What do you do when church isn’t the reflection of heaven’s society it ought to be? What do you do when entering the church building is more likely to raise your blood pressure than offer rest and nourishment for your soul? When the people you love in the Lord begin to look like the enemy? What do you do when you are ready to wash your hands of your spiritual family and be done?

1. Don’t Run. Stay put. Like a good marriage a church family relies on your commitment, and my commitment, to stick with it. Unlike marriage that commitment may not be quite “until death do us part,” but it’s pretty close. If you believe Ephesians, than you are responsible to fill a vital, God-ordained role in Christ’s body, the church. When you abandon your local church you are quite literally, in a spiritual sense, ripping that body apart. Christ can repair that body, but “what God has joined let not man put asunder.” Respect the head of the body, the brain if you will, to know when it’s time for you to move on, and then wait patiently.
2. Love actively. Do something for someone in your church. Do something for everyone in your church. Even if you don’t want to. Even if you are certain that no force on earth could convince you to fellowship with them/her/him again. Pray for them. Pray sincerely. Don’t pray one of those “Dear Lord, please remove this pain” prayers. But pray fervently, genuinely seeking the good of your brother/sister in Christ before the throne of God. And then engage. Make them a meal, bake them bread, crochet them a blanket, and/or mow their yard. Do something! Satan loves it when we sit around and ponder from afar. Love your family like God loves your family. When they hated Him, He died for them. What have you sacrificed/done for those pests lately?
3. Grace, grace, grace. In an era when grace means a free pass or blindness to sin, I don’t mean either at all. I mean actual grace the kind that allows growth, encourages godly change, and cheers progress. It is so easy to assume that because we are brothers and sisters in Christ that our relationships should be natural and easy. Bologna! There is nothing more unnatural than putting a bunch of diverse sinners in a box and asking them to accomplish something productive for the Kingdom. The only reason we exist as a church at all is the manifold grace of God who saw us in our sin, sees us in our sin, and chooses to forgive and use us despite our sin (with the loving intention of ridding us of that sin through the slow and painful process of sanctification). As Christ wannabes our job is to reflect that grace to each other (forgiveness and restoration) and to receive that grace from others (yes, receiving grace takes grace, too). The church should be a great big hall of mirrors reflecting around to all the only true grace – the grace of God.
4. Work on your expectations. Read Corinthians. Most of us can feel pretty smug about our churches when reading Corinthians. Just kidding . . . sort of. Read Corinthians, yes, and realize that the Corinthians were a church. A church for which Paul “[gave]thanks always,” despite their divisions, rank carnality, and spiritual immaturity. Paul had to remind the Corinthians that the “foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Why? “So that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” So that if you feel like boasting your only option is to “boast in the Lord.” From the very, very beginning there has been trouble in the church. That isn’t likely to stop until glory. Get over it. If your focus is on the problems and on the human-being-sinners that create all the problems your expectations for the church will constantly be disappointed. You need something stable and sure to anchor your soul in the midst of your troubled (and it will always be troubled as long as it is composed of humans) church. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf. . .” (Hb. 6:19-20a) Manage your expectations by expecting only what God expects . . . not what you would like. When God assembled your church, He knew what he was getting. He hasn’t been surprised yet.
5. Don’t burn bridges. Love your church family enough to consider well before you act or speak what exactly the consequence of your action/words might be. These are the people we are stuck with for eternity. Eternity is a really long time. (And yes, I do realize we won’t be holding grudges in heaven.) I’m a firm believer in taking a little time away. Not forever, just a bit to remember and reflect so that you come back to your family renewed. I’ve said it before, and maybe it bears repeating (I know I need to hear it again.), your church is your family. What besides family can bring out of you such love and frustration? Sometimes a break is healthy. But you don’t walk away; you don’t stop communicating, loving, and guarding. Be angry and sin not. Be annoyed and sin not. Be hurt and sin not. Sin makes messes. Sin divides. Sin burns bridges. The most perfect Love in the world is unable to look at sin because He sees its true consequence. Assess sin as God does. Assess the church as God does. And you will be less likely to be willing to burn bridges in your church.

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Philippians 2:1-8

The church really, really shouldn’t work. It makes no sense. It is baffling. And if you don’t believe me, you haven’t been paying attention in church.

I think we take the ridiculous ineptitude of the church for granted. We go to church like we go through life. We assume that most people are a great deal like us, until we run smack up against someone who really isn’t–and there the explosion of personalities leaves one or both parties breathless and occasionally damaged. In order to avoid these situations we tend to flock together with people who are, well, a lot like us–people with similar tastes, interests, outlooks, lifestyles, etc. There is nothing particularly wrong with this until you come to church. The whole point of the church is to overcome differences in personality, background, and taste in our one common mind: Christ. A common mind that makes slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek, old and young, rich and poor, tactful and brusque, with and without taste, scrapbookers and non-scrapbookers, all brothers and sisters under the loving father-ship of God.

Like any family (because the home is God’s picture of so many eternal truths), this family experiences loss, joy, malaise, exultation, surprise, etc. together. We are commanded to rejoice together and to sorrow together. When was the last time church did that? Just celebrated because God had done great things for someone in the congregation? Or broken out in spontaneous prayer for God to work or in thankfulness for God’s working on behalf of someone? As firmly as I believe in the traditions and rituals of church (I think we ignore them to our peril and slavish follow them to our destruction — more on that later), I am dismayed at how little spontaneity we generally embrace when it comes to prayer and praising.

Like all families there is friction. I mean, let’s face it, humanly speaking asking a church full of sinners to go about accomplishing good is the equivalent of herding cats. The friction is multiplied by the fact that we aren’t just commanded to go out and do good, we are also commanded to become good–to become more like our Father. We are commanded to encourage, exhort, rebuke, edify, teach, correct each other into more Christ-likeness; and we all know how much human beings love to be encouraged, exhorted, rebuked, edified, taught, and corrected into change of any kind!

Someone, and I wish I could remember who, said that drama is locking two people who disagree in a room and letting them fight. Multiply this by the number of members at your church and you have your church drama quotient. At least three times a week (and if we were more like the NT church that met together daily for prayer, even more) we put X number of people (who in the normal course of events would probably never connect) into a room and require them to be family.

The sad thing is that this rarely actually happen, especially if you are like me. I’m still like the person looking for birds of a feather. I find “my” people in church and generally stick with them. We make excuses for it in church–they sit on the piano/organ side (because clearly switching pews in church is impossible), they take off right after the service (because inviting people over to our homes is evidently just too much work), they are hard to talk to/don’t seem very open (no comment!). Biblically, I don’t think we have (cliché alert) a leg to stand on. We are being sinful. I am being sinful.

Until we repent and start treating the entire church (even the difficult people) like the family God intended it to be we will never begin to understand the most breath-taking truth about the church: It is, despite all of its deformity, “the manifold wisdom of God.” Ponder on that for a bit and if you are not re-convinced that God’s ways are not our ways and that God’s thoughts are not infinitely higher than our thoughts, go ponder it a little longer. Praise God that he uses the broken, weak, ridiculous things of the world to work out his own glorious purposes. Praise God and then go out and meet some of those broken, weak ridiculous things that sit on the piano/organ side. Get to know the family God has provided for you in the church.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” Eph 2:19-22

In the most reductive terms (this is not to imply that being reductive is of necessity bad any more than a sketch is less valuable/correct than a realistic, colored painting) materialism is the belief that the world is comprised solely of material, tangible, quantifiable components;

OR, from Google, because the internet knows everything (Just kidding! But in this case the internet is fairly enlightening):

MATERIALISM (noun) A tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.  The doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.

Within the materialistic worldview any kind of spirituality is at best a delusion or perhaps only the misfiring of an under-evolved brain. The church has too long attempted to inoculate its constituents to the work of materialism by attacking the most obvious flaws of the system with truisms like:  “Don’t live for things”; “Don’t let money rule your life”; or “Be heavenly minded.”  (All good ideas based in Scripture, so please don’t read this as a dismissal of the value of these truths.)  However, these fail to address the complexity of the dangers of materialism.  They only address the most obvious danger. The more alarming danger of/from materialism comes when the church, either individual or corporate, lives as if responding to the material world like the unsaved were normal. When we as a church act like the unsaved world’s normal (which in our current cultural climate is almost completely materialistic) is normal, we are in trouble.

INDIVIDUAL MATERIALISM–

When it becomes normal for church members to live like everyone else–in comparative ease, pursuing activities for personal gain/enjoyment, assuming having a career/home/healthy family/money/anything is to be expected–we have become Practical Materialists because, frankly, this kind of lifestyle is found nowhere in the Bible.

Consider Hebrews 11:

• Noah spent one hundred years, give or take, building a boat. He gave up, literally, the entire world he knew.
• Abraham left his family and his home to wander around a land he had never seen. (Now Abraham was wealthy, but this tended to be as much a problem as a blessing. Consider Genesis 13:3-7, for instance.)
• Sarah believed against all human odds that God could provide her with a son.
• Joseph made slavery into a lucrative career by obeying even when obedience seemed to mean career-suicide. (Not that Joseph was thinking of a career, but that’s sort of the point.)
• Moses exchanged life in a sophisticated, urban, cultured palace to lead a bunch of whiny, rebellious people around the wilderness.

The point of all this is that these people chose to live in the realization that the material world around them was insignificant in comparison to the Spiritual world to which they were called.  And you don’t have to take my word for it:

“These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.” (Hebrews 11:13-16)

And if you don’t favor OT examples (shame on you) consider:

• Paul at God’s call left his cultured, religious world to join the group he had made it his lifework to persecute.
• Aquila and Priscilla followed Paul to minister to him even when it meant facing persecution and discomfort.
• Peter left his cultural “home” as a Jew within the Jewish nation to preach peace to the Gentiles–a move with ramifications beyond the ken of us Gentiles.
• Barnabas, Silas, Philip (one of my personal favorites), all the women who housed the church in their homes even when the church was facing persecution, etc.

I don’t know what living above/beyond/without consideration for the material immediacies of life means for you. I’ve read about it and felt like a worm in comparison:  Hudson Taylor, George Mueller (and his wife, who is seldom mentioned, but I bet she was incredible), Mary Slessor, etc.  I’ve seen it on occasion and it’s breathtaking.  A missionary who took a trip to Albania and stayed because God called him there. Friends who sold their beautiful home so that they would be free to follow God’s call more easily.  But it’s so rare, which is heartbreaking.

To conclude this part let me just put out a general reminder to myself most of all:

Normal people, people who live giving too much value to material concerns, don’t tend to fare well in Scripture: Jonah, Ananias and Sapphira, Lot, Samson, Cain, etc.

More to come, but, as always, thanks for listening.