The Sackrider Blog

Recently at a church service, someone from the platform hit a sour note during praise and worship.  My wife elbowed me and made a sour face, and without thinking I said “Its not a talent show!”  I didn’t intend to be rude to my wife, I was thinking the same thing that she was regarding the malformed melody.  Blurting out as I did, it seems my comment was directed as much at me as it was to Stephanie.  I have often been caught up in the audience / performer mentality.  I believe we are in an entertainment seeking culture with television, movies, the Internet, and the many other non-interactive media forms we have heaped upon us in the last several decades.  I’ve often found myself deciding on whither a preacher was ‘good’ or not based on how entertaining he was.  I have had conversations where I commented that “if they can’t sing, they shouldn’t be on the platform”.  The problem is, church as I see it was not designed to be an entertainment outlet – and I repent for treating as such.

A friend of mine recently started a house church, due in part to the condition of the traditional church model as an entertainment venue.  He has ‘meetings’ instead of ’services’, and in a recent post on his blog he pointed out the difference.  As I understood him, services are based on an entertainment model with a platform of performers and an audience of spectators but meetings are expected to be participatory (http://www.blog.godfidence.org/2007/10/15/house-church-clarification/).  I’m not sure how well the ‘meeting’ model would work in the traditional church service with a few hundred people in the same room, but that’s his point (as I understand it).

Is the traditional church model effective?  How does the traditional church affect the world around it?  I believe the local church building does have importance in our world today.  It can be an anchor in a community in a way that I do not believe a home based church can.  Still, the need to connect on a personal level is very real and a home based church makes a greater demand for that connection on its members.  By reducing the size of the congregation, the entertainer/entertainee dynamic is almost completely removed. 

The problem I see is our ability to affect change on a large scale is reduced when we reduce our mass (pun intended).  Ten people in a house church are easily ignored by a politician deciding how to vote on an abortion bill, and while the outreach would be significant to those that did receive it from a small house church, the impact that can be made in the community by a larger congregation is obvious.  In either case – we need more churches, traditional, non-traditional, large and small, in homes or in buildings – we need more churches.  To quote an entertaining preacher that I once knew, Hell is real and eternality is long – so I again repent for treating the church as another entertainment source.  It’s not a talent show.

So, Friday night, Stephanie and I went out to eat using a gift card a co-worker had given me. When we got back to the house, we realized what a nice night it was and decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. That’s when I heard the announcer. He was calling the local football game at Ironwood High School; it’s across the street from my neighborhood. We decided to walk over and take a look.

The lights were on, the stands were full, the sounds of whistles blowing, helmets clashing, and silly trivia from the press box filled the air. The band was playing, the cheerleaders were cheering, the color guard was color guarding (although one of the girls dropped her flag more than once). Young girls and boys were walking hand in hand while gazing into each others wide starry eyes. I forgot how much perfume high school girls wear.

Stephanie and I really enjoyed this unexpected night cap to our evening. As we walked back home with still more than six minutes left on the fourth quarter clock (the score was 41 – 6 Ironwood), I looked back at the stands. I couldn’t help but wonder if these young people knew my God. Has anyone told them about Jesus?  How can I be available to do the work of the LORD in the lives of these young people?

C.S. Lewis happens to be my favorite author, and The Silver Chair happens to be one of my all time favorite books. I don’t believe I will ever be as excellent a word smith as The great C.S. Lewis but I do hope to one day be a published author. I have had a strong sense of the book I would very much like to write for many years now, but never have I taken a moment to jot even one line down. My unwritten book, whose working title is “Moments of Insanity”, is based on a passage from my favorite book by my favorite author. I don’t know how many people will relate to the premise, which I’m sure would be essential for a successful book, but the whole idea strikes deep within me and I would very much like to finish the work if for no other person’s benefit than my own. I’ll pretend this is a two way conversation and that you’ve just asked “What is the premise?” Many of my friends might suggest that reading my blog is very much like a conversation with me – one in which you don’t often get a word in, but I digress. To answer your question:

In the book, The Silver Chair, there is a Knight who assists the Queen of an under world and is in all discernible matters a very well put together, very sane person. At night however he is strapped to an enchanted chair because, we are told that he has fits of rage and pure insanity. The enchanted chair is the only thing keeping him together. But during one of these nightly fits, the Knight shouts these words:

“Quick! I am sane now. Every night I am sane. If only I could get out of this enchanted chair, it would last. I should be a man again. But every night they bind me, and so every night my chance is gone. But you are not enemies. I am not your prisoner. Quick! Cut these cords.”

In this moment, we are faced with a choice. Do we believe this insane, enraged maniac? Or do we prefer the put-together version of the character. As a Christian, I have had moments in my life when everything suddenly seems more clear than before, when I know some action I must do, despite not always knowing to what end or what purpose that the thing must be done. These moments seem to occur most often during a church service or personal devotion; times when my focus is most on the creator.

I believe we are created beings, creatures made by a creator. I believe God created us with a purpose or purposes in mind and that at some point we as a species left that divine purpose to follow our own. For the most of us, we get along just fine in this condition; pursuing careers, mates, pleasures on both intellectual and physical levels. These are our daytime hours, our daily lives when things are almost on auto-pilot. I wake up, goto work, goto lunch, return to work, go home, spend time watching TV, eat dinner, spend time with the family, goto bed, wake up, and do it all over again. But there are moments that break the white-line-fever method in which we go about our lives. Its in those moments that I believe we become aware. I want to write a book about those moments. Or more precisely, how to ‘cut these cords’ that keep us from leaving the ‘chair’ and walking in that strangely clear frame of mind.