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Skipping Church

Posted by Editormum on 29 June 2014 in Uncategorized |

My friend Heather wrote this blog post today about taking a break from going to church, and how it helped her evaluate her spiritual condition and renew her relationship with God.

I cannot begin to express how much it resonated with me. Because I stopped going to church about five years ago, and every time I have tried going back, something has happened to make it clear that I wasn’t ready to be there again. Yet.

Like Heather, I wasn’t obnoxious and obvious about my disappearance. I even had a convenient excuse in the serious after-effects of the car accident I’d been in—a wreck in which I sustained minor physical injuries along with a major traumatic brain injury that went undiagnosed until eight weeks after the collision (because I didn’t go to a doctor until the headaches refused to let up). By the time I went to a doctor, the damage was done.

And that damage has been pretty permanent. I stutter now, especially in noisy, chaotic, or “performance” situations. I have panic attacks when in large, noisy, or chaotic crowds, especially if I’m “trapped” and have no easily accessible, unobtrusive exit path. And I struggle mightily with migraine headaches—they have gotten better, almost gone away, over the years, but they still hit occasionally, and they are much worse than they used to be: crippling me with nausea, blinding me with scintillating scotomas, making me violently averse to noise of any kind, and reducing me to a quivering, helpless jelly from the excruciating pain. So yes, I had a ready-made, very convenient excuse that was a lot more socially acceptable than “I hate what has happened to the worship service.”

But let me be brutally honest: Heather nailed it. The service is no longer rich, wholesome, nourishing food for the believer’s soul. It’s sweet, and fluffy, and creamy-smooth— and it’s giving the Church (or at least many, many local congregations) spiritual diabetes. The last time I heard a sermon about sin was when I visited my old church and got to hear an hour-long rant a sermon about how divorce was the worst possible sin you could commit.

Now, don’t get me wrong here: we need to hear about sin and we need to define and confront sin. And the divorce rate in the Church is scandalous. But divorce is no more unforgivable than lying or stealing, and it’s time we stopped treating it as some sort of spiritual leprosy. Heck, adulterers get more of a break than divorced people in the Church. But I digress.

At my church—where I remain a member because I love the people, even if I hate what’s been done to the worship experience—the first indication that we were abandoning traditional worship for a more contemporary service was that we stopped saying the creeds and the Psalter.
Then the sermons bore no relation to the lectionary … at all.
Then we changed the liturgy of the communion service and exchanged a new Doxology for Old Hundredth.
Then came the highly repetitive songs that were easy to learn, but that I didn’t like because they were like cotton candy—sweet fluff without substance. The doctrine-rich hymns became rarer and rarer.
And then there was the sermon about how original sin was not such a bad thing, because Adam wasn’t fully human until he sinned. (What?!) After that, the sermons got fluffier and fluffier, until there was not even a shred of meat to sink my teeth into.
And then they installed big screens with pretty slideshows running through the service.

And it suddenly dawned on me that church was more like a sports bar now than a worship retreat. I was already very sick physically, and the spiritual diabetes I was being lured into was just more than I could handle. More than I wanted to handle. I needed to touch God on a regular basis. And it just wasn’t happening any more.

So I walked away. Mostly.

Please understand that I’m not saying any of those things (except maybe the bankrupt teaching) is necessarily wrong. And I suppose you could make a case for “it’s just that you miss what you were used to.” But I submit to you that the whole point of worship is finding a place to touch God. And there is a significant element of custom and tradition in that concept. C.S. Lewis said, in his Letters to Malcolm,

I think our business as laymen is to take what we are given and make the best of it. And I think we should find this a great deal easier if what we were given was always and everywhere the same.

To judge from their practice, very few … clergymen take this view. It looks as if they believed people can be lured to go to church by incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications, and complications of the service. And it is probably true that a new, keen vicar will usually be able to form within his parish a minority who are in favour of his innovations. The majority, I believe, never are. Those who remain — many give up churchgoing altogether — merely endure.

…. They have a good reason for their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, … to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best … when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. … The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshiping. …

A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. … Try as one may to exclude it, the question “What on earth is he up to now?” will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste….

I’ve quoted this passage before, and my thoughts still hold true. If the channel markers in my river of worship are constantly being moved about, my frail little boat is going to run aground. And that just defeats the whole purpose of going to church.

I’m looking, now, for a new church. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but I need to feel refreshed and renewed in spirit when I leave. I need to be able to love the people and feel that they are truly seeking God, not playing a numbers game or compromising truth while trying to be all things to all people. Most of all, I need a sacred rhythm. A predictable, comfortable order of worship that allows me to focus on God instead of being distracted by the next innovative thing.

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