Is God Really That Awesome?
By: Beverly Garside
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Atheism, Church, Spirituality

Is God Really That Awesome?

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Jesus says that where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I with them. (Matthew 18:20) If you are a believer, you have to believe that promise. As an agnostic, I can’t deny it. It’s a claim that can neither be proven nor disproven.

So let’s assume that Jesus is present in the church — in the building on Sunday and at every prayer group, Bible study, and church picnic. That’s pretty awesome. To be in the presence of Jesus Christ, and the god who created the entire universe — who could stay away from that? That sounds like a spiritual experience people would flock to. You would have to chase them away with a baseball bat.

But no. Not only do we not flock to it, we are fleeing it in numbers never seen before. Kids have to be dragged to it kicking and screaming. ESPN wins Sunday morning by the gazillions. Unused church buildings are the newest big thing on the real estate market. Christmas pageants have become community extravaganzas used as recruiting tools. A church in my area even resorted to serving as a polling place on the off chance that voters might take an interest in visiting after casting our ballots there.

It’s almost like the presence of god is not really that big a draw.

Filling the Pews

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It’s gone from a perennial problem to the biggest and most desperate feature in American Christianity. Search the topic and you find hundreds of books, articles, and outside-the-box ideas to grow your church. From savvy social media and youth outreach to casual dress services and emotional healing programs, churches are trying everything to fill their pews.

The secret to attracting and keeping new parishioners is generally acknowledged to be finding new ways to connect with them. Because people join and stay in churches where they develop strong bonds with each other. The strategy seems to be to lure them in for the music program, in-house shopping and entertainment activities, a rousing emotional service, a recovery group, or some combination thereof. Once in, you have to get them to bond tightly with other members, making your church their social center.

Long gone are the days when even non-believers came to church because it was the only social center in the community. Churches today have to compete with a plethora of other social and entertainment options. So it’s a double challenge — to get them in, and then to give them a reason to stay.

As an agnostic, I have to admit that I find this whole quest amusing. Because for all the attractions and strategies to get people into churches, there is one that is seldom cited as a contender.

God.

For if the spirit of god actually revealed itself to us there in any way, nothing else would matter much.

The Church of the World

I was a believer during my college days. My student fellowship at the time maintained that the protestant mainline churches were dead because the congregation sat quietly in the pews singing moldy old hymns to organ music. There was no spiritual life, which was defined as clapping, shouting, and raising arms, preferably to a band on the stage. This they said, was evidence of the spirit of god moving.

But I defied that declaration by attending services instead at a mainline Episcopal church. It was where I believed I felt the presence of god. I loved the darkened, quiet sanctuary with the cross lit in red behind the pulpit. The ceremonial procession in white robes and the calm predictability of the liturgy soothed my soul. I felt the spirit of god there. But it was not moving. It was instead a spirit of quiet peace.

Many years later I would realize that this contradiction between their definition of the spirit and mine had nothing to do with any spirit, holy or otherwise. It had instead everything to do with our worldly temperaments.

It was simply the difference between the worship preferences of introverts versus that of extroverts.

There has been some acknowledgment of the similarity between the sensation of losing yourself in the clapping and shouting crowd of a rousing church service and of losing yourself in the clapping and shouting crowd of a sports event or a secular concert. Less has been said about the same similarity in sensation between a quiet, liturgical church service and a visit to any other quiet activity in a softly lit, inspiring room. It turns out I can feel the same spirit in an old library or at a violin concert.

So is it the spirit of god, or just the way our brains are wired?

The True Believers

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Most churches seem to have a minority of parishioners who take their faith more seriously than the others. These believers are more committed to their discipleship and actually making their brand of Christianity work than in the baubles of music, recovery programs, and entertainment offerings used to lure the general public into churches.

And as a minority, their proscriptions for filling the pews and growing a church comprise the minority of advice on the subject. But it is out there. According to this faction, the real reason churches die is not because of such external, secular factors. It has to do instead with the church’s theology, doctrine, emphasis, and practice of the religion itself.

It’s because churches are failing to honor the spirit of god. If they would just heed the magic verses that the author cites, and interpret them the way the author does, the spirit of god would pour back into their congregations and magically fill their pews.

The spectrum of this advice is wide. For some authors, it’s the issue of a church being missional (engaged in the community), or insular (focused exclusively on the needs of the congregation). Arguments for both approaches abound. Others may point to either a failure to engage the youth or to engaging the youth at the expense of the elderly members. Another notorious killer of the spirit is the church’s alliance with secular politics.

More extreme prophets may proclaim that churches’ decline is a result of their embracing the secular culture’s wiles of Satan, failing to talk about hell, or making fatal doctrinal errors like accepting or rejecting predestination. According to their theory, Christians are attracted to churches that preach the true and whole gospel of Jesus Christ, and will drift away from churches that stray from it.

Of course, just what constitutes the true and whole gospel is in the eye of the author.

Reality Check

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I doubt that either science or anyone’s personal experience can prove or disprove the existence of a deity or the presence of a deity among any group of people. Likewise, the efficacy of any particular plan to lure the American public back into church and keep them there would face similar obstacles for verification.

Was it the wisdom applied from those Five Steps to Grow Your Church, Seven Secrets to a Healthy Congregation, or the One Root Cause that Churches Die that saved your church? Too many variables get in the way of determining why some churches are withering while others may be bucking the trend and prospering. Did your church die because it was guilty of the One Root Cause or did the closure of the town’s largest employer play a greater role? Did your numbers increase because you applied the Seven Secrets? Or was it because another similar church in your area split after an abuse scandal?

What we can do, however, is use logic to examine the larger picture of the church crisis. Logic says that if any of these measures, sets of steps, or the elimination of any root causes actually worked on a significant scale, the results would be obvious.

Imagine for a moment that:

All the churches that adhered to the doctrine of predestination were dying, while all those that adhered to the doctrine of free will were swelling. Bingo! The problem was down to a single cause after all!

All the churches that were insular were thriving while all those that were missional were failing. Or vice versa. This would be noticed. That argument would be settled and the crisis would be closer to passing.

Suddenly all the churches that followed The Five Steps started to grow and prosper, while those that did not continued to wither. Glory to god! The magic Five Steps!

No one knows better than churches just how important the purely human and secular aspects of a fellowship are. As for god? Meh.

Oh Spirit, Whither Thou Art?

None of this, of course, is the case. The convergence of factors causing the empty pew syndrome seems to be largely immune from the recipes aimed at turning it around.

This doesn’t suggest that the spirit of god is not present in churches. What it betrays, however, is that god’s presence appears to make little, if any, difference in a church’s life or death. For if the spirit of god actually revealed itself to us there in any way, nothing else would matter much.

We would be less needy of all the little secular matters that are currently so important to us. We would not need a service that conformed to our particular temperament to be able to feel the spirit. We would care less whether the focus was on healing our emotional wounds or on engaging with the community. And little bits of doctrine and generational conflicts would feel like fleas on an elephant.

Because, wow, the actual spirit of the almighty creator! That would just be so awesome. Who would care about what we sung, whether the pastor was a woman, or even whether the heat was turned on in the sanctuary? And evangelism? Unnecessary. Instead we would have to employ security to keep them away from the door.

Basically, god’s presence among a body of believers appears to be irrelevant. We can’t feel it, at least not strongly enough for it to override our worldly needs and preferences. We need the service to fit our temperament, we need the emphasis to be on where we are personally at the time, we need to feel accepted, to have our generational psyche accommodated, and to feel deeply connected to others in the fellowship.

When these purely human needs are no longer met we feel disconnected from god in our fellowship — whether he’s actually there or not.

As Americans abandon our former religious character, churches have had to confront this reality. No one knows better than churches just how important the purely human and secular aspects of a fellowship are.

As for god? Meh.

I suspect churches have figured that one out too.