It's Not Hard To Go To Church--What's Hard Is Loving Your Neighbor
There’s a steep decline in U.S. church membership and attendance, and although I guess I’m supposed to care about this, I don’t. In many ways I think it’s good because if cultural Christianity withers, authentic Christian life might flourish.
I think our entire Christian culture and most churches including my own risk focusing on church attendance and membership as if they were ends in themselves, instead of thinking of church participation as a sign of deeper and more radical commitments.
The church, the body of Christ, is called to something very deep and profound: whole-hearted love of God and whole-hearted neighbor-love.
Love of God and love of neighbor are two sides of the same coin. Jesus says so.
So when modern skeptics wonder whether or not they really need to go to church or not, I kind of want to shift the conversation entirely and ask instead: “Are you devoting your whole life toward love of your most vulnerable neighbors? Are you willing to risk loss of property, personal safety, status, etc. for your neighbor?”
If the church is really being the church, the body that is the church would answer resoundingly, “Yes! By the grace of God.”
It’s not so much about Sunday habits, and much more about extracting oneself from complicity in the powers of the world that demean your neighbor.
I end up in a lot of conversations with folks who say, “I’m just not sure I believe [fill in the blank…. the resurrection, the Virgin Birth, Jesus as the Son of God].
But increasingly I want to test those concerns out with another question, “When’s the last time you risked losing your job or getting kicked out of your neighborhood because you stood up for your needy neighbor?”
I’m reminded of something Søren Kierkegaard wrote in Provocations:
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of schemers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?
Herein lies the real place of Christian thought. Christian thought is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless thinking, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
I open the New Testament and read: “If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.” Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars!
I have wanted to make people aware and to admit that I find the New Testament very easy to understand, but thus far I have found it tremendously difficult to act literally upon what it so plainly says.
Might it be more pertinent, and more honest, to admit that our failure isn’t in not going to church, but in not committing 100% to what we know we are called to do as Christians?
And, if we thought of church not as a responsibility to fulfill in order to be pious, and instead thought of it as the primary workshop where we help one another love God and love our neighbor, wouldn’t it be kind of easy to go to church, because wow we all need a lot of help to really love our neighbors, right?
One of my favorite New Testament theologians is Ernst Käsemann. In a series of lectures he gave in Germany in the 1970s, he said this:
In the no-man’s land in which the Nazarene [Jesus] dies we unavoidably must do with politics, whether or not we want to… in this situation a Christian statement or church statement is always and necessarily a political factor. Whoever denies this seeks and finds at this point a third possibility for Christians and the church, makes of the gospel a call to private piety. Further, such a person does not consider that even silence toward existing situations and the uncritical recognition of traditional convention have political consequences. Our Protestant Christianity is still most intimately attached to a bourgeoisie, which for centuries regarded inwardness as the place for religion but toward the outside heralded nationalism and justified it by the fourth commandment.
Church or theological authority cannot overlook or obscure the fact that the first commandment has consequences that are unavoidably political. God—who claims the world as God’s creation and wants to be served in our everyday lives—at most leaves children, the sick, and the aged in peace and quiet. But he commands us to care not merely for the soul but also for the body, for the welfare and salve-ation of our neighbor. We therefore cannot look on when the neighbor’s conditions on earth are life destroying, and it is not enough merely to respond to it with alms. We ourselves are needed totally when the other suffers and is cast out. What this means in a shrinking world is clear, since now, by virtue of increasing information, we see our neighbors with ever greater clarity, as far as in South Africa and South America, in India as well as in the Eastern Bloc…
Are we prepared to enter into the discipleship of our Lord before the gates of Jerusalem, or Babylon, and—if it should come to that for us!—of capitalist society? Our hearts are not allowed the neutrality of the observer. If the heart is truly made restless by the question of the divine rule in the world and of our neighbor’s welfare, it will forever behave in a politically restless way. Positioned by the Crucified, rest cannot possibly be the citizen’s first duty.
“We ourselves are needed totally when the other suffers and is cast out.” Totally. And the great distraction of our focus on church attendance is to portray it as if the church needs our attendance in order to survive, when it’s really that our neighbors need us organized as church if we going to direct ourselves toward neighbor-love, and especially if we are going to be political about it.
This is the part in all of this that may be the most confusing. A lot of us feel we can be religious on our own. And of course we can. But this is most definitely a bourgeoise kind of piety, religion turned inward.
Faithfulness that is political, that will actually impact the world in ways that benefit our neighbors, necessarily is done together in community. It requires a very different kind of organizing, of course, spiritual organizing that may or may not look anything like party or union or other kinds of group organizing.
But we need the church as a body and we find our place in it because it is the training grounds for neighbor-love in its political dimension (which is it’s spiritual dimension).
One other thing: I think we’d be a lot less likely to “take or leave” church participation if we committed ourselves to meeting the needs of one another in church. You can’t really skip church if you’re giving someone a ride. They need you.
But when we break down class barriers (Käsemann is onto something essential when he repeatedly calls out the bourgeoise captivity of the church) so that very different peoples all find themselves in the church together, then inevitably the church discovers together, as a body, how much they need one another.
Many of us discover this for the first time when we worship in a community very different from us. Join a group of prisoners in the jail some week, and you realize you are visiting a group that only gets to see people from the outside world if those siblings in Christ come to them. Join a group of Christian protestors worshipping while picketing a pipeline, the same holds true.
So if we could switch our mentality away from “I guess I’m going to church because I’m supposed to” or “I’m skipping church this week because I don’t really feel like it” and instead started thinking “I need time with a group of people who together will keep me on the way of Jesus,” or “my siblings need me (and my money or my car or my house or my voice)” then we’re getting somewhere.