The afternoon was brilliant... I went sailing! I sailed with someone who admitted to being a believer but not being to church for 20 years. For different, but somewhat similar reasons to my frustration. Over the last week, including me, I have met 5 people who have similar feelings about church.
So I googled 'church boring' and found a number of articles - one from Christian Woman:
Keep in mind, however, that school can be boring, yet we make our kids go. If we send our kids to school but make church an option, we communicate that education is more important than spiritual growth.Oh, yipes... she's surely not that stupid. Well, OK I used to think that way too. I hated school - it was boring too. And I rarely learnt anything... as I rarely learn anything at church. One reason is that I'm not an oral learner. So school is as bad as church. And... more significantly we didn't make our children go to school. Maybe more people ought to realise that school is optional but learning is not. I believe many more people out to stop their children going to school. It's not helpful and they would do better if they didn't go to school. If we radically changed both school and church that might be a move in the right direction.
Proverbs 27:17 says, "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another."I wish people would understand this often quoted Bible passage. This is irony. Iron doesn't sharpen iron, it blunts it. My Dad was trained as a chef and from a very young age I remember him saying 'You cannon sharpen iron with iron' [you use a stone or more recently steel]. The ancient people knew this, so the quote means, 'As iron sharpens iron [not], so one man sharpens another [he rubs him up the wrong way!]'.
Scripture shows us we can't grow alone. If we try, we can fall prey to heresy or give in to temptation.Experience shows us that we also can't grow together. I see heresy and giving in to temptation all over the church. Basically... no difference, sorry! But I am not sure that Scripture does show that anyway. She doesn't give any evidence, merely makes it as a proposition.
Most importantly, it's where people come together to worship the living God and Savior Jesus Christ.No - wrong again. It's a place where some people can come together to worship the living God and Saviour Jesus Christ. I worship God all week. Worship means expressing his worth ship. And as I say I do it all week. Sunday is the day I don't express his worth ship [if you've ever heard me singing you'll know what I mean]. Many Christians seem to believe only what happens on a Sunday is worship, which is crazy, and if it were true would be an extremely sad reflection on their lives. So implying worship only happens on a Sunday is a very dangerous heresy.
What I am looking for is a church that celebrates diversity apart from the essentials of faith, that encourages discussion and grappling with the issues rather than a party line from the front, that acts as a community rather than an exclusive membership club and where the leadership are not a bunch of pharisees interpreting and creating a burden of laws under which we suffer and that encourages people to use their God given creativity rather than sit as pew fodder. In our town there is no church like that. Sadly.
2 comments:
Having the same issue here re. boring sermons/lectures/talks, 1-way communication not being ideal, and so on and so forth.
alas, one of our leaders has the following story which he uses as counter attack to such arguments:
"My daughter went to primary school and secondary school, and every day when she came home I'd ask her 'How was school?' and she'd respond 'Boring!' and I'd ask her 'What did you learn?' and she'd respond 'Nothing!'... but now she applied and got into Oxford! So even if we don't think we're learning anything, and even if you feel like it's boring, you're still learning!"
*sigh*
Yes, but I could counter that example with another from my experience:
I had a colleague who was 2nd in his year in a Middle Eastern University - a good university - but although he was very bright he had not learnt how to learn. He had learnt how to pass exams and how to repeat knowledge, but not how to learn things for himself.
Our aim as followers of the Messiah is not to create people full of knowledge. We are called to be disciples - not scholars, people who know how to learn and how to follow a person not a book. The logic of learning from boring talks in churches is as fallacious as the logic of needing to go to school to learn.
'Boring' talks are not just unhelpful, they are downright dangerous. They imply that following the Lord is boring too. And they somehow impart the idea that following Jesus is about knowing things - often detailed knowledge from the Bible - rather than knowing and enjoying the author: Not through what He wrote, but through who He is.
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