Disenfranchised Christianity

I grew up in an seeker friendly tradition, which is to say that every Sunday typically contained a message of salvation and an alter call. The good news was to be delivered always in a such a way as non-believing visitors would not feel as though they were in over their head, should they choose to show up. This didn’t present a problem until I was halfway through high school, when I legitimately felt neglected on Sunday mornings. I had heard about all that pulpit was going to say; their repertoire had been exhausted in my eyes.

I had come to a crisis or sorts, or as much of a crisis as a middle-class adolescent white male can come to in suburban Indiana. My young eyes watched as church was been gutted of it’s meaning. As far as I could figure from inductive reasoning, what occurred on Sunday mornings was equal parts worship and teaching, but neither was being given proper service.

I tried visiting other churches in search of any glimmer of something I could recognize as meeting these two requirements in a satisfactory way. I once asked a man whom I respected for his spirituality what it was about his church that kept him going week after week. He looked at me and said, “Honestly, it’s because I get to teach kids.” To my high school mind this meant that no matter how old I got, or how mature, Sunday mornings would always be a shell of what I had been raised to expect. I was, in a sense, a disenfranchised Christian.

My faith in Christ had remained intact, but my view of what should have been acting as his body was shattered. In its place I saw organizations whose concern was only for numbers and safe thinking. Seeker friendly somewhere became seeker focused, which didn’t match up with my view of what should be occurring in church. I thought, and still believe, that church should be focused on the body of believers and raising issues that challenge people’s faith, growing them as spiritual beings. It shouldn’t raise people to a certain level of Christian awareness and then expect them to keep showing up out of some hollow attachment formed only on repetition.

The people that spoke for the faith were no longer people I agreed with; the people who had the public ear were misrepresenting what I had come to know about Christ and his loving concern for all people. So what did I do? I gave up, I took my ball and went home. I was fed up with a body of Christ that was basically on a respirator yet pretended to run marathons.

It was during my college years that I came to recognize other disenfranchised Christians. At first I thought there were only a handful of us, but I became growingly adept at finding the symptoms of what I had considered some sort of personal failing. I developed the eyes to see a generation of my brothers and sisters lamenting a loss of innocence sitting next to me in the back row of chapel. The more I saw it, the more I realized there was nothing wrong with it; we were starving. It was a natural hunger that had not been satiated for years. But the more startling realization was to find we weren’t the victims, we were the culprits.

Every time one of us takes our ball and goes home, we deny the body a new Prometheus. It’s that post-adolescent response that has gutted the church, and as long as we remain silent we are culpable for the words of those we see as misrepresenting Christ. If they have no opposing Christian voice to keeping them accountable in truth and love, then how can we expect the rest of the world to discern whether or not they speak for us. We are one body and it’s our own apathy that keeps us on a respirator.

Yes, the church is broken. Yes, it’s mangled and disfigured. But we can’t wait in our living rooms until it becomes a finely oiled machine and then stand up and claim it. It is only by making our numerous voices heard that we can participate in the Church’s glorification and truly become satisfied in our righteous hunger. This was the true wisdom was in my friend’s sobering statement, “Honestly, it’s because I get to teach kids.”

We need to speak as a one growing but wayward kingdom, “Lord, we are not worthy to receive you, but say only the word and we shall be healed.” You have read over and over the words, “seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened,” how much more is it to say, “open your mouth and words will be given.” This is why we need to discover and employ synergistic movements and publications like Willow Tree, because it gives us as voice and affords us the opportunity to rectify the mistakes we made in our years of silence. We may not want to speak; we may not want write, but I believe it is our penance and our cross to bear.