Chicago: What is the Role of the Church? Pt. 2

This is the second part of my two posts attempting to tackle the question:  “What is the role of the Church?”  In the last post, I covered a trip to Chicago visiting two different churches, Willow Creek and Lawndale.  For this post, I’d like to reach back to the week I spent in Chicago, and make some final conclusions.  First, pardon me while I retrace my steps a bit.

After having visited Willow Creek, I was pretty excited to see a contrasting church in Lawndale.   I had read a little bit about it, so I knew slightly what to expect.  However, it wasn’t until we were pulling up that I realized that I had been there before.  And no, this wasn’t one of those creepy deja vu things, I really had been there before.  I just hadn’t known it at the time.  During our week in Chicago, we ate at a pizza restaurant that serves as a ministry by hiring people who have been incarcerated or otherwise can’t get reintegrated into the workforce.  When I ate there in May, I knew that it was an extension of a church, I just hadn’t known that the church was Lawndale.

The visit to Lawndale’s pizza parlor was one of many examples of what seemed to be a common theme for the week: visiting another unaffiliated ministry and hearing the Sunshine folks say, “We like to help them out as much as we can.”  See, the thing is, they actually are affiliated, and they know it.  They are all Christians, and that is all that matters.  Because, in the heart of Chicago, they are in a fight.  And they are in it together, fighting with God against the ills of the world.

Too often today and in history,  the Church has fought against itself.  In history, the Church has gotten into arguments, which led to splits into denominations, who then got into their own arguments, who then split into more denominations, who then… you get the idea.  Where has the compromise gone?  Is this what God intended for us?  I understand that there are disagreements, but isn’t that natural?  Aren’t these disagreements there for the purpose of working through them?  In 1st Corinthians 1:11-13, Paul says, “Some… have informed me that there are quarrels among you.  What I mean is this:  One says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.’  Is Christ divided?  Was Paul crucified for you?  Were you baptized into the name of Paul?”  Just as we are not followers of Paul, we are not Lutherans, or Wesleyans, or followers of the Pope.  We are followers of Christ.  Christ is not divided.  So why have we chosen to divide his Church?  Are we not all brothers and sisters in Christ?

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Chicago: What is the Role of the Church? Pt. 1

Well, friends, I’ve put it off too long.  I never got the chance to extensively detail the rest of my experiences in Chicago this May, but after spending the weekend there in two vastly different churches, I think now is as good of time as any.  I’d like to tackle the question, “What is the role of the Church?”  So I’m splitting it up into two parts.  The first will discuss the events of last weekend, and the second will tie-in what I learned from Chicago in May.

As part of a summer-long quest, a group of young adults from my church in Elkhart has been venturing around the area in attempt to explore a few churches that are different than our own.  The goal of this experiment is two-fold: to witness the variety of ways that congregations worship, and to observe what different churches are doing well that could be incorporated into our own church.  After exploring a few local churches, we stepped it up a notch this week and made the trip to Chicago, visiting the megachurch of Willow Creek and Lawndale Community Church, which is, you know, maybe slightly smaller…  First, let me tackle Willow.

After reading a few things about Willow before the weekend, I got the impression that I was going to hate it, or perhaps even despise it.  It is easily one of the largest churches in the country, with an auditorium holding 7,500 people, and a supposed weekly attendance of 23,400 (not sure how that math works with only 3 services, but maybe it includes its other campuses).  It also holds a food court, large bookstore, and several other buildings on its 155 acre property.  So, this is not exactly my idea of how Jesus intended his Church to function, but as we headed towards the church, I tried to keep an open mind.  Surprisingly enough, it vastly exceeded my expectations!  …But I still kind of hated it.  The music was awesome; it’s hard to beat a thousand people singing in one voice, worshiping God.  The sermon was awesome also, and very scripturally based.  But I couldn’t help but be aggravated by the hypocrisy of it all.  Something immediately seemed a little off when we drove in, as the long winding driveway included a pull off “scenic outlook” place.  But I digress.  The sermon was on John 6, and the message is summarized in verse 27, which reads, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”  As I said, the sermon was great.  It was incredibly moving, because it was the Truth of Christ.  But, to me, the Truth of Christ doesn’t mesh with those surroundings.  How can you receive a sermon on gaining sustenance from God instead of the material world while millions of dollars, massive projector screens, unrealistically perfect people, and two artificial waterfalls stare you in the face?  I am truly at a loss for words, I can’t comprehend it at all.  Do these people read the words of Christ? Of course they do! They preach about them every week! And as far as I can tell, their sermons are right on!  But somehow they read the Bible, speak the same words, and take an entirely different message away.  I have never been so confused and conflicted by a church service in my life.  During the time of prayer, I couldn’t focus; I just kept asking God what was going on, and I wondered how he was even in that place at all.  I don’t want to condemn Willow Creek without understanding more about it, so I won’t say that this necessarily applies to it, but I would say that any time the Church is allowed to be the least bit comfortable with its selfish pursuit of the American dream, then it turns from Satan’s greatest threat to his greatest asset.  I am afraid that in our attempts to be seeker friendly, we lose the heart of the Gospel.  We lose its sting and its potency.  While in Willow Creek, I heard the teachings of Christ, but all I saw was money.

So, I guess you could say that I needed a little boost and clarity after that conflicting experience.   Luckily, I was in Chicago.  Chicago is a lot like the Christian Church in that it encompasses all ends of the spectrum economically and racially (and also spiritually, if I may ironically add).  In a drive of just 30 minutes, we were able to go from one of the richest areas I’ve ever been to one of the poorest.  The contrasts were amazing.  It is really stunning to see that such great differences can exist in the span of just a few miles.

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Shifting the Focus

I went for a bike ride yesterday, and I had a stopwatch going.  My goal for the ride, since I didn’t have a lot of time before it got dark, was just to go a short distance but ride as fast as possible.  As I was getting to the end, probably about a quarter of a mile away from home after around 6 miles of riding, I was pushing really hard.  I knew that stopwatch was counting up the seconds, so all of my energy was dedicated to going as quickly as possible.  In exchange for this speed craze, and because I was already a bit tired, my bike handling was compromised.  I started getting dangerously close to the edge of the road. Then, I veered off the road, just a tiny amount. I quickly corrected it and got back on the road.  But I couldn’t seem to maintain a straight line, again and again veering ever so slightly off the edge of the road and correcting myself.  Then, somehow, I went a little too far, and tried to correct it a little too quickly, and I went down.  But I was hardly scathed, and I knew that clock was ticking, so my only thought was to get back on and finish the ride.  Even as some riders passed on the other side of the road, asked if I was ok, and made a comment that the car behind me had his lights flashing, I failed to acknowledge them.  Ignoring them and the car behind me, I rode home and got the clock to stop… then wondered why I hadn’t said a simple thanks, or even looked at them.

Malcolm Gladwell says in his book, Blink, that when our heart rate gets too high, when we get too angry, or frightened, or work too hard, our bodies begin to shut down.  “After 145… Complex motor skills start to break down… At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing… The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain — the part of the brain that is the same as your dog’s — reaches up and hijacks the forebrain.”  When we focus too hard on one thing, we block out everything else, and as the stress continues to heighten, we lose our ability to control even that one thing upon which we’re focusing.  So perhaps this is what happened to me; I was so intent on stopping that watch that I couldn’t control my bike, acknowledge fellow human beings, or pay attention to a car with its lights flashing.

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