Churches and anecdotes

As we drive to church each Sunday, we pass a huge billboard for a large and popular church in our area. The picture is a close-up of an electric guitar, and the tagline is 'For people who don't do church.' I've received flyers for this church in the mail, all of them touting its coolness, acceptance, and non-traditionalism. If you think church should be fun, without the hassle of conscience-pricks or pleas for money, then this is the place for you!

It occurred to me that part of the problem with watered-down theology and worldliness in the modern American church can be traced to personal laziness. We keep hearing, as churches push the limits and leave the sacred and the traditional for the cool and hip, that it's all in the cause of reaching the lost.

But is this a proper application for the church? Or shouldn't the church be sending out disciples and ambassadors into the world for that very purpose? After all, the church is defined as the Body of Christ. Throughout the New Testament, the church is described as consisting of the gathering of the Believers. Church, therefore, in the corporate sense, should be concerned with feeding the flock and edifying the saints.

I'm not saying that evangelism shouldn't be on our plate - it should be. So much so that nourished and edified saints should be so full of love and enthusiasm that they cannot help but tell others of Jesus Christ and bring these new converts in droves to church with them. We are supposed to go find them and convert them, not lure them to us by pretending to be like them and then - surprise! - trick them with a bait-and-switch.

I don't think the church is an appropriate place for unrepentant sinners. After all, we're actually commanded to excommunicate unrepentant back-slidden Christians and have no fellowship with them. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be loving and accepting toward those who are searching - just that our mission to them should be outside the church, not in.

Making church a fun place to hang out, proffering the excuse that it's a great evangelistic ploy, is an easy cop-out from true evangelism. After all, it's so much easier to invite someone to church (a hit-and-run seed-sowing, if you will, as contrasted with the years of one-on-one discipling Jesus modeled) than to actually bare one's soul and talk about the Gospel. 'Hey, you want to come to church with me this weekend? Don't worry - it's really cool. You won't feel out of place. It's so fun you won't even know you're at church!'

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I'm moving more and more away from the model of using anecdotal evidence from Scripture to justify doctrine. Perhaps this caution comes from an overdose of this kind of Biblical interpretation when I was younger, when I accepted all these theories as principles at face value. I'm not suggesting that we can't learn from others' examples. We should do exactly that. That's why so many of those stories were written: as an example for us, as Scripture itself says, not as common law precedent. We are supposed to learn from them, not copy them.

The most misguided example of this kind of extrapolation, in my opinion, involves the teaching that dancing is wrong because, among many other things, we read of Miriam leading the women of Israel in a dance after the defeat of Pharaoh's armies and the very next time we hear of her, she is teaming up with Aaron to challenge Moses' authority. Clearly, dancing gave her the uppity spirit of independence, so it was wrong for her, and it is wrong for us to dance. Now that's a real stretch. Are you going to argue that since Aaron got off the hook with a mere slap on the wrist, we should all join the priesthood to enable us to get away with sinning, because it worked for him? Nonsense! You can extract all kinds of morals from any given fable, which is why you can't rely on stories for building a creed.

The specific application of this particular train of thought came to me when I was pondering the best kind of tax system, and had just about concluded that a poll tax was really the best. 'And it's even Biblical!' I thought with triumph. Then it dawned on me to question whether, just because it was how God assigned taxation for the children of Israel in the Old Testament, it was necessarily the best system for America today. I think it has a lot going for it. But such a system should stand on its own merits, not be our first choice just because It's In The Bible.