Skipping Church
It’s Sunday morning, and I’m at home alone. Skipping church. To fill the emptiness usually taken up by in-person fellowship, I call my buddy who is in the hospital recovering from surgery. We talk about his life and health for a while and then the verbal floodgates open. I share my perplexity about the state of Christianity and my feeling of homelessness. Well, maybe not homelessness, but being between places, on my way somewhere else. I felt a little guilty hanging up the phone. Did I really want to spread my ideas about the emptiness of modernity and the state of the evangelical church? My concern is deeper: concerning the whole enterprise of truth-seeking since the Renaissance. My internal dialogue about the nature of reality needed a sounding board. If I’m called to share the truth about my life, I must share my perplexities and doubts along with my conclusions. Otherwise, I risk hypocrisy.
When I turn on the TV, open a book, or browse a website, they often assume the primacy of reason and nature divorced from any connection to God. Thanks to our modern forebears, we are enthroned as individual judges of truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Moral outrage is the zeitgeist, but nobody agrees on the morals about which we are so outraged. Even academia is fractured—the academics disagree about the disciplines to study, the canon that comprises them, and the methods students should use. And the Church is part of the culture, so it is fragmented by innovative theology and philosophical speculation. The Enlightenment sacrificed unity on the altar of reason, but it was not enough. Truth itself is next.
Scientists replace pastors as those with the answers about right living while theologians question the authority of Revelation in the light of the brute facts of nature and history. We tame truth by making it personal, relative, or subjective. When that doesn’t make it fit our will, we reduce it to propositional statements: tame syllogisms that prove whatever we happen to believe at the moment. But most of us just ignore truth entirely. We send it packing, along with any sense of humility and acceptance of mystery beyond our comprehension. We live in a world we think we fully control, but one emptied of meaning. Maybe we are gods, but our kingdom is much smaller than His.
Some see the reductive errors of the materialist philosophy and try to correct them with reason, some Scripture, and the light of their own conscience. But their efforts often create new factions within Christianity. Much of what such well-meaning innovators assert is debatable. Their foundation is reason, with Revelation filling the cracks. Authority is out the window; we only believe what we can fully understand for ourselves.
I’ve experienced this tension firsthand. Growing up in the Mennonite church, God seemed angry and the nonviolence I was taught was out of sync with the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Over the next thirty years, I migrated slowly towards Calvinism because of its beautiful philosophy, theology and understanding of the problem of evil. It’s as perfect a system of thought as modern Christianity has produced, but is an innovation that tries to explain the mysteries of God’s sovereignty and the freedom of man after more than a thousand years of living with ambiguity. Maybe God wants us to accept the mystery rather than trying to resolve it.
I’ve grown skeptical of the central place of personal opinion. Reason, isolated from community and authority, has failed and should be ignored. The era of the individual—noble, bourgeois, and philosopher—is over. Conscience and reason must ultimately submit to authority. I want to recover the spirit of the Middle Ages, when community was based on truth, tradition, and authority. It had its significant problems. Authority was abused, and education often neglected, but most countries had one church rather than many, and society shared a common definition of the good life. Only within bounds established by revelation and the beneficent authority of the Church is a collective enterprise of philosophy and theology likely to contribute to genuine thriving. We must become a people who no longer reject God, but see him as our source of life and reason for being.
Yet this longing for ancient authority doesn’t resolve the immediate tension I feel on Sunday nights, caught between intellectual honesty and the need for spiritual community.
So despite its obvious benefits, I reject the modern experiment. I still value the common-sense idea of progress through the scientific method, but I repudiate Progress as a god that can resolve all the ills that plague us. Established within a truly Christian framework, the projects of science, philosophy, and theology need not change substantially in their content or methods. But it must surrender any pretense to authority and the naive belief that we can be rid of mystery. Truth, being so much more than the proposition, will be personal and ultimately embodied in Jesus Christ. We must pursue academic disciplines with devotion to God; otherwise, our thinking will undermine the very truth we seek to understand. Under God, our curiosity can thrive without replacing God or idolizing the self.
Calling a friend is not a long-term substitute for church. I need to engage with communal church life despite my frustrations with it. It’s been a few years since I relocated to Florida, and I want to join a functioning local body, not a perfect one. I’ll join anyone who loves Jesus Christ and wants to follow him. Still, I need to point to the foundation of our churches. It seems to me that reason and the individual conscience have cracked and fragmented it. The unity Jesus desired and prayed for is gone, and the spirit of individualism exalted above any external authority is to blame.
Perhaps what I’m seeking is what I’ve glimpsed in those sacred spaces where doubt and faith coexist—not as contradictions to be resolved, but as the very texture of honest spiritual community.
