A Church-Membership Sabbatical

When our small church disbanded in the summer of 2008, we sensed God’s direction to spend a year or so visiting churches in a roughly 30-mile radius of our home. Our ultimate goal was to find a new church home. Along the way, we wanted to visit old friends who, over the years, had moved on to other churches. More deeply, we wanted to take the time to see firsthand what God might be doing in the larger body of Christ in our area and how he might speak to us there.

There was a lot to see! In the course of visiting 26 churches in our area, several more than once, plus eight other churches further afield, we encountered some very pleasant surprises, and we also faced some less pleasant situations. In this article we share some of these experiences, plus mention some of the perspectives that we gained in the course of making these visits.

New Perspectives? Not Easy!

On a recent trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, a city of over 600,000, we noticed that there were no limited-access highways through the city. We learned that this lack had irritated some visitors from the United States, who had expected interstate highways to exist through and around all major cities they might drive through. Vancouverites, though, wanted it just the way they have it. They have one perspective on how driving should be in major cities, we Americans have a different perspective.

While we were in Vancouver we took a guided architectural tour of the city, examining a series of different neighborhoods. We visited Charleson Park, part of a neighborhood designed by an environmentalist. Then, across False Creek, we noticed a very different area of high-rises developed by a Hong Kong architect. Our guide mentioned that, on a visit once to the Charleson Park area, with all its trees and parks, the Hong Kong architect had commented negatively about the people who were living there, “How can they live this way? Look at all this wasted space!”

These two examples of exasperation show hard it is for us humans to move beyond our own perspectives or ways of doing things.

In the course of their institutional life, churches inevitably develop habits in the way they do things—what songs they like to sing, what musical styles they prefer, how they pray, what gets emphasized in the sermons, and assumptions about the character and working of God. These attitudes and habits collectively define what is “natural” and “normal” in a church’s life. In most cases, it becomes hard to notice these habits, much less evaluate them—they just seem so normal! In his book Preacher, Can You Hear Us Listening? pastor Roger Van Harn makes a good point in urging churches to deliberately engage in cross-cultural experiences, for “nothing helps us see our own culture better than seeing ourselves through the eyes of people from different cultures” (p. 94).

In visiting several churches in our area, we crossed no major cultural boundaries. Nonetheless, by exposing ourselves to different ways of doing things, we gained some new perspectives that we perhaps would not have had we been spending our time in only a single church circle.

Our Starting Point

Before starting this journey, we identified four questions that were key for us in observing and evaluating the various church communities we would visit:

Do we sense here a passion for God himself?
Does this seem like a community in which we could use our gifts (versus simply helping to staff established programs)?
Is there a sense of community here, of people belonging to each other?
Does this church convey a sense of being part of the larger body of Christ in the area (versus being a self-contained entity)?

These questions could not be fully answered after just one or two visits. They did, though, provide a focus for observing the actions and attitudes of the various churches we visited. Throughout these months, we have been thoughtful and prayerful about where to attend and about how to interact with the many people we encountered in the various churches.

In every case, the people of the churches we visited were gracious in welcoming us as visitors into their midst. We would be pleased in return if these comments might be of any use to any of the churches we visited.

Worship

In the worship part of the services, we encountered a wide variety of formats and—not surprisingly—music, words, and instruments, from percussion to pipe organ, from simple microphone to sophisticated sound system. (Perhaps the most unexpected was a praise group filling the whole front of the auditorium, complete with guitars, drums, and recorders, an energetic band that consisted primarily of gray-haired saints!)

Some of the more memorable worship experiences we had, both positive (+) and negative (-):

+ A worship opening that was very clearly and thoughtfully God-focused. First a very specific call to the audience to join in worship of God, then a prayer-song of praise, then a “prayer of praise” by the leader (true to its announced title, the prayer focused in praise of the character of God, not merely on thanksgiving for benefits he has given), then the sturdy Charles Wesley hymn “Oh, for a Heart to Praise My God.” By this point, our hearts were full of praise to God for who he is, with deep gladness.

+ A worship leader (one of the church’s elders) who opened with a Scripture reading. It related to a hospital visit he had made during the week before and a conversation he had with a woman there. It involved the character of God, who proved himself faithful in the face of suffering. The leader then developed this theme through the songs he had selected for audience singing, which were assisted by a very competent worship team. The unity and thoughtfulness of this leader’s contribution stuck long in our minds.

+ Miked worship leaders singing from the front row, facing the front. This choice of positioning (versus putting the whole team on the stage) helped keep the worship team itself from being the center of attention.

+ A pastor following his sermon with a congregational response hymn that was accompanied only by a keyboard. We noticed that, by having only a keyboard for accompaniment, he could move immediately into the singing without waiting for the entire praise band to reassemble. Good awareness of timing and audience focus!

– A church service that began with no noticeable attempt to draw the audience’s thoughts and hearts together toward God and into worship of him. The “worship” began simply when the musicians started playing the lead-in to the first song. But does singing itself equal worship? For which of God’s attributes or actions are we worshipping him in this music?

– Worship when the leader’s main contribution was urging us to sing louder (what about those of us who don’t know the songs? how are we supposed to sing along if we see only the words?) or telling us to “put our hands together for God” (but is it on the beat? off the beat? what about us, the rhythmically challenged?).

– A worship time when, despite the urging and pleading of the praise band in the front, most people in fact were not singing along or visibly participating at all. In the front row, though, two church leaders were actively singing and clapping with the music. Were they aware of how unengaged many people at that service seemed to be?

Somewhat unexpectedly, we found that our feelings of worship and engagement with God went up or down, not so much with the familiarity or unfamiliarity of the music, or even with the volume or the styles of the instrumentation, but with whether the worship leader did or did not take an active role in helping draw the hearts of those assembled toward God himself and some aspect of his character.

Public Prayer

As with our experience of worship, so with public prayer we noted quite a variety in the churches we visited, in both the number and the content of the prayers:

+ Prayer for a routine event (dismissing kids to go to children’s church). In one church, just before sending off the children, the pastor offered a very thoughtful prayer for them and for their teachers. It struck us as very much more than a routine duty on his part.

+ In churches that included more prayers than average, it generally seemed that these prayers were also more thoughtful than average. In some churches we encountered an array of prayers: call to worship, prayer of confession, prayer before dismissing kids to children’s church, prayer for illumination before the sermon, and closing prayer. In general, these prayers struck us as thoughtful, heart-felt addresses to God.

– In one church, we noted that the public prayer consisted solely of a pastoral-type prayer offering only requests for the well-being of church members. It seemed to us that public prayers could be a good time to model and teach our people a hoping and waiting “for God alone” (Ps. 62:1), finding words to praise him for his innate character, then for how he has blessed us, then for how he might help us through our current problems.

Use of Scripture

We encountered wide variation in how much Scripture was read, and also in how it was read. In some cases, we sensed a real commitment to the Bible in all its breadth, with thoughtful readings more than just in the sermon. In other cases, the Bible was read more routinely with the sermon; in a few cases, the Bible seemed overwhelmed, if not entirely hidden, by the sermon itself.

+ One church followed a practice of reading consecutively through the whole Bible in their public meetings, reading (with a thoughtful summary of the context) a New Testament chapter on Sunday mornings and an Old Testament chapter on Sunday evenings.

+ Several churches had multiple readings of Scripture (typically, from the Old Testament, from the New Testament, and a reading with the sermon text). Where these readings were done thoughtfully, they communicated some feeling of both the privilege and the duty to listen to these words of God written authoritatively to us.

– Several churches made no use of the Bible except in passing references in the sermon. And some sermons made so little direct use of the Bible or explicitly biblical ideas that they could just as well have been a lecture in a public high school or university. Does not “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Tim. 4:13) suggest giving more than a minimal place to the Bible in our meetings?

Preaching

The variation in preaching was great indeed, with sermons ranging in length from barely 15 minutes to a full hour. Equally varied was:

The overall tone (quite common: duty; often: encouragement; not too often: dealing with God himself)
The level of passion (some: spoken obviously from a pastor’s heart, with love and spiritual intensity; others: more professorial, detached)
The thinking required by the audience (sermons ranged from fairly simplistic to frustratingly dense)
The connection with a biblical text (from “obvious” to “superficial connection only”)
The degree of self-revelation or personal investment of the speaker (a few: very self-revealing; most: more guarded).

Sermons that struck us positively were:

Clear (quite a few)
Giving relevant application (a few)
Dense—full of biblical content and organized clearly (a very few)
Thought-provoking (few)
Those where it was clear the speaker was addressing himself as well as his audience (not very often).

Sermons that left us with a negative impression were:

Dense—covering a deep topic, but not clear (one in particular)
Clear, but tending toward the simplistic (quite a few)
Focused entirely on duty, without relating the comments meaningfully either to God himself (regarding how our view of God should change in order to take up the duty described) or to God’s grace (some—each of which felt very “heavy” and unsatisfying).

This past year we heard a few sermons that seemed to intentionally make no application of the text to our personal lives, or at least only a very surface application. One such sermon, which lasted 58 minutes, we found rather tedious. We heard about the prayer practice of one of Paul’s associates, with great detail about some of the Greek words and (so it seemed!) all of the English words. At the very end of the hour we came, finally, to the application and heard, in essence, “Do you pray for others? For people in our congregation? Also for other Christians? You know that we’re in a great spiritual battle around us—therefore, pray!” For most of the hour we found ourselves asking, “So what?” After the hour we asked ourselves, “Is that all?”

Another sermon that was big on the biblical text but small on making it relevant dealt with Jesus’ denunciation of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. We heard that the Pharisees wore masks and gave only lip-service, that we are all Pharisees at heart, and that “our hearts are idol factories” (Calvin). These were strong, blunt words that we felt indeed applied to our hearts. The words could have been helpfully sharpened, however, if they had included some practical examples of what this hypocrisy and idolatry might look like, including some idea of how the pastor himself had faced these very sins in his own heart.

The Larger Body

With only two or three exceptions, the 34 churches we visited made no mention whatsoever of any other church, either to pray for needs or to mention activities that could be shared with other churches or even that might be of common interest. It was as though each church thought of itself as totally self-sufficient and self-sustaining. There seemed to be blind spots preventing most churches from seeing that there is one flock and one Shepherd (John 10:16), and that the New Testament teaches us to love and look out for believers, not only in our own fellowship, but in church circles other than our own (2 Cor. 8:13-14; 1 Thess. 4:9-10; 3 John 5-8). Where was the concern for the one church in our area? (Note Luke’s perspective in Acts 9:31.)

Other

In one church, three people we had never met before approached us separately before and after the service, asking about our visit and interacting thoughtfully with our answers. (Generally, it was extremely rare for people who didn’t know us to initiate conversation with us at all, much less to interact with genuine interest with what we had to say.)

One church service included the baptism of a man, a recent convert. He read a well-constructed, multipage testimony that was remarkable for its clarity and sincerity.

In another church the worship leader called for a time of public prayer. There were very long silences, with very few who prayed. After the worship time was over, the pastor didn’t let the matter drop but intervened by reminding the audience that they had just missed a chance to offer public prayer and praise to God and exhorting them not to do so again. “Now let’s do it right,” he urged and then led off with a spirited prayer that was quickly followed by many others. We said to ourselves, “Now there’s some pastoring!”

Conclusion

Personally, we found this to be a stimulating, refreshing time of connecting with old acquaintances, trying to sing along with new tunes, hearing sermons from a wide variety of preachers, and seeing some things done differently than we’d ever seen before. It brought new perspectives on worship (especially regarding the key role of the leader in focusing the direction of worship), prayer (feeling the importance of making God himself the center), Scripture (sensing the richer place the Bible could have in our public meetings), preaching (noting the many angles of a sermon and a sermon-giver that can make or break a presentation), and the larger body (noticing how invisible the larger body seemed to be in almost all the churches we visited).

How far did these experiences go in answering our four preliminary questions? Maybe pretty far, though in some cases we had no real way to say without more extended involvement.

1. Did we sense a passion for God? Yes, when a pastor announced that the semiannual men’s night of prayer would be held next Saturday night from 9:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M.—and when we learned that upwards of 30 men (out of a church of less than 150) would probably be attending. No, when not a single sentence of a single prayer was uttered in praise and worship of God himself.

2. Did we feel like we could use our gifts here? Yes, when one pastor whom we’ve known for some time mentioned that “wherever we end up in a church,” he hoped we could continue our friendship and communication with him. No, when we had the sense that a church had plenty of ministries and plenty of saints to do them.

3. Did we sense that the people belonged to each other? Yes, when, in his prayer for the offering, the pastor had his arm around the shoulder of an usher who was physically and emotionally handicapped, and when, after the service, the pastor’s wife commented (appropriately!) to us, “Can’t you just feel the love?!” No, when a friend we knew in one church confided to us after the service that several people had complained to her that very morning about the pastor’s sermon.

4. Did we sense awareness of being part of the larger body of Christ? Yes, when, in talking with the woman in front of us before the service began, she happened to mention how the pastor always prayed thoughtfully for the other churches in the area—and then, in his opening prayer, he did just that! No, when a couple we reconnected with in one church poured out their hearts to us about the declining membership in their church and confided that they had absolutely no sense that any other pastor or church out there had any knowledge of, much less any interest in, their church’s precarious situation.

As happened to Elisha’s servant, so may the Lord open our eyes to see the unseen world right around us—both the mighty forces and purposes of our Almighty Lord God, and the “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (2 Kings 6:17; Eph. 6:12), before whom we are called to display God’s manifold wisdom in our church lives (Eph. 3:10). May we, with all other believers, come more intentionally to Jesus in order that we all might be truly built more tightly together as a spiritual house, to be holy in our collective priesthood, and to offer spiritual sacrifices through Jesus that our Father can accept (1 Peter 2:4-5)!

Postscript

Since writing out these observations, we have committed to joining one of the churches we visited during our church-membership sabbatical. How might the things we observed shape our participation in our new church home?

One caution we sense is not to get too focused on, or content with, “how we do things here.” As we have recently experienced, there are many ways to do the things churches do, from prayers to collecting the offering. A better focus might be on whether there is a sense of God’s purposes being fulfilled in the specific activity or program. And then we have noticed that, after these many months of being without community, we have a deepened sense of the value—the delight! —of becoming an integral part of a church family. We are finding that we have a new eagerness to really know people and hear their stories and to participate fully with them in “partnership in the gospel” (Phil. 1:5).