Straddling The Tiber

Read something by John MacArthur today that made me shake my head. It is similar to hundreds of essay and blog posts I have read before and each time it makes me sad. What I read today is a 2009 post from John, Gimme That Showtime Religion…

Can the church fight apathy and materialism by feeding people's appetite for entertainment? Evidently many in the church believe the answer is yes, as church after church jumps on the show-business bandwagon. It is a troubling trend that is luring many otherwise orthodox churches away from biblical priorities.

Church buildings are being constructed like theatres. Instead of a pulpit, the focus is a stage. Some feature massive platforms that revolve or raise and lower, with colored lights and huge sound boards. Shepherds are giving way to media specialists, programming consultants, stage directors, special effects experts, and choreographers.

The irony here is rich and tragic. Instead of a pulpit, there is a stage? There has always been a stage that the pulpit sits on and whether it is a wooden pulpit, a glass lectern or a stool where the pastor sits, at least for the last 1700 years, the congregation is merely an audience of mute observers. Some people like upbeat contemporary Christian music, others warmly familiar liturgy, still others lengthy exegetical expository sermons. Whatever. It is all religion, repackaged over and over again for centuries but essentially the same. For example, here are three different packages…

The seeker sensitive pastor leads the service. He wears a particular uniform that marks him as a “man of God”: skinny jeans, a graphic t-shirt and horn rimmed glasses. He does almost all of the speaking and officiates over the sacraments like baptism and communion. The rest of the congregation sits quietly and watched him. He has special educational training and is hired by the church to perform clerical tasks.

The conservative Reformed pastor leads the service. He wears a particular uniform that marks him as a “man of God”: a dark suit and conservative tie. He does almost all of the speaking and officiates over the sacraments like baptism and communion. The rest of the congregation sits quietly and watched him. He has special educational training and is hired by the church to perform clerical tasks.

The Roman Catholic priest leads the service. He wears a particular uniform that marks him as a “man of God”: a priestly collar and priestly robes. He does almost all of the speaking and officiates over the sacraments like baptism and communion. The rest of the congregation sits quietly and watched him. He has special educational training and is hired by the church to perform clerical tasks.

The doctrines are different, dramatically so. The meaning of certain aspects of the service is radically different although the rituals are eerily similar. But when you are sitting in the pew, whether at some groovy church or St. Something or other Catholic Church or Grace Community Church in California, if you aren’t a clergyman you are just an observer. You are there for the show.

I had a conversation the other day online that highlighted for me once again the dilemma of the traditional Protestant apologist trying to discuss ecclesiology with a Roman Catholic apologist, namely that when it comes to the church Protestants have not moved terribly far away from Mother Rome. Each Sunday most Protestants find themselves unknowingly straddling the Tiber River, one foot in the Reformation and the other in Rome and neither in the New Testament.

In some ways you can argue that the form doesn’t matter much. There are Christians in church forms of all types and many of them are doing the work of the Kingdom, in megachurches and in tiny congregations, traditional churches and organic churches. So who cares how it looks? Let’s just do our thing in our way and see what happens.

While I get that and can affirm much of it, I am left with the inescapable conclusion that form does matter because form has such an impact on how the church functions or, more to the point, doesn’t function. Church as event, church as entertainment, church as religious inoculation, church as performance. All of these common unspoken but unmistakable forms of “church” inevitably hamper spiritual growth, reinforce the “leave it to the professionals” mentality and turn the vibrant, living Body of Christ into rows of immobile mannequins silently watching an overburdened man pouring out the fruits of his weekly efforts in the form of a 45 minute speech.

That is why so many of us spend so much time exploring, studying and discussing ecclesiology. It matters! It matters how we gather, why we gather and what we take from our gathering. It is so important that we cannot assume anything, we cannot just accept a tradition because it is 50 or 100 or 500 years old.

Form is not everything but form certainly is something.