The TSA officer at the airport shouts, "Remove your shoes and your outer jackets or sweaters. Empty your pockets … everything. All watches, jewelry, and belts go in a tray. Your toiletry articles should be in a clear plastic bag where they can be seen, no more than three ounces of any liquid or gel. Take all laptops out of your bags and …"
He repeats this over and over again and never says "please."
My stuff, in dirty plastic trays, rides a belt into a little tunnel. I step into a cylindrical booth, raising my hands as if surrendering, and wait for something called a scanner to search me for weapons.
When cleared, I reassemble myself and my luggage and head for my plane.
During one such TSA moment, my imagination swung into motion.
What would happen, I wondered, if people entering church on Sunday morning had to pass through a scanning device that revealed the state of their current interior life. This scanner would ignore surface appearances—saccharin smiles, spiritual jargon, superficial gestures—and would reveal the attitudes and spiritual conditions that most of us would prefer not to have exposed.
The Psalmist who wrote, "Search me, O God, and know my thoughts" would appreciate this idea. He seems to be saying, "Reveal to me the deeper parts of myself that I'm not in touch with."
Such a scanner would revolutionize church. It would help us not engage in worship only at the appearance level but rather at the soul level where the real "us" is to be found. You've heard of reality TV? Imagine reality worship.
Think what a pastor could do with the information a soul-scanner might divulge. Just as he's about to offer the morning prayer, he is handed a printout that reads: "12 percent of the people here today are depressed or discouraged; 18 percent do not want to be here; 22 percent are preoccupied with a crisis at work or school; 8 percent haven't prayed for several days; 4 percent are grieving some kind of loss, on the edge of tears; only 21 percent are here expecting to truly worship. 16 percent succumbed to an addiction in the last day. And 9 percent need rescanning because their interior space is so clogged with thoughts that …"
How would that information affect the pastor's prayer? The sermon?
My Scanner Substitute
Lacking such a scanner, I have to rely on questions and trust that people are truthful with me. Imagine one Sunday morning I circulate through the sanctuary as people arrive. I ask, "So why are you here at worship today?"
Answer 1: "All week I swim in the sleaze and slime of the city, and I need a spiritual bath. I need to get lifted out of the cynicism that's poisoning my soul. I need help getting cleaned up and back on track."
Answer 2: "You really want to know? This isn't for me. It's my wife that really needs what you're doing here. So I'm here because I don't think she'd come alone." (About six months after this exchange—and this really occurred—he told a group of men at a breakfast that he'd just crossed the line into faith and was following Jesus. Worship was now for him too.)
Answer 3, from a teen: "I've got friends here. We meet in the balcony."
Answer 4: "I'm an alcoholic. Being here every week is part of my recovery program. When I'm here I feel closer to God—you know, my higher power."
There's an instructive Bible story: An unnamed woman has been in poor health for 12 years. At first she's just a face in a coarse crowd driven by curiosity about Jesus. The crowd doesn't seem know what it's looking for in Jesus, but she does. She wants to be healed.
Imagine someone asking her, "So, why are you here today?
Answer: "He's a man with extraordinary power. Things and people change when he's around. If I could just touch him …"
Response: "In our culture women never touch a strange man."
Answer: "I know that, but somehow, I don't think he'd mind.
She reaches out and touches that part of his clothing closest to the ground. Which might suggest how low she is—physically and spiritually.
Immediately, Jesus' scanner picks up on this little thing she has done. He stops! "Who touched me?" he asks.
"Who touched you?" the disciples ask incredulously. "You're being pushed and shoved in every direction, and you ask who touched me?"
"Someone touched me!"
There's a message inside the message of this story, and it's about the sensitivity of the Lord to the people around him. Call it what you will—sensitivity, intuition, compassion—but his "scanner" works.
What if Jesus had been moving too fast, preoccupied with some other agenda, or saw himself merely as a preacher to the thousands rather than a healer of the one? What if his eye was only upon the rich, the powerful, the beautiful? Where would that have left this woman who approached him in such hope?
Jesus' words after they have met: "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."
That's a great benediction. It describes what a person who has genuinely encountered the Son of God might hear and ought to experience when he or she has worshiped the Lord from soul-level on up.
You could sum the story of the woman's healing in these words: she came to Jesus out of her need, and she left Jesus a beneficiary of his power. No one else in the crowd had a similar experience.
I wonder: Is it possible that some (perhaps many) come to worship and push and shove Jesus around in any way they find convenient, but only a few actually touch him?
That question haunts me.
When we don't scan
I am appalled when I look back to my less experienced pastoral years when I was often oblivious to people in my congregation who resemble this woman.
To be sure, I really had a heart for my people, but—truth be told—it was a heart bent on getting them interested in whatever I thought was important. My vision, my latest sermonic theme, my impressions of the larger world. Much less: their agenda.
If I'd had something like a soul scanner, I'd have preached and prayed for people a lot differently. Frankly, I must have let a lot of them down. Who of them came hoping for a "touch" but left with a sales pitch?
One day the sorrowful rebuke of a woman—not unlike the woman in the Bible story—stopped me cold.
"Pastor Mac," she said. "You ask me, 'How are you?' but you don't have time to hear the answer. You're too busy. Too important to pay attention to people like me."
Then I read the obituary of a Church of England vicar who lived about 150 years ago. Of him, someone had written, "People traveled many miles to be in his presence because they loved to hear him pray. They felt—each one—that he was praying with each of them in mind."
I was jolted by that comment. Come to hear him preach? That I could understand. But come to hear him pray? It was as if they were similar to the woman who only wanted to touch the Lord. And he? Similar to the Lord.
Some years later there came a time in my life when I had to retreat from being a praying and preaching pastor and sit in the pew like everyone else and listen. At the time my wife and I were desperately in need of hope—a "spiritual bath" my friend called it.
Yet all too often we never found it. The worship leaders had no scanner. They seemed not to know that many of us were sitting there confused, scared, panicking. Their prayers often seemed insensitive, fillers between other aspects of the program. The content of the music seemed poorly selected. The sermons? Not where we were at.
At the end of some of these hours of "worship," we would return to our car, sit in silence for a while, and finally admit to one another that it would have been a better Sunday if we'd remained at home.
What people bring into worship
For many weeks after my vision of a scanner at the front door of the church, I tried to observe and talk to a cross section of people who were faithful to worship each Sunday.
"What," I asked, "are some of the dominant moods or spiritual attitudes that you think people bring to church?"
What if Jesus saw himself as a preacher to the many rather than the healer of the one?
Don't treat the following answers as if they are the result of a professional researcher. They are just what people said.
On the positive side, some people come to worship because of a sense of responsibility for their families. They saw the importance of instilling habits of regular worship and connection with other Christian people.
Some said they come in need of encouragement, looking for hope, wishing to blank out the messiness of the weekday world for a few moments.
Some mentioned thankfulness and praise for good things they believed had come from God's hand. More than a few acknowledged that they came with a questioning spirit, seeking guidance for decisions and answers to questions.
I was encouraged to hear how many loved their church, their pastor, their feelings of spiritual reordering when they returned home. Church and worship for them was involvement in a family of choice, a safe place to be with good people.
But then there were those who spoke of how much brokenness there was in the church. Maybe these are the people Jesus was thinking of when he said, "I have compassion upon the people. They are like sheep without a shepherd." Compassion: it's a visceral reaction someone has who "scans" and notices the battered feelings and fears.
So many people spoke of weariness: they feel that their energy levels (spiritually, emotionally, even physically) are not being replenished. Life is simply beating them up.
Some spoke of anger because a marriage wasn't going well, because a son or daughter was breaking away from the family in ungracious ways, because a boss or coworker was making their day job a miserable experience.
I heard from mid-life people who felt trapped (in marriages, jobs, financial predicaments) and going nowhere. Others acknowledged that they were struggling with addictions (food, alcohol, prescription drugs, television). They came hoping that God would deliver them from such captivities.
Loneliness was used frequently. Then there were people carrying the guilt and burden of secretive behaviors. Fear was also oft-used. Fear of an unfunded retirement, fear that health was deteriorating, fear of failure.
And After The Service?
After wondering who it is that comes through the door, I had a second thought: What should people be like when they leave worship an hour or so later? Every pastor, every worship leader ought to have a ready answer to this question.
My friend, mentioned earlier, used the term spiritual bath—cleaned up, ready to meet the world again. I get that. But what might being "bathed" look like?
I went back to asking people this additional question: How do you think people should leave worship? How should they be different?
Sample answers?
"I would like to leave church renewed, spiritually alert."
"I'd like to leave with a feeling of peace, feeling sturdy and courageous."
"I'd like to leave feeling that I really belong to a family of people where I am genuinely loved and am glad to be with."
Others talked about hoping that worship would deepen, fortify their Christian lives. Not surprisingly there were those who craved useful, practical instruction that would motivate them toward higher purposes of serving.
A few even mentioned the hope that they would break through the stingy side of their lives and find the power to be generous.
"I'm hoping to leave with a sense of reassurance that God is in control."
"Me?" one man actually said to me. "I want to be so excited about following Jesus that if the exit door is clogged with people, I'm ready to break through a wall to get out of there and get started."
Well, that's a high order for those responsible for the spiritual health and welfare of people to attain. We have 60-75 minutes to create an environment in which people of varying situations will find God in some way that can be called personal.
How do we try to make those answers come to life? We try to open the hearts of people to gain a fresh view of the majesty, the splendor, the faithfulness of God. That could be called adoration. We want them to be freshly moved by the character of a God who is faithful, unchanging, caring, powerful, and redemptive.
We challenge people to do some inner reflecting, asking if there are patterns and episodes of sin that need to be acknowledged and brought into the light of Jesus' mercy. We want people to hear us pray for them and the issues of life they are living with—older and younger.
We help people retrace the week and find things for which to express thanks and to recognize where God has been especially present.
Surely, we want people to connect with each other and offer mutual encouragement and support.
And, finally, we want people to approach the cross—as it were—and find in Jesus an experience of reconciliation that leads to eternal life.
"After worship, I'm hoping to leave with a sense of assurance that God is in control of the circumstances in my life."
Do these sorts of things happen in a lot of churches? Is it possible to do church in such a way that people who have entered with spiritual heaviness will leave refreshed, directed, inspired? These are questions for pastors, worship leaders, and elders to ask. And if the answers are not clear, there may be serious work to do.
Struggling with some of these same thoughts a century ago, the great 19th-century preacher John Henry Jowett wrote: "We leave our places of worship and no deep and inexpressible wonder sits upon our faces. We can sing these lilting melodies, and when we go out into the street, our faces are [similar to] the faces of those who have left the theater and the music halls.
"There is nothing about us to suggest that we have been looking at anything stupendous and overwhelming."
Maybe we really do need something like my imaginary scanner. But until we get one, we'll have to make sure that we are present enough with people, trustworthy, alert, that they will voluntarily open their hearts to those who manage worship and tell us what they need.
Then Jowett concludes: "Far back in my boyhood I remember an old saint telling me that after some services he liked to make his way home alone, [walking] quiet by-ways, so that the hush of the Almighty might remain on his awed and prostrate soul. That is the element we are losing, and its loss is one of the measures of our poverty, and the primary secret of inefficient life and service."
Imagine what a scanner would reveal about those in your worship services.
Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership Journal and chancellor of Denver Seminary.
Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
