You won't find the right church (& why you shouldn't try) Part 3

Part 3

We're at the end of this three part series on why you won’t find the “right” church (and you shouldn't try). Today I want to talk about the third major reason why a consumerist vision of church is wrong and how it reveals where we place our faith.

I hope you're ready, because this is sort of the most important reason.

God doesn't want you to find a church. God wants you to be the church.

Read that again.

Now read it a third time. Out loud.

The church isn't about you as an individual. It’s not about your needs or your wants or your desires or your fears or your anything. It’s about God. Full stop.

Now “about God” looks like a lot of different things to different people, and this is where we run into trouble. To some of us it looks like hanging out with other Christians. To some of us it looks like doing good in the community. To some of us it looks like getting deep into His Word. And to some of us it looks like praise and worship.

None of these are wrong. Every single one of those things are centered on God! We all have our favorite things about church… and our not so favorite things. But what I think it all boils down to is being involved in the church and loving others.

If you're shopping for a church there’s simply no way you're jumping in and getting involved in that church, because you're too busy judging it by your criteria. And if you're shopping for a church there’s no way you're loving others, because you're too busy sizing up their performance of Christianity by your criteria (and it often falls short of your own, doesn't it? Hard truth, people!).

 We're in a precarious position as followers of Jesus Christ. There’s no way we will ever be anything close to as perfect and amazing as Jesus is, because we’re not God in human form. But we’re called to follow Him: His teachings and His example. We are called to be both in the church and to be the church.

We aren’t called to find the perfect church. Or to pick apart the churches we don’t like. And when we do these things what we’re revealing about ourselves is that we’re so focused on judging others we’ve forgotten why we’re looking for a church in the first place.

Rachel blogs at Choose Happy, and spends the majority of her free time chasing a 2 year old. She was not raised in a religious home, and was an atheist before God found her and made her His.

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You won't find the right church (& you shouldn't try) Part 2

Part 2

Last week we discussed how there is simply no such thing as the “right” church. This week, I want to delve a little deeper into this discussion of our tendency to treat church as just another commodity in our consumer society.

The second reason why we shouldn't view our church experience through this lens is that our feelings should not be our spiritual guides.

Do our feelings and opinions matter? Of course, but they shouldn’t be the only thing we think about when it comes to our church experience.  And if you’re church shoppingthen you’re most likely thinking about yourchecklist of what you need in your church.

To put it simply: you’re relying on your heart to tell you how to live your spiritual life. And your feelings don’t matter more than God’s plan for you or His church.

The Bible describes the heart as being “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Now this isn’t the only description of the heart in the Bible, but through my research I found that most positive descriptions of the heart are rooted in God’s role in our hearts. The negative descriptions? God hardening someone’s heart or people relying on their own hearts at the exclusion of God.

So what does this all tell us about where we place our faith? Well, if we’re relying on our hearts to lead the way in our decision making – especially in our spiritual lives – we are not trusting God. Instead, we are getting caught up in our desires, fears, and comfort. We aren’t giving God a chance to settle us, guide us, and love us through our discomfort. And discomfort is oftena tool God uses to help us grow out of our self-imposed boundaries.

That’s a hard truth, isn't it? But it’s also a beautiful truth, because it’s absolutely something we can change! We can change our tendency to rely solely on our feelings and on ourselves by working on our relationship with God and trusting Him.

Rachel blogs at Choose Happy, and spends the majority of her free time chasing a 2 year old. She was not raised in a religious home, and was an atheist before God found her and made her His.

5 comments Church, faith, Rachel M.

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You won't find the right church (& you shouldn't try)

One of my goals for 2015 was to find the “right” church for my little family (me and my daughter), and while I've managed to find a church I've also quickly realized that my goal in itself was… wrong. What I intended to do when I decided to find the “right” church was to church shop, find something that felt right, and just bounce if I felt at any time that it wasn't working out.

And then, you know, shop for a different church.

Don’t tell me you haven't been there. We live in a world that is constantly telling us that if we’re not happy with something we can just shop for a new version of it. A version that fits our specific needs. There are approximately two and half million different types of toothpaste at the store, and that's just what we're brushing our teeth with each day. If you live in the south like me then you know there is quite often literally a church on every corner.

We like choices! There's nothing wrong with that. Except for when it comes to our relationship with God and His church, because as much as we like to pick and choose all manner of things in our daily lives this isn't something we should carry over to our spiritual lives.

For the next three weeks, I will focus on three major reasons why this kind of consumerist vision of church is wrong and how it reveals where we truly place our faith.

Today is the easiest reason: there is simply no such thing as the "right" church.

Think about it. Unless you create your own church and it's a church of one person (which is not actually a church), you are not going to find a church that fulfills every desire, need, and belief you have as a human being.

We have told ourselves the myth that we can find the "right" church as a means of continuing to center our lives on ourselves and our wants. A church that is the perfect fit for you doesn't mean it's a perfect church. It just means you've managed to find a church perfectly okay with your sins and a church that probably isn't going to challenge you to grow.

There's no perfect church, because we are not perfect people. And the church is made up of us: fallible, hypocritical sinners.

For some of us, searching for the "right" church is really symptomatic of us wrestling with our own beliefs, doubts, and sins. What this tell us it that what we want is to avoid getting honest with ourselves by focusing on the performance of religion rather than the heart of Christ.

But what God wants for us is to be in the church: the body of people who worship Him. The kind of music, the distance from your house, your comfort level? Those are not things that God is concerned about at all - those are worldly things that we let get in the way of our relationship with God.

Rachel blogs at Choose Happy, and spends the majority of her free time chasing a 2 year old. She was not raised in a religious home, and was an atheist before God found her and made her His.

4 comments Church, Rachel M.

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