SO here's my latest blasphemy (and you have been warned, so please stop reading if you are unprepared spiritually or soteriologically for my thoughts!):
I think I am no longer able to attend church. It's not a matter of being too good for it, or too cynical, or because I am in sin and unwilling to confess. It's a realization that "church" is a place where normal people suddenly turn into weirdos speaking a language they don't understand but pretend to. It's a place where "visitors" (like a petting zoo?) feel so out of place unless they are the same ethnicity and social class as the majority. If they ARE the same ethnicity and social class, then they can switch to the consumer mentality, and decide for themselves if this church is going to meet their needs (child care, a "bible-first" preacher, good music with a charismatic leader, etc...). If they decide that it CAN meet their needs, then they begin "attending" and maybe join a "small group." Keep in mind these people are just like them: they already think like them and act like them.
But what happens is inevitably somebody gets in a fight with somebody else over something stupid and the consumer attendee decides to take her business elsewhere to find a church that is EVEN MORE like-minded to her so that there won't be any more fighting. Churches become the biggest network of cliques ever known to man. They're like match.com for Christian narrow-mindedness. The size of the church doesn't matter-- I have seen it in mega churches and home churches. Rich areas and poor areas.
This was not Christ's plan. It might have been the Apostle Paul's plan with his Utopian idea of everybody being in one accord... or maybe Luke with his very biased view of how the early church got along perfectly. If the leaders of a church think that "unity" is the most important thing for the life of the church, than soon everyone will look, think, and act just like the leaders. This is magnificent in the eyes of the leaders of the church, but devastating to the true work of God.
"Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ... The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” 22 On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor.
I believe that I AM a part of the Church- the people of God. But I also believe that because so many "churches" do exactly the opposite of what Paul is saying here, they would be better described as cliques and I disdain them as such, and find that being in their presence is excruciating.
Prove me wrong! Where is the diversity in your "church"? When do the 'eyes' say to the 'hands,' "We need you!" and then let their actions show it!?
I feel more "church" at my yoga studio than I do at an actual church (having a church as your workplace doesn't help). A few months ago my sister and I were going to visit a friend who was dying of leukemia, and the morning we headed out, I went to yoga. I wrote about it later in my LJ (so outdated, I know), "Yoga is a place to work through things, to be weak and strong standing shoulder-to-shoulder with others who are also being weak and strong." I realize this is more about MY problems and MY solutions and church should be more than that, but it does say something that I found the strength I needed for the journey in a yoga class, not in a church service.
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