Amusing Ourelves to Death

Entertaining Church

As a kid, I found the circus, a parade, an episode of Monty Python, or even a half-chewed hunk of bubble gum more captivating than church. A lot has changed since then. If anything, the various ways we can amuse ourselves has grown expotentially. And "church" has worked hard to keep from losing ground.

More's the pity.

Whatever its failings, church used to be church. Distinct from other institutions. Mysterious and, yes, awe-inspiring. Even as the afore-mentioned distracted kid, I can remember gingerly entering a church with a sense of reverence. It was a congregation that still practiced high liturgy, and the feeling came from the church. Not my parents or anyone else. My dad was an agnostic who used to joke that he made it through a liturgical service (or any other for that matter) by counting ceiling tiles. Mom was too busy wrangling four wriggling boys to display even a modicum of reverence. So where did the feeling come from? It came from a sense of otherness that the church oozed.

As that kid, I knew I was in a place that wasn't like any other. The experience assaulted me with a sense of the divine, and I both loathed and loved it.

It's hard to find a church like that today. Even those that still have an architecture and physical space designed to communicate otherness have so accomodated contemporary tastes in order to become "relevent" that they've dulled their distinction from society's more earthbound institutions.

More's the pity.

So what do contemporary churches do? They get with the program. Better sound systems. Bigger, more professional bands. Eye-tickling lighting. They entertain. My question? Is it still church? What makes church obviously different from any other organization—somethiing more than a social club with outstanding production values?

Christ. The Lord of all, and Lover of our souls. As the Church (capital "C", as opposed to "church"), it is our delight to proclaim Christ. To shout the Gospel of God's love for us in Christ. To celebrate the mystery of His coming to save us as one of us. That doesn't sound like entertainment. It sounds like life. The really tough part of answering the question I posed above is not the "what", or the "Who" but the "how." We're still working on that.

More's the pity. Or maybe not.

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