The Problem of Relevance

It’s been three years now I’ve been trying to understand the problem the Anglicans are experiencing. And I’m not entirely sure, but I think I can articulate it now. It’s that they don’t know how to respond to someone who doesn’t find Christ particularly relevant to his life. Such a person – and they are legion in the UK as elsewhere – may well believe in God and perhaps in Jesus as well, but thinks, so what? Such a person has tried to read the New Testament, or has listened to it being read, and just can’t see any meaning in it that applies to his own life. Okay, so for example the Good Samaritan was a good guy; bravo to him. And?

Sure, says our hypothetical person to himself, Jesus had some nice ideas, but what have they to do with me? I already live a pretty good life, try to be nice to people, don’t do anything illegal, immoral, or fattening. (Well, fattening, maybe…) And I certainly don’t need to go to any boring church service to pray to Him if I want to, supposing I would know what to say.

The Anglicans don’t know how to address this issue. They think the problem is that their more traditional church services were boring and, running scared, they are trying every way they can imagine, however outlandish, to cure that. They have puppets and balloons and clowns and they even have what they call “Messy Church” where you can do all sorts of crafts.

I'm sorry, but this is pathetic!

Yet the people who promote all this sor of thing aren’t enemies of Christ, as I once supposed; they are in fact believers with strong emotional attachments to Christ, which they strive to pass on to others. They call it, “Getting excited about Jesus”.

Dear Anglicans, forgive me, but it seems to this observer you are addressing the wrong problem. And in the process, not only are you not attracting the younger generation; you’re inadvertently driving away even more people. The problem is not that your services were boring, but why they were: because the Christ those services presented was simply irrelevant. And your newer services, to be frank, are equally banal because they present the same basically irrelevant version of Christ. Putting make-up on Him doesn’t solve the problem. Presenting His real significance for every human life does.

So what is that significance? Well, Jesus is the Perfect Man, and only in emulating Him do we express and live and fulfill our own human nature. Jesus is not merely relevant but indispensible because it is only by following Him that we recover our full humanity. Obedience to Him is for our freedom and growth and fulfillment as men, as families, as societies. That is the very reason He has given us His commandments. He revealed His precepts for our sake, not His, because He loves us. And indeed, the path He has marked out for us eventually renders us not only complete, finished men, but even more than mere mortals; ultimately it is the path to becoming deified, as our participation in Christ deepens into a sharing with Him in the very inner workings of the Life of God, the Holy Trinity.

In a word, Christ IS your life and mine, and everyone else’s. He is the difference between really living and merely surviving. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:4)

Anglicans (along with so many others) seem to see following Christ simply in moral terms. It’s a desirable but largely optional by-product of salvation. And/or, the Christian Life is seen as something nice for those few who can do it, but “I couldn’t live that way.” Thus, the sober business of “Take up your cross and follow Me”, the very thing in which we discover Christ’s indispensible relevance, is also the very thing many Anglicans appear reluctant to preach – for fear of turning people off. Terrible irony!

But, beloved Anglicans, if you remember the proper understanding about following Christ – and it has as little to do with upholding a moral code as with getting excited about Jesus – and if you both preach and demonstrate (mainly in the saints you’ll produce) who we can beome when we follow the way of the Cross, then the Church of England will become again what she once was and what the Church is always meant to be: our lifeline to heaven, the umbilical cord conveying my life and yours to God’s Life, and His Life to us.

And then people will come, in droves, because this is the Life for which we were all made, to which our whole being is geared. This supernatural life, the life in Christ, is actually what is most natural for a human being, every human being, at his deepest level. Following Christ doesn’t so much result in salvation as it already IS salvation beginning here and now.

And then, if you preach and manifest this, such lesser issues as the style of worship and the genre of the music will all sort themselves out.

Christianity and Culture

In our Tuesday evening discussion group a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of concern among our Anglican friends on how to express the Christian religion in terms comprehensible to the current culture. I listened with much interest and empathy, and I didn’t have any answer for them. Finally I asked Demetrios, yes, aloud and in front of them, “How is it we Orthodox don’t have this problem?” And he answered the question very well, I thought. He said it’s because Christianity is not geared toward any given culture, but is according to human nature.

That’s true, isn’t it? And human nature doesn’t change, at least hasn’t since Adam and Eve fell. And the problem(s) and needs and joys we experience in the depths of our being remain the same. And what God reveals to us, or rather Whom He reveals, is for our good, to restore our human nature and then go better and glorify it, according to God’s original intention. And Christ took on that human nature and inaugurated the process for all of us. That is why, when we hear a Christian truth, so often it seems to us to resonate, or even to have come from, our own hearts, and we leap toward it and greet it with a joyous, “Yes!”

Christ is universal, catholic, meaning for all people in all times in all places. Who doesn’t need to be loved, and who loves us as He does? Who doesn’t need peace in his soul, and who guides our feet into the ways of peace? Who doesn’t need his past forgiven, his present joyful and his future filled with “sure and certain hope”? What human being doesn’t feel in his soul that death is a monstrous wrong, a cruel end, the ultimate enemy? What need has any of this to be put into specific cultural terms?

And the corollary is, it’s a tautology, a redundancy, to say salvation is only through Christ. He is the very definition of salvation.

Signs of Having Lost It

Saturday, 25 August

We went to "The Round Church" in Cambridge, whose proper name is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  It is modelled after the church of the same name in Jerusalem, even has a sort of Pantocrator up high in the ceiling of the tower.  It is no longer used, at least not regularly, for worship; its congregation has merged with another and their church building is used. 

This building is now operated by something called the Christian Heritage.  This group has made the church building into something of a museum of Christianity, showing the history of Christianity in Cambridge (and in the UK).  Did you know Christianity came into Britain with the Romans?  In fact, St. Constantine was made emperor in - guess where? - York!  In other words, in those days, the Brits were o/Orthodox Christians.  Then Christianity died out when Rome fell and the Saxons took over.  People reverted to paganism, except in Wales and in Cornwall, where they clung to their Christian faith.  Later, of course, Catholicism came to Britian, but that was a distinctly different thing. 

There's a 23-minute film you can watch that tells you about many great men who were Christians.  It concludes that still today, many people find Christianity meaningful, even transformative, in their lives.

It took me until that night to figure out what it was that bothered me so much about all this.  Finally, it  hit me:  these people are presenting Christianity instead of Christ.  They are defending the Church instead of bringing people into relationship with the Lord.  Contrast what they are doing with St. Paul's description of what he was doing:  "And my speech and my preaching [was] not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power."  He demonstrated the Spirit and showed them God's transformative power.  Brought them grace and love and power and liberation.

That's what these people no longer know how to do. 

And I think it was in the same church - but we've visited so many I am no longer sure - that we saw the base of the baptismal font encircled with stuffed animals and other toys, by way of decoration.  Talk about trivializing Holy Baptism!

It's very sad.  The very ploys they contrive to attract more people are driving them away more than ever.

True Presence?

The Anglicans here inform me that they do not believe that the bread in their eucharist is truly Christ's Body, or that the wine is truly His Blood.  One of them said she wished she believed it, but that's now what she was taught.  It's a memorial, it's symbolic, but it isn't the real thing.

That's odd, because when I was Episcopalian, I was indeed taught the doctrine of the True Presence. 

"So what do you mean when you speak of the 'consecration?'" I inquired.  They didn't quite know.

I concluded, aloud with a regretful shrug, that maybe they were right; maybe they really didn't have Christ's Body and Blood in their eucharist.

The Secret of the Universe

There are certain basic questions, answers to which any religious organization must provide if it is to survive. Otherwise it will not matter how much fun you provide to the people who walk through your door - or how colorful or solemn your ritual may be. People ultimately aren't looking for those things. They are looking for the answers to life's deepest questions. These questions include: What is man? Who am I? Where did I/we come from? Where am I/are we going? Why am I/are we here? What is the meaning of life? Why is there something instead of nothing? St. Paul writes that this is the mystery from before all the ages, now revealed in Christ.

Why are People Forsaking Church in Droves?

One reason for people’s churchly severance
Is, they miss good old-fashioned reverence,
Which doesn’t fit well at services
With balloons and whirling dervishes.

To fix your soul you must face what’s wrong,
Which is hard to do to a happy-clappy song.
You won’t even see where you’re not so great
If all you do is celebrate, celebrate.

Celebrations will draw them for the short run,
For people love playing and music and fun.
But you need ever more to keep getting those highs,
Inevitably you crash, and what’s left but sighs?

Entertainment grows wearisome, feelings go flat,
You have to give people much more than that.
Sentiment sours and pleasures aren’t joys,
And church-going folk are not all girls and boys.

Adults want substance and not just feeling,
But wisdom and truth and meaning and healing
In short, they’re searching for things profound
That have little to do with clowning around.

Fun is for picnics, church camps, and youth meets,
Ditto, dancing and movies and magical feats.
In church, theoretically, God is right here;
If so, then with love, awe, and reverence draw near.

If not, there’s your trouble; go back to square one.
You’ve but ethics to offer, and feelings and fun,
And people will seek the deep Mystery elsewhere,
Or give up and pretend they no longer care.

The secret attraction is Himself, Jesus Christ,
By Whom, more than anything, folks are enticed.
Dearer than all else, all our Hope, all our Heart,
With decorum receive Him, before more depart!

On Church Services

A few days ago I wrote:

I think I've understood now the thinking of many Anglicans (and of course, others here and in America and elsewhere) about their new church services. It seems to be: As I must go to church, or most certainly should, at least it ought to be made into an enjoyable experience for me.


Can you spot the flaw(s) in that line of reasoning?

Here are some.

1.)  Worship is not for us.  It is not entertainment; it isn't to make us feel good or 'blessed' or stronger or whatever.  Worship isn't even the same as evangelizing, but is instead an offering to God.  All that matters is that He be pleased.   Self-seeking is the very opposite of worship.

2.)  Many, many people, especially in our Western culture, confuse 'fun' with real joy.  It isn't, any more than relaxation is true peace or sex is true love.  We have, on the one hand, the spiritual reality, and on the other, its physical counterpart.  Many of us seem only to notice the latter, the physical, the things of the flesh.  Romans 8:13a: 'For if you live after the flesh, you shall die...'  You will miss everything truly worth living for, miss your calling, your glorious destiny.

3.)  Providing Christ is truly in our midst, then to the degree we are aware of Him and to the degree we love Him, we will never find worship services tedious.   Corollary:  The Gospel, pure and straight and properly preached (there's the rub; see below), already draws in the people and feeds them.  There is no need to dress it up with skits or clowns, live donkeys or dance or water pistols, no need to mount the precious diamond* in plastic on the theory that plastic is more attractive to the people.

The major part of the problem, of course, is that people find they don't really love God all that much, and in our culture, the main reason for that is the way He is preached, namely with hellfire and damnation, obey or roast in hell.  And going right along with that, this monstrous, heterodox theory that God needs to punish us, or else punish His own Son in our stead.  That's the main thing that, no matter how much one may love Jesus, keeps one stand-offish concerning His Father, and disconnected from the Holy Spirit.


Psalm 50/51:17
A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit:

a broken and a contrite heart, O God,
You will not despise.

Forget the soap bubbles and the clown costumes and all the other cheap gimmicks.

*This metaphor assumes the Anglicans have 'the precious diamond,' which assumption, I realize, may or may not be warranted.

Worship Redefined

A Methodist church near where we live has this sign on its front lawn.

So I wondered, what IS the new definition of worship? For that matter, what is the old definition, that it needed reworking?

So I had a look at their web page and found out. Worship redefined is vibrant and participatory.

Worship redefined means it is multi-sensory. "On a given Sunday, it may include multi-faceted visual images, sounds, and/or even smells."

The new worship means will not be the same from Sunday to Sunday, but will "include surprises, even to its planners". (We may only hope all the surprises will be pleasant ones.)

It will be "organic", whatever that means, and fluid. It will be less structured, presumably to allow more freedom (freedom?), and it will be more informal. Or as a neighboring church advertises, "Casual Worship, Sunday, 6 p.m." Casual worship? You can worship God casually?

Do congregations that do this realize they're tacitly saying their worship all these centuries up to now, before it was redefined, was non-vibrant, non-participatory, unappealing to the senses, boring, stuffy, non-fluid (gaseous? solid?) and inorganic? Do they wonder how, or even whether, God could ever have accepted such worship?

"Contempogelical"

Pr. Cwirla, a Lutheran, has posted a cogent critique of "happy-clappy worship" on his blog. While the Orthodox can't agree with everything Pr. Cwirla writes in this post, still he makes what I think are some excellent points. So do the commentators, in their replies to the post; read them, too, to get a better balanced perspective. Here is a small excerpt from the post.

Contemporary, Evangelical worship, what I call “Contempogelical” worship, is revival worship, the revival tent come to the stadium, turning the church into a concert venue. The intent is to manipulate the audience (aka congregation) into a certain mood, whether praise frenzy or prayerful somberness. Participation is individualistic - waving hands, rhythmic dancing, simplistic refrains. The focal point is the lead singer of the “praise band”, usually a drop-dead gorgeous female (aka Praise Babe) with a lilting soprano voice wearing a look of virginal innocence combined with a teasing come hither seductiveness. The songs fall into either of two categories - power chord praise songs that extol God in His majesty and glory or pop-ballad love songs, extolling Jesus as lover and friend. Guys put up with the latter category only because they think the Praise Babe is singing to them.

Revival always has a strong sexual component to it. During the “great religious awakenings” of 19th century America, it was noted with some degree of alarm that unwed pregnancies increased dramatically after the revival left town. The predatory boys knew to hang out at the fringes of the revival meetings knowing that the girls were ripe for the picking. It doesn’t take a libido-driven imagination to catch the same sexual undercurrent in a lot of contempogelical worship.

I just wish Rev. Cwirla wouldn't make the word "Greeks" synonymous with "enemies".

:-)