Sick, sicker, better

As 2011 dawned I awoke with a scratchy throat, which I thought was nothing... until it got worse. I traced it back to talking to a person on New Year's Eve day who had been sick with this cold that's been going around.  Oh great.  Don't tell me.  Oh well, maybe a good night's sleep will .... uh, no it didn't.

So, knowing that I was at that point at my most contagious (and more vulnerable to further attack by viruses and other assorted air-borne nasties including petrochemicals), I stayed home yesterday from church.  I managed to catch some of the service online - but couldn't concentrate long enough to get what the speaker was saying, except that it was (as usually happens in church) about something we "should" be doing (see my series on Shoulds and Oughtas back last summer).  I got to thinking that the world would be a better place if people just got to be friends with Jesus without having to deal with those who call themselves His people.  Myself included, I'm afraid.  I do my share of screwing up, judging, and offending.

Matter of fact, I guess my opinion of church services would shock a lot of church-goers. 

I happen to think that they're pretty useless.  

In many cases they're like the photo to the left - this is a Lego model of a congregation sitting in church.  Impressive to look at - but nothing ever really changes there.  

I am also one of those folks who believes that everything happens for a reason.  Even sickness.  So I was kind of curious as to what God's purpose was in allowing me to catch this &*^$#*!@ cold.  He didn't take long to show me.  I was in the middle of trying to watch this sermon when my Skype icon started going nuts, and I heard my voice notifier say that a friend of mine was online.  Then I got a Skype chat message.  

Over the next hour or more, we talked about stuff.  Important stuff. We shared our stuff with each other, the things happening in our lives, the lessons we were learning. Like I said, important stuff: the purpose of suffering, the importance of being honest, how God uses the wounds in our lives to help heal others.  Near the end of our conversation, my friend said that she felt that the time we spent together was better than most church services she'd been to.  To be honest, I felt the exact same way.

I believe that church can be useful and productive like that too.  

It's just that usually ... it isn't.  

Usually ... it's about someone trying to tell someone else what to do and then judging that person when he or she doesn't succeed in doing it, or doesn't succeed in doing it the way the person telling them would have done it.  

I also think that maybe we need to rethink the way we "do church."  One writer I read a few years back talked about the "industrial model" for church - the idea that churches are factories where Christians are mass-produced from raw material that comes in off the street (i.e., the un-redeemed) and then they pile forth out into the world to bring in more raw materials to be "refined."  But church ISN'T that.  The church is a living organism.  Try to organize an organism and guess what: you kill it .... by a process known by biologists as vivisection.  

I believe that my friend and I were having church yesterday morning.  Each of us knew the other loved her, each not only gave but gained experience, strength, and hope, and each left that conversation feeling refreshed and empowered to face another encounter with the forces of evil, homogeneity, and mediocrity around us.  AND within us.

Food for thought.