don't give up on church

I love Bob Hyatt's article Why I'm Not Done With Church in Next-Wave. Hyatt uses George Barna's Revolution is a trigger for discussing why we should be committed to Church.

Hyatt writes:

Barna writes "Whether you become... immersed in, minimally involved in, or completely disassociated from a local church is irrelevant to me (and, within boundaries, to God)."

You know, I couldn't disagree more. I don't care if it's house church, simple church, emerging church, purpose-driven church, little bitty baptist church or big ol' ginormous megachurch... God cares if you connect to community. It's not "irrelevant" to Him. In fact, in a way... it's the very point of the Gospel.

And I couldn't agree with Hyatt more. Hyatt articulates why, at least for a season, it is normal if not good to struggle with the institution we call church. But he goes on to say that what he doesn't get.

[W]hat I struggle to understand, are those who, rather than seeing this as a (sometimes necessary) phase that many of us go through, something to be faced, experienced and then moved on from, seem to see it, and indeed embrace it, as a permanent state. The perpetually churchless Christian wants to experience a bit of what the "spiritual but not religious" all around us seem to have. In other words, they want Christ, just not His Community. It's God's intention to build a redeemed community living in a renewed earth in relationship with Him, the God who is Himself a Triune community- that's the whole point, the telos of the Gospel! ... The point of the Gospel is to place fallen people like you and me into the community of the redeemed.

And then comes this excellent closing.

Time away should be undertaken with the idea that it will give you time to breath, to reflect, to pray... but most importantly to let the bitterness fade and the thirst for community to rise again. Done correctly, a fast from church should make us hungry for the community of Christ followers again. It should renew in us a desire to lean in and give us the distance we need to recognize that our hurts and disillusionment with church often have just as much to do with our unreasonable expectations of community as they do with what fallen people have done to us.

Whenever you get people together, fallen people, at various levels of commitment to ideals and living them out, you are going to have a place where toes are stepped on and where you are given many, many opportunities to work out what mercy, grace and forgiveness really mean.

Painful or not, there's more that needs to happen in my life through a disciplined presence to the community of Jesus. I need to know what mercy and grace mean, and I can't think of a better place to learn it, both the giving and receiving of it, than in the community of people trying hard, but often failing, to live life in the way of Jesus.

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