Stealing From the Fish Tank

…Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” –Luke 5:10b


The church is the people in it. I’ve said that. I am the church (whether you like it or not) you are the church, all the cute pastors in their jeans and blazers are the church (whether I like it or not). The sad part is the people in charge and the people going have forgotten that the church is not a building, committee, system, or program. The people coming to church demand to be entertained and sedated. The people running their church demand to be relevant and earn their keep.
It’s relentless.
I’m not an outsider but I hang out with enough of them to realize that church is now an uncomfortable place. I know a lot people that have “church” faces. We all see it but as church folks we don’t want to be called on it so we don’t call others on it. This creates a very awkward atmosphere for the non-Christian who is seeking Christianity.
We’re not fooling anybody.
I would dare say that’s why most churches don’t have non-Christians in them. They see the church face, they see the perfect pastor, the cute youth pastor and the hipster worship team and say “Crap, I can’t do that,” and then they peace out.
Christians will jump from church to church in a fanciful desire to re-invent their church face. These are the types of people that hop from church to church, don’t get involved with people (but are probably heavily involved in ministry), don’t really read their Bibles, complain about the kids program, then bail as soon as they face a crisis then go bitch about how they had no friends in that church. Then they pack up their families, write passive aggressive Facebook statuses and go to the next church.
Then the next church celebrates that they are growing and getting new families.
This doesn’t sit well with me at all. This only perpetuates the cycle of non-Christians not going to church. Maybe a few will pop in now and again, raise their hand during the time at the end of the service when the pastor offers Jesus to be their band-aid for what ails them. Then they walk through all the people talking to their friends and go past some dude who they don’t know who is chasing them down with a Bible because when everybody else had their eyes closed he looked around like a Falcon at dinner time.

Maybe they come back for a few weeks. Maybe they even get involved. But unless they drink the Kool-Aid and have no issues with anything and as long as they don’t go do any “real” sinning they will have nobody. They aren’t conditioned for this. The average non church attender, non-Christian has no idea how to survive in the Christian culture.

But those of us who’ve lived in it are survivors.

We bounce from each denizen of worship and know exactly how to do it. We raise our hands, we clap, we read the right books, we do nursery, we take notes, we have the church’s app on our cell phone. We are members. We are committed. We can play the game.

One church grows while another fizzles. One pastor is the new wave while another is the old guard. We talk about cycles and keeping up with the times like one day there won’t be another young hot shot with new ideas that we find horrid. We act like we won’t ever be the “old guy.” We act like our church will dodge the 75% teens leave after graduation bullet.

After all, we know how to grow.

When Jesus first called his motley crew of miscreants He called them to a life of insanity. These uneducated, untrained Sunday School rejects were charged with the very mission of giving God to the entire world. “Fishers of men..” meant jumping into deep water with a hand net and scuba goggles. There was no church complex to tell people to go to. There was no radio station to put on in your cubical. There wasn’t even a cute little Christian section at the local book store.

It was twelve men, one Savior, and a soap box.

We’ve lost that. The church used to just be a bunch of people who loved Jesus hanging out, praying, reading the scriptures, and eating food. There was no compartmentalizing. It was all Jesus in every aspect of life. There was nothing flashy, there was nothing sane, there was nothing normal. Christianity was totally out there and uncomfortable. It was completely irrelevant to the culture and focused on our depravity and Jesus’ love. And people were coming in droves.

Every time I talk to a pastor about the “...3000 were added to their number that day...” I get a cop out answer. “Oh, that was the time and place,” or “God needed that to then and not now,” or my favorite, “You have to look at the church universal and then you’ll see God is doing the same thing.” I don’t buy all of this. We make up excuses so we can keep our comforts of church in North America.

We really don’t want 3000 non-Christians showing up to our church this Sunday. They will stink. They will swear. The pastor is going to have to preach a basic Gospel message not a deep theological expose. Worst of all they will sit in my seat and make me talk to them. Don’t think I’m right? Check yourself the next time you go to church and somebody is in “your seat.”

But churchy people know these rules. Churched people look right, act right, smell right, talk right, and live right. Church people are so much easier to live with, work with, deal with, and have on your ministry team. The only Biblical problem is that they only attract other church people.

I’ve been guilty of this. At one point my family started going to this new church and I knew a lot of my old Christian School buddies were unhappy with their churches so I told them to come to mine. They came and loved it. Then I invited some of my non Christian friends and they came a few times and then stopped. Now the relationship was awkward. It was uncomfortable. It wasn’t clean.

We have this idea that when we tell people about Jesus and share the Gospel with them that we’ll have the Full House music play in the background and then Kirk Cameron comes out of the kitchen and gives them a Bible while the credits come across the screen. That would be easy. Sometimes it is easy. Most of the time it’s not easy. We have to be ready to fail. We have to be ready to have people dismiss us.

Nobody likes to be rejected. That’s why most of our ministries are focused on churched or previously churched people. The problem with this focus is that it creates dead faith. Jesus and the Gospel no longer brings people from death to life but rather from good to better. The reason this eventually creates zombie faith is because it looks and feels like the Gospel of Jesus but it really is the gospel of moralism/humanism/deism which is really no Gospel at all.

Having people coming to your church who have no problem (yet) with the fact that they are horrible rotten sinners is distracting, expensive, awkward, and messy. I dare you to find anywhere in the Gospels where Jesus’ preaching is anything but messy. Even when Jesus was dealing with the religious it was messy.

What would Jesus say to you if He came into your church today?

This sentiment is not going unnoticed and I know a lot of people reading this will say that they got it down. Some people get it and nobody is perfect at it. My issue still lies with church leadership. While I do believe in higher standards for Church leaders, I do think it is sad we are snobby about who we give a title too.

I was working for a church as a youth pastor and I had two leaders in my group. Both were funny, weird, a little awkward, and great with the kids. One was an desk jockey who dressed in collars, clean jeans, and short hair. The other was a laborer with tattoos, dreadlocks and tattered clothes. The pastor told me I should invest my time and energy into the first guy because he didn’t like the image of the second guy.

That was the beginning of the end for me. If we are going to have everybody at our churches we have to understand that we will attract people that are nothing like us. We will have people coming through the door that we don’t like. We will have people sitting in our pews that we would cross a street to avoid if we were in town.

This goes both ways and we have to get over ourselves.

I’m done bitching so here’s the fix: Get out of your offices, get out of your Christian bubble, and invite your non Christian coworkers to your house for a BBQ. Live life with them. Show them Jesus through you. You don’t have to wait ‘til Sunday to share the Gospel with somebody.

Most people outside of the church have a good sense for bullshit (most people in the church have an appetite for it). If your faith is real they will know it. If you really love Jesus, they will know it. This isn’t saying they will like it, but they will respect it.

To end this I’ll steal an analogy from Neil Cole: What the church is doing now is like a farmer building a barn, standing in the doorway and yelling for the crops to come in. This won’t happen. We need to get our hands dirty.