to get along with
people who are very different from us. We’ll be stretched out of our comfort
zones. And, as we established in the previous chapters, staying in one’s
comfort zone, as much as one is able, is one of the best ways to prevent
spiritual growth, and thus maintain the low-level undercurrent of perpetual
angst that is so popular in Christian circles nowadays. The fact that listening
to the ideas and values of other generations or cultures might broaden your
perspective should alarm you. It is far better to remain narrow, to like only
the things that you like and to reinforce your belief that everyone else is
quite obviously wrong in the worst possible way. Avoiding the local church,
especially cross-generational or cross-cultural churches, is one of the best ways
to achieve this helpful narrowness of perspective.