During high school I attended church in a concrete-block building located on the grounds of a former pony farm. Several stable buildings were still standing, littered with hay, and one Sunday morning the largest of these burst into flames. Fire trucks came, the deacons dashed about moving lumber and attaching hoses, and all of us church members stood and watched as orange flames climbed the sky and heat baked our faces.
Then we solemnly filed back into the sanctuary, suffused with the scent of burnt straw and charred timbers, and listened to our pastor deliver an impromptu sermon on the fires of hell, which were seven times hotter than what we had just witnessed.
That image lived long in my mind because this was a “hellfire and brimstone” church. We saw ourselves as a huddled minority in a dangerous world. Any slight misstep might lead us away from safety toward the raging fires of hell.
My church frowned on such activities as roller skating (too much like dancing), bowling (some alleys serve liquor), and reading the Sunday newspaper. The church erected this thick wall of external rules to protect us from the sinful world outside, and in a way it succeeded.
Later, though, I came to see that some of their rules were wholly arbitrary, and some were flat-out wrong. In the Deep South, racism was an integral part of the church subculture. I regularly heard from the pulpit that blacks—and that was not the word we used for them—were sub-human, ineducable, and cursed by God to be a “servant” race. Almost everyone in my church believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. was “a card-carrying Communist”; we cheered every time a southern sheriff hit him with a nightstick or locked him in jail.
When I moved out to taste the broader world for myself, I rejected the legalistic environment of my childhood. A harsh church set back my faith for many years. In short, Christianity kept me from Christ. I have spent the rest of my life climbing back toward faith and climbing back toward church.
Why bother with church? Is church really necessary for a believing Christian? Winston Churchill once said that he related to the church rather like a flying buttress: he supported it from the outside. I tried that strategy for a while, and I am not alone. Far fewer people attend church on Sunday than claim to follow Christ.
Others simply “get nothing out of church.” Following Jesus is one thing; following other Christians into a sanctuary on Sunday morning is quite another. A formal church service, with its unvarying routine, its repetitiveness, its crowds and bulletins and announcements, its conventions of standing up and sitting down, annoyed me. The longer you stay away from church the stranger it seems, and clearly I had gotten out of the habit.
Even as I write these words, I must pause and shake my head in wonder. I have picked up the habit again, you see, and for years the church routine, this very routine that once so irked me, has seemed as comfortable as slipping on a pair of old shoes. I now like the hymns, I know when to stand and when to sit, I listen to the announcements because they involve activities I care about.
What changed my attitude toward church? A skeptic might say that I lowered my expectations somewhere along the way, or perhaps I “got used to” church just as, after numerous false starts, I got used to opera.
Yet I sense something else at work: church has filled in me a need that could not be met in any other way. Saint John of the Cross wrote, “The soul that is alone … is like the burning coal that is alone. It will grow colder rather than hotter.” Whenever I abandon church for a time, I am the one who suffers. I grow colder rather than hotter. My faith fades, and the crusty shell of lovelessness grows over me again. So my journeys away from church have always ended back inside.
Nowadays, despite my checkered past as a churchgoer, I could hardly imagine life without church. When my wife and I recently moved to another state, finding a church was one of our most urgent priorities. If we missed a Sunday, we felt a void.
How did I move from being a skeptic of the church to an advocate, from a spectator to a participant? Over the years I have learned what to look for in a church; I look outward and then inward. This new way of seeing has helped me to stop tolerating the church and learn to love it.
LOOKING OUTWARD
The church, said Archbishop William Temple, is “the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.” That is the lesson I learned most clearly from LaSalle Street Church in Chicago.
The churches of my childhood had always emphasized foreign missions, and I looked forward to the annual missions conference with its displays of blowguns and spears and tribal masks.
In Chicago, though, I learned that the mission of the church extends to the needs of its own neighborhood. One reason the congregation of such diversity worked well was that we banded together to reach the community around us. Actively serving others causes you to think less about serving yourself.
Neighborhood programs at LaSalle began when Sunday school teachers, noticing that many students could not read, offered tutoring classes after the Sunday service. The need was enormous, since the local high school’s dropout rate exceeded 75 percent. Soon busloads of students from Wheaton College were making their way to LaSalle Street to do one-on-one tutoring.
To counter neighborhood abuse by the police and by landlords, an attorney quit his firm to begin a Legal Aid Clinic, offering free legal representation to any housing project resident with qualifying (low) income. A counseling center was established, with sliding fees based on income. In Chicago, as in most U.S. cities, the majority of babies are born to single mothers, and soon the church founded a ministry to assist them as well.
More needs surfaced. When a government study reported that a third of all dog and cat food was purchased by senior citizens too poor to afford “people food,” the church began a ministry to local seniors. The director organized bingo games, featuring not money but canned goods as prizes; the seniors had fun and left with bags of food and their dignity intact.
For eleven years my wife, Janet, directed the church’s senior citizens program. She relied on seventy volunteers, and I learned through her how much good can be accomplished by a congregation of ordinary people who band together to minister to the needs around them. A local disc jockey in a red sports car would pull up to a dilapidated house each week and deliver groceries to a homebound senior. A young lawyer would take his children on weekly visits to a blind man in a nursing home. A nurse from the church made house calls.
Twice a week volunteers cooked meals—for many seniors, the only hot meals they would eat all week. Many volunteered out of a sense of guilt or responsibility, but over time, they learned that our need to give is every bit as desperate as the poor’s need to receive.
Evangelist Luis Palau captured the nature of the church in an earthy metaphor. “The church,” he said, “is like manure. Pile it together and it stinks up the neighborhood; spread it out and it enriches the world.” When I look for a church, I look for one that understands the need to look outward. Indeed, I have come to believe that outreach may be the most important factor in a church’s succeeding or failing. In a paradox of faith, the one who shares love comes away enriched, not impoverished.
Perhaps in reaction against the legalism of his childhood, Bill Leslie, former pastor at LaSalle Street, never tired of the theme of grace: he recognized his own endless need for grace, preached it almost every Sunday, and offered it to everyone around him in starkly practical ways. As I sat under his ministry Sunday after Sunday, I gradually absorbed grace, as if by osmosis. I came to believe, truly believe, that God loves me not because I deserve it but because he is a God of grace. God’s love comes free of charge, with no strings attached. There is nothing I can do to make God love me more—or less.
Grace, I concluded, was the factor most glaringly absent from my childhood church. If only our churches could communicate grace to a world of competition, judgment, and ranking—a world of ungrace—then church would become a place where people gather eagerly, without coercion, like desert nomads around an oasis.
Now, when I attend church, I look inward and ask God to purge from me the poisons of rivalry and criticism and to fill me with grace. And I seek out churches characterized by a state of grace.
I learned an enduring lesson about grace from my church’s response to Adolphus, a young black man with a wild, angry look in his eye. Every inner-city church has at least one Adolphus. He had spent some time in Vietnam, and most likely his troubles started there. He could never hold a job for long. His fits of rage and craziness sometimes landed him in an asylum.
If Adolphus took his medication on Sunday, he was manageable. Otherwise, well, church could be even more exciting than usual. He might start at the back and high-hurdle his way over the pews down to the altar. He might raise his hands in the air during a hymn and make obscene gestures. Or he might wear headphones and tune in bebop music instead of the sermon.
As part of worship, LaSalle had a time called “Prayers of the People.” We would all stand, and spontaneously various people would call out a prayer—for peace in the world, for healing of the sick, for justice in the community around us. “Lord, hear our prayer,” we would respond in unison after each spoken request. Adolphus soon figured out that Prayers of the People provided an ideal platform for him to air his concerns.
“Lord, thank you for creating Whitney Houston and her magnificent body!” he prayed one morning. After a puzzled pause, a few chimed in weakly, “Lord, hear our prayer.”
“Lord, thank you for the big recording contract I signed last week, and for all the good things happening to my band!” prayed Adolphus. Those of us who knew Adolphus realized he was fantasizing, but others joined in with a heartfelt “Lord, hear our prayer.”
Adolphus called down judgment on all the white people in the church who had caused Mayor Harold Washington such stress that he had a heart attack. He gave regular reports on the progress of his music group. Some of these prayers were met with an awkward silence. Once Adolphus prayed “that the white honky pastors of this church would see their houses burn down this week.” No one seconded that prayer.
Adolphus had already been kicked out of three churches. He preferred attending a mostly white church because he enjoyed making white people squirm. Once he stood up in a Sunday school class I was teaching and said, “If I had an M-16 rifle, I would kill all you people in this room.” We white people squirmed.
A group of people in the church, including a doctor and a psychiatrist, took on Adolphus as a special project. Every time he had an outburst, they pulled him aside and talked it through, using the word “inappropriate” a lot. “Adolphus, your anger may be justified. But there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to express it. Praying for the pastor’s house to burn down is inappropriate.”
We learned that Adolphus sometimes walked the five miles to church on Sunday because he could not afford the bus fare. Members of the congregation began to offer him rides. Some invited him over for meals. Most Christmases he spent with our assistant pastor’s family.
Boasting about his musical talent, Adolphus asked to join the music group that sang during Communion services. After hearing him audition, the leader settled on a compromise: Adolphus could stand with the others and sing, but only if his electric guitar remained unplugged (he had absolutely no musical ability). Each time the group performed thereafter, Adolphus stood with them and sang and played his guitar which, thankfully, produced no sound. Generally this compromise worked well, except for the Sundays when Adolphus skipped his medication and felt led to do a gyrating Joe Cocker imitation across the platform as the rest of us lined up to receive the body and blood of Christ.
The day came when Adolphus asked to join the church. Elders quizzed him on his beliefs, found little by way of encouragement, and decided to put him on a kind of probation. He could join when he demonstrated that he understood what it meant to be a Christian, they decided, and when he learned to act appropriately around others in church.
Against all odds, Adolphus’s story has a happy ending. He calmed down. He started calling people in the church when he felt the craziness coming on. He even got married. And on the third try, Adolphus was finally accepted for church membership.
Grace comes to people who do not deserve it, and for me Adolphus came to represent grace. In his entire life, no one had ever invested that kind of energy and concern in him. He had no family, he had no job, he had no stability. Church became for him the one stable place. It accepted him despite all he had done to earn rejection.
It gave him a second chance, and a third, and a fourth. Christians who had experienced God’s grace transferred it to Adolphus, and that stubborn, unquenchable grace gave me an indelible picture of what God puts up with by choosing to love the likes of me. I now look for churches that exude this kind of grace.
SIGN ON THE BEACH
“There are two things we cannot do alone,” said Paul Tournier: “One is to be married and the other is to be a Christian.” In my pilgrimage with the church, I have learned that the church plays a vital, even necessary role. We are God’s “new community” on earth.
I am aware, painfully aware, that the kind of church I have described, the ideal church I look for, is the exception, not the norm. Nothing troubles my faith more than my disappointment with the visible church.
Still, I must remind myself of Jesus’ words to his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” The church was God’s risk, his “gamble,” so to speak. I have even come to see the church’s flawed humanity as a paradoxical sign of hope. God has paid the human race the ultimate compliment by choosing to live within us vessels of clay.
Several times I have read the Bible straight through, from Genesis to Revelation, and each time it strikes me that the church is a culmination, the realization of what God had in mind from the beginning. The body of Christ becomes an overarching new identity that breaks down barriers of race and nationality and gender, and makes possible a community that exists nowhere else in the world. Simply read the first paragraph from each of Paul’s letters to diverse congregations scattered throughout the Roman Empire. They are all “in Christ,” and that matters even more than their race or economic status or any of the other categories humanity may devise.
My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American, or as a Coloradan, or as a white male, or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of a watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.
One scene from my time at LaSalle Street Church stands in my memory as a vivid picture of this new community. Each year in the springtime, not long after the last ice floes have melted away, LaSalle held a baptism service in Lake Michigan. I remember one year especially, a gloriously sunny day when Chicago’s ethnic life was splayed out for all to see. The melting pot simmered: dudes on roller skates decked out in plastic helmets and kneepads, cyclists honking for sidewalk space, sinewy bodies stretched out in a random pattern on the beach.
In the midst of this beachfront scene, thirteen baptismal candidates lined up to speak. There were two young stockbrokers, husband and wife, who said they wanted to “identify with Christ more publicly.” A woman of Cuban descent spoke, dressed all in white. A tall, bronzed man said he had been an agnostic until six months ago. An aspiring opera singer admitted she had just decided to seek baptism that morning, and asked for prayer because she hates cold water. An 85-year-old black woman had asked to be immersed against her doctor’s advice (“Strangest request I ever heard,” he said). A real estate investor, a pregnant woman, a medical student, and a few others each took turns explaining why they too had come to seek immersion off North Avenue Beach.
The bodies were dipped rather quickly. Each baptismal candidate emerged from the water trembling and goosepimply, eyes bright and large from the cold. Those of us on shore greeted them with hugs, and wet spots soon appeared on our chests. “Welcome to the Body of Christ,” we said.
During these proceedings, I kept glancing around at the Chicago bystanders. A few disgruntled sun worshipers moved away muttering. Most were tolerant, though, responding with stares and bemused smiles. Just another weird religious group, they probably thought.
That small scene at the beach, worked out before a curious crowd, became for me a symbol of the alternative society that Jesus inaugurated on earth so long ago. Chicago’s beaches have their own pecking order: Hispanics to the north, yuppies near the lifeguard tower, gays by the rocks. Like gathers with like, families stick together. This small community, though, encompassed stockbrokers and Cubans, an opera singer, and an 85-year-old granddaughter of slaves.
Moreover, we had assembled to declare our allegiance to another kingdom altogether, a kingdom that for us takes priority over the sensual pleasures afforded by a lazy Sunday at the beach. As each baptismal candidate was presented, someone from the church prayed aloud for that person’s new walk with God. One, in his prayer, quoted Jesus’ promise that great rejoicing breaks out in heaven when a sinner repents.
Seen from the lifeguard tower at North Avenue Beach, not much happened that Sunday afternoon. Seen from another viewpoint, that of eternity, a celebration sprang to life that will never end.
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Adapted by permission from “Church—Why Bother?” to be published by Zondervan Publishing House.
Philip Yancey is a writer in Evergreen, Colorado.
1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal
