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(A prayer that can be said at the beginning of a home church service)
Almighty God,
we are gathered together
in the promise of your son
Jesus Christ
who told us
that whenever two or more
are gathered together
in his name
that he is there
among them.
Send him now
to be with us
that we may
lift each other up
and honor You.
Send him now
among us
that we may
fully and better
understand him
and serve You
through him.
Amen.
When Muslims pray the 99 names of God they don’t believe that there are 99 different gods. They believe that there are 99 different attributes of God. God has many names but is still one God.
It is kind of like me. I am Betsy, but legally I am Elizabeth. To my husband I am his wife, to my coworkers I am their coworker, to my friends I am their friend. I am always me, but other people have different ways of interacting with me and know me in different ways. It depends on how they see me as to how they refer to me.
God is the same. “God” is just a descriptive, after all, not a name. In the Bible, God uses the name “I AM”. God is known as Elohim, as Jehovah, as Lord, as the Almighty, the Creator… the list goes on and on.
While there are different names for God, we are still talking about the same God that created the Earth, spoke to Abraham, and was made known on Earth as Jesus.
I’m not so sure if people are talking about the same God when they refer to Spirit.
I know a lot of people who are disillusioned with church and have left. They seem to like parts of it but not all of it. I get that. I left church too.
Some of them like the ritual. Some like the community. Some like the hymns. They are creating their own version of “church” with the pieces they like, but leaving out the pieces they don’t.
They are having circles where people talk about what is important to them, or they paint, or they drum, or they recite poetry.
I get that too.
But I’m strongly opposed to them calling it “church” if Jesus isn’t present. If they don’t read the Word of God and they don’t celebrate Communion, then why call it church? It is more coffeehouse gathering than church.
Let us call things by their true names. Let us not deceive ourselves and say that we are going to “church” when Jesus isn’t present. The same is true of the “mega churches” with their “Prosperity Gospel”.
Things evolve, of course. I left a medieval reenactment group because it stopped being a medieval reenactment group. Years ago, people who were thinking about joining asked if they could dress up like fairies and vampires, and the members told them no. They said that had nothing to do with the group. The focus of the group was “A day in the life of a European court.” The time period was pre-1500s. But then slowly it became more and more “early period” with more and more people showing up in shapeless garments with animal skins tied around them. Then, the Middle-Eastern re-enactors started showing up.
Now this group looks nothing like what it looked like when I joined. It has stopped being “A day in the life of a European court” and started being a “come as you want to be” party. When will the Klingons and the Silurians show up?
I’m all for everyone feeling welcome and included. I like the idea of “All are welcome” and “radical inclusion”. But I feel like at some point a line has to be drawn. Are we talking about the same thing? Are we still on the same page?
Hummus has a few basic things that make it hummus – garbanzo beans, oil, citrus juice, and tahini, all blended up in a food processor. While you can exchange black beans for garbanzo beans, and you can use lime juice instead of the traditional lemon juice, that is as far as you can go. After that, it stops being hummus. You can’t put apples in a blender and call it hummus. You can’t add tahini to a pot roast and call it hummus. There are certain things that you must have, and if you don’t have them, you don’t have hummus.
Church is the same way. You can strip away the ritual and the hymns and it is still church. You don’t even have to gather together in person – you could have a videoconference. You can add in dance, or painting. You don’t need musical instruments, or you can have a whole symphony.
But you have to have God, and you have to have Jesus, for it to be church. And they can’t be implied or guessed at. There has to be no doubt about it.
What about “the Goddess”?
While I’m fine with the idea of the many sides of God being welcomed and included, actually including the idea of the “Goddess” is totally not acceptable in church. Remember “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”? That is a big one. To worship the “Goddess” is a complete violation of that commandment.
God has many aspects, not all of them related to gender. You can be a feminist and still worship God. But the Goddess isn’t God – she is another thing entirely. If you want to worship the Goddess, fine. That is your choice. But then it isn’t church. It is something else. To call it church is deceiving to yourself and others.
So what about those names of God? At what point does God stop being God? At what point are you worshipping something else? At what point are you not in a worship service at all?
These are important questions to ask yourself.
Christians in recovery aren’t like recovering alcoholics. We are more like food addicts. We can’t do without food. We just need a healthy relationship with it.
When you are a recovering alcoholic you have to learn to live your life without alcohol. But you can’t live without food. You have to relearn how to eat. The trick is to learn what is a healthy relationship with food and what isn’t. The trick is to set up boundaries.
In the same way as food addicts, people who have been hurt by mainstream church (by the current definition of what “church” means) are renegotiating this relationship. They can do without the top-down leadership, the politics, and the obsession with money that comes with church as it is currently defined.
When we have had an unhealthy relationship with church, we have to renegotiate the deal. We often try to stay away from church. Sometimes we go back but to a different denomination and we find we are welcomed. Sometimes we find that welcome is short lived and we discover the same bad processes and unhealthy ways of thinking that plagued our old churches. Sometimes we start to think that the whole idea of Christianity is wrong, and we stay away from anything associated with the idea.
The only problem is that the thing that drew us to church, and the thing that got us to leave is the same thing. It is Jesus in both cases. Those of us who leave church don’t do it because we don’t love Jesus. We do. We just weren’t finding him in church, or at least any modern definition of it.
As for me, I wasn’t finding him in the activities that the church sponsored. I wasn’t finding him in the book clubs that featured books that had nothing to do with how to be a better Christian. I wasn’t finding him in the margarita karaoke evenings. I wasn’t finding him in the Bunco gatherings that were held in the parish hall. And I certainly wasn’t finding him in a minister who told me to stop talking about how God was and is interacting with my life.
I left church, but I couldn’t leave Jesus. The only problem is in trying to figure out how to have one without the other. Just like with food addiction, I need Jesus in order to live. I just can’t handle all the extras that have been added on top of him.
So much was put on my plate when I’d go to church that Jesus became the side dish instead of the main course. There were so many garnishes and condiments and appetizers and desserts that I couldn’t see him at all. When I left church and left all of that, I missed him, and I got hungry for him all over again.
I think this is true of many people I’m meeting. We love Jesus. We just don’t love how he’s been served to us.
Just like a food addict, we need to strip it all down to the basics and start from scratch. We need to reevaluate our relationship. We need to set up healthy boundaries. We need to figure out what we need and what makes us feel ill.
For me, one of the big things is that the group not have a permanent building. Jesus didn’t build a church with bricks, but with bodies. The church is the people, not the place. The more money that is spent on a church building, the less that is spent on helping people who need it.
Another thing is there needs to be no one minister. We are all ministers, by virtue of our baptism and our acceptance of Jesus into our lives. To have only one person sharing their story, and only one person making the decisions, is to take away the God-given power, voice, and ability that we all have.
So while I really like the gatherings that I’ve been going to, I’m still missing Jesus in them. I think we’ve all gotten so afraid of how we were treated at church that we’ve just dumped everything and been feeling it out. We are reassembling the jigsaw puzzle but without the picture on the box, and we are leaving out all the bits that we are afraid of.
While I like that the meetings are in friend’s homes and we all get to share our stories openly and honestly, I feel that we are missing something really important. We forget to invite Jesus to our circle. We don’t talk about him. We don’t have communion. Well, not openly. Tea and cookies can count, but it has to be intentional for it to count.
I think we feel that because we don’t talk about Jesus, because we don’t invite him to our circle, that we aren’t going to get hurt like we did the last time we were in a place that mentioned Jesus. And we might. We might get hurt because whenever we gather with other people, we gather with other people’s problems. I also think that we still need to try. Just like renegotiating a relationship with food, I think we need to renegotiate a relationship with Jesus. I think we need to invite him in, to help heal that brokenness and that hurt. I think if we don’t, then we will start to feel more and more empty.
betsybeadhead 