Keeping with the Church While Keeping with God -- By: Travis Tamerius
Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 13:1 (Winter 2004)
Article: Keeping with the Church While Keeping with God
Author: Travis Tamerius
RAR 13:1 (Winter 2004) p. 133
Keeping with the Church
While Keeping with God
I got indigestion today listening to a radio program just before suppertime. Our local radio station interviewed Martin Zender, author of Quitting the Church Without Quitting God. The author, a professing Christian, suggested to the listening audience that one should freelance his or her faith. Believe in God, but don’t believe in the Church. Realize that God transcends the boundaries of the Church and her dogmas. He pointed to all of the problems and contradictions with organized religion, her structures and leaders. He made the statement that Jesus wouldn’t join any of the churches, which today bare his name.
Zender went public with what many think privately. Just give me Jesus. Who needs the Church? I can worship God in my johnboat on Sunday morning. He can “walk with me and talk with me” while I’m chasing golf balls down the fairway.
It is easy to think that way. It is easy to believe in a transcendent God whose glory fills the earth. It is much harder to believe that any of the glory ever finds its way into the Church. It is easy to believe in Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, much harder to believe that other Christians have anything to do with your personal relationship with Jesus. It is easy to believe in a universal, invisible catholic Church. Much harder to believe in the local, visible church one actually
RAR 13:1 (Winter 2004) p. 134
attends on the corner of Main and Broadway.
Dogging the Church is easy enough to do. After all, the Church is not what it should be. People sing out of tune, the sermon is not as impressive as Meet the Press, the man next to me is a bore, the woman in front of me is a crank. Why not quit the Church?
Those of us who minister in the Church have similar thoughts, monthly paychecks notwithstanding. At about the time that the same man in the same pew knocks off at the same place in each week’s sermon, we wonder whether or not Jesus really did intend the Church. Shortly after we get two factions fighting over the biblical approach to breastfeeding children we’re pretty confident he didn’t.
Even though such thoughts are easy to come by, they are nonetheless adolescent. The Christian life is not a spiritual Woodstock, an exercise in free love and a baptized narcissism. The way of Jesus is neither Zen Buddhism nor Zender Christianity. The hippie that says, “I love but not my wife,” or “I don’t want love boxed in with vows and commitment to one person” is no model for the Christian.
When we love the Church invisible but not her embodied expression we are in love with an ab...
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