The Value of "Church"

Part one of several thoughts about church.

I’ve been in the orbit of an open-minded nondenominational church in DC for several years, and currently I’m in a wider orbit. I’ve not been attending the in-person services — in part, because I’m in Columbia on the weekends and I haven’t wanted to make the drive into DC and back on Sundays. So over the summer, I went to a nondenominational church in the Columbia area instead. It was a church in that Hillsong genre: Big, dark auditorium. Casually dressed pastors. Big LED screens. A loud band playing music that thumps in your chest. The sermon was about the sanctification process. Conversion, a young associate pastor said, initiates a process of sanctification, and this leads to entry into a kingdom of heaven.

After the sermon, another song was played, and folks ate the Lord’s Supper. Small plastic containers with a tiny wafer and a little bit of grape juice had been placed in the seats in front of everyone before the service, and folks took this and ate and drank. During this process, I heard a number of people sniffling, when I’d not heard anyone sniffling before. I was under the impression that people had been weeping. I found this so moving.

Sometimes, we can’t escape ourselves. We do less than we want to do, are less than we want to be. It doesn’t feel good. It’s quite a thing to bring this into the presence of a supreme God of grace, to hold it up, and to feel it loved in a rarified environment. Or to feel a sense of divine consolation in the face of some unexpected trial or suffering. To feel a redeeming, comforting love of God. These are the kind of thing that I imagined folks were weeping about. I’ve wept about these kinds of things in church, too.

I would imagine most of us would recognize an inherent desire to be more than what we are. For some people this might seem compulsory, extrinsically motivated. But the deeper one looks the more obvious I think it becomes that a basic desire is intrinsic. If your worldview holds that the ground of being is consciousness, then there’s an interplay between the intrinsic motivation that belongs to us, and a reaching toward us from beyond. That ground of reality calls us to an encounter with it. We insistently seek growth, and the ground of reality insistently seeks us, and seeks to grow us. This is the existence we have.

It seems clear to me that any stage in the growth process like the process of learning to ride a bike. When you first get on, the bike is hard to manage. You have to get used to the bike. You have to learn. I think we learn our larger selves and our larger worlds in a similar way. It can be accomplished by having temporary encounters, and then coming away to metabolize those encounters. Bit by bit.

This seems to me to be a big part of the reason that humans create sacred space. Yes, everything is sacred. But creating a rarified space has its uses. You go in. You have an experience. You take the experience with you, and digest it. Repeat. If you were in too rarified of a space all the time, this might be stressful. Over time, this can really have an effect of the fabric of one’s consciousness. This process of the periodic, but regular enough encounter seems like a natural aid to transformation.

Temples are nearly universal. In ancient Israel, the original temple was the tabernacle with multiple inset chambers representing increasing degrees of rarification and holiness. Of necessity, the original tabernacle was portable, as the story goes — designed to be transported through the wilderness before the Israelites settled in the “promised land” of Canaan. This story emphasizes the idea that the structure itself is secondary to its function — which I think is an important idea to keep in mind.

I’ve been reading Ken Wilber’s most recent book Finding Radical Wholeness: The Integral Path to Unity, Growth, and Delight, which I recommend to everyone. I don’t take Wilber as gospel, the way some people do. But I think his modeling is really useful — a good, solid anchor as we’re all “camming” our way up the mountain. Wilber’s really into stage theories — Graves’ Spiral Dynamics, Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness, James Fowler’s stages of religious development, etc. These various stage theories pull out one of the central tensions in religious organizations — which is that the narratives of religious institutions often don’t jibe with the levels of cognitive or spiritual development of the participants.

I went back to this nondenominational church a second time, and I realized I couldn’t settle in with this community for this reason. Every week, they show videos of folks getting baptized, and the entire auditorium — several hundred, maybe a thousand people — cheer. A large number of people seem so sure they understand the good in what’s occurred. I find that unnerving. The answers are too thick, and without knowing what they are, I have the distinct impression that they’re too fundamentalist.

More often than not — far, far too often — many people have to leave some part of their genuine understanding at the door in order to enter the temple. Folks get tired of that. Church attendance is shrinking.

But to have lost, in the process, this experience of the tabernacle — of the temple — is terribly unfortunate. Even at that church I can’t attend, I can’t help but admire the process of the intensive, weekly immersion in sacred space — and to long for it. It’s good to have a weekly immersion in the way of the world that you dream about. It’s good to do this in community. It’s good to do this is somewhat large community, to continue to dwell in the dream that a more beautiful world is something that we can experience broadly, ambiently — culturally.

It’s very good to do it at least once a week. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing with life? Just the next thing? That’s not bad, I guess. But, really?

The second week I attended this nondenominational church the sermon was about the ways we develop through the choices we make. What a wonderful thing for a thousand people to talk about: Real conversation about things that really matter in the functioning of our lives. This was the part of what Alain de Botton had in mind when he undertook the “School of Life” project — which aimed to be a church without a theology.

One of the key tricks of getting church to work, of course, is content. What are you going to talk about, exactly? What are you going to do? The content has to be selected by human decisions, and so the quality of the content is going to be mediated by the insight of the folks who are putting it together — or, at least, by the structures that they put in place to decide what the content will be. Many church organizations, in my experience, are pretty authoritarian — particularly as they get smaller. The pastor is treated as a kind of avatar, or messenger of the divine, and is ceded a great deal of authority in the making of decisions. This authoritarianism dissipates a bit in mainline Protestant churches, and in the Catholic church, but it’s replaced by dogma, which has its own obvious rigidity.

There’s more to say about this part, for sure. But this problem doesn’t occlude the essential enticements of church. Church is worth thinking about.