It being Sunday, we had another team meeting today. These usually go like this: Arrive 11-ish, read the comics and chat for 30 min or so, eat, chat more, make some church-related plans, do something somewhat spiritual like read from a book or read the bible or take prayer requests, have communion, chat a bit more, and go home.
I, er, expressed some frustration today over the health of our spiritual diet. I didn’t put it that way in the meeting, but that’s how it seems to me now. It seems that out of fear of institutionalizing our spirituality, such as “five acts of worship” or something like that, we have eschewed focusing on spiritual things and instead institutionalized (made regular and predictable and essential) by default some peripheral things we find ourselves doing every week - reading the comics, eating, making plans, etc. Since we don’t have any other “church service,” this is kind of it for us as far as corporate spirituality. I felt that we had, in our desire to avoid dichotomizing the sacred and the secular, ended up removing the sacred or spiritual and leaving only the secular elements.
My comments were focused around the matter of scripture. We haven’t spent much time recently studying the bible together, or reading it, or even opening a bible in our entire meeting. There are some good reasons for this, and some bad reasons one might open a bible in a church gathering, but after two or so Bible-free months, it felt to me like something was missing.
Unfortunately, my comments last week and this week came across as “we need to get the ingredients of a good church gathering right and do the same things every week,” which is probably the opposite of what we actually want. I should have said that we might not be eating a balanced enough diet, metaphorically speaking.
I think the approach that we’re recoiling from as somewhat-Gen-X-ey em-churchers is the “perfect worship service” approach that has all the right ingredients in equal proportion, repeated every week. This is what you find in most churches, and we have a certain cynicism toward that (which is probably a motivation, as well as a reassurance to ourselves, for our doing things differently). I’ll call this the “Four Food Groups” approach.
The problem with the four food groups concept is that it’s not balanced. You can eat pizza three meal a day and get all four food groups. The FDA long ago replaced the FFG with the Food Pyramid, which, despite conspiracy theories about various agricultural lobbies, is probably a more balanced approach to nutrition and diet.
The same is true of church: A balanced and healthy diet is more likely to be in place when the various kinds of food are eaten in their proper and differing proportions, not equal amounts. You shouldn’t eat equal amounts of cheese and meat and grains. The pyramid reflects that some foods need to be consumed with more restraint than others.
But with either approach, you don’t achieve a balanced diet by eating exactly the same thing every week. You try to get the end result right, but you eat different things each week. If you don’t, you’re likely to bored or have other health problems from eating so much of one thing, even if it’s good in moderation.
Lukas pointed out that we really don’t have time each week to do all the good things that a church is supposed to do. No matter what your model, there are always more things than you can really do justice to in a 2 or 3 hour meeting. Richard and Lukas both helped me realize that for us as individuals, the reality of our spiritual lives is that we go through cycles of intensity, rest, reflection, struggle, etc., and don’t just do the same perfect recipe of things each day. (The perfect recipe is also known as a “quiet time” - see Darren’s recent thoughts on this [Darren also has a new look thanks to Rachel]). For a balanced diet as a church, we need to change up what we do from week to week, and not try to cram in the “essential ingredients” every week, because 1) We’ll probably get them wrong or miss some; and 2) There is simply not enough time to do even a few such ingredients justice in one gathering, and we’d kill ourselves having ten meetings a week to get everything covered. It’s time to critically consider what’s important for us to spend time on as a church, and look at how we can emphasize those things for a healthy diet over the long term without creating unhealthy meals in the short-term.
[N.B.: It's at once mildly amusing and mildly frustrating that I can think about stuff like this for an hour and come to the same conclusion I made months ago =)]
