Some thoughts on church culture
What’s the difference between fast food restaurant and a church? It sounds like one of those kids’ riddles, doesn’t it? But it does give rise to an interesting cultural comparison. Here’s where it takes my thinking…
A few years ago, a colleague and I made a business trip to America.
Each evening we were taken out for dinner by our young host and, each evening, it was to a different fast food ‘restaurant’. Wendy’s one night, Burger King another, and a raft of names that I had never heard of.
Every ‘restaurant’ was hygienic; the food was cooked fresh; there were carbohydrates, proteins and a few green things in our food. We were served with speed and efficiency, there was a place to sit and eat.
The menu was worked out in a distant head office, as were the portion sizes and the combo meals were predetermined. There were special treats like flavour-of-the-month in the shakes or desserts.
On one occasion, our host – a youngish computer guy – said, “Isn’t this a great place to eat!” In one sense he was right. Fresh cooked food, hygiene, efficiency – everything in place. But what was missing was what makes us human. Our tummy tank was full, but the blessings of the table, the bonding over shared food and lingering conversation were missing. The ‘restaurant’ gave no nod to the things God made us to be or to who we were in the higher sense.
And our youngish host was so enculturated into that way of life that he could not imagine anything different. It was normal. The “great place to eat” that he identified was great because they had an additional flavour of shake or their own unique sauce on the hamburger or some other tweaking of the common fast food experience. The ‘restaurant’ organised us into their way of doing business.
Around the table
A year or so later he and his wife came to Australia and stayed with the colleague who had been with me on the USA trip. We all had lunch together. My wife Marilyn and I brought some things – probably crusty sourdough bread and wine or a dessert. The ladies, including our guest, worked together in the kitchen chopping and preparing. We blokes stood knowledgeably around the barbecue with the meat that been marinading since break of day.
Having all shared in the preparation of the food and the decoration of the table, we talked as we ate and passed food to each other, talking and lingering for two or three hours. We most naturally shared information about our lives and stories. Many of the food elements that were in the fast food places were on our table – meat, salad, bread, drinks. But in the home setting, we were people made in God’s image, sharing the blessings of the table and the friendship that is almost always deepened when we eat together.
So what’s the difference?
In an analysis on paper, it is hard to differentiate between the two experiences. Food, hygiene, efficiency… in fact on paper, the fast food experience probably wins. Better hygiene control, quicker from cooker to plate, quicker to fulfil its biological function. But the differences were as night and day. And only someone who has experienced true table fellowship would reflect on the serious deficiencies of the fast food experience, deficiencies that are greater than just the food but that are rooted in the core of who we are.
In fact that is the fast food problem – it reduces us as human beings and turns us into food consumers.
Pushing the metaphor a little further:
Franchised fellowship
Fast food restaurants are usually franchises, run by professionally trained managers who know how to maintain the standards and procedures determined by head office. Their training teaches them to reject individuality and creativity and to manage by strict control. They, after all, are the ones who have had the training and know the rules of the head office company.
The owners and managers go to conferences of fast food franchisees and they pass on tips. Some are given accolades as the most successful among the group measured in numbers of customers, revenue and efficiency. If there is a perceived weakness causing loss of customers, they will share their experience and probably come up with a world-beating idea like adding a slice of pineapple to a chicken burger.
A percentage of customers shift their loyalty from one chain to another. But it is only ever, and can only ever be, a variation on a theme. The culture remains. Everything is in place to guarantee that the culture remains. The basic loss of human relationship, creativity, and dignity remains. But usually, the revenue rolls in and it is deemed a success.
There is no need to press the metaphor too far, but it is worth recognising the cultural issues at play and thinking whether those same cultural issues can hang over our large modern churches. Are the same things missing – our basic new-born, gifted humanity?
Controlled efficiency
It is, of course, only a metaphor, a contrived illustration. But the questions it raises have significance. Larges churches are efficient – lots of people put through a service in a short space of time. Even the ‘Lord’s supper’ can be processed in minimal time—provided, of course, that fellowship, conversation and shared experiences of Christ are removed. They are safely ‘hygienic’ uninterrupted by human pain, emotional distress or any other such messy spontaneity. And once they reach a certain level of attendance, they are anonymous. A long, long way from (to use our metaphor) home cooking and true table fellowship.
Did God intend to have us sit in obedient silence each week? Bringing nothing, sharing nothing, contributing nothing? Being talked at rather than with. Having every detail planned (sometimes to the minute) by people trained to run a denominational franchise? Even needing to have our prayers written out lest we actually think of something spontaneous to say to God? Is that who God made us to be? A study of Scripture indicates that it is most certainly not his intention.
Of course the large Sunday meetings are not the only time believers meet or interact. Of course! Nor are they harmful. That is not the point. They are just deficient in most of the things we were reborn to become. So they are only harmful, like fast food, if they are the mainstay of our diet.
In much modern thinking, without the Sunday auditorium, the church doesn’t exist. It is the church. If you doubt that, suggest closing it down for a month or two so that people can spend quality time in smaller groups over Sunday brunch. Or suggest to the leadership that you won’t be there on Sundays anymore because, as a friend of mine did, you are reaching out to a social group that only meets Sunday mornings.
The core question
The core question is: “Is this what Jesus had in mind? Is this the way he intended his family to grow? Are his family words (brother, sister), his koinonia intentions (shared-life fellowship), his body metaphor (inter-connected and essential mutual ministry) visibly displayed in these events? Is our basic, reborn humanity touched by this processed experience?
In our fast food metaphor, it is simply not possible to change from within the packaged experience. Even if a gourmet chef married into the manager’s family or one of his kids became a nationally recognised nutrition expert, the franchise cannot change because it would no longer be the franchise.
Leaving the metaphor, we can promote the fact that we have better music, real coffee after the meeting, better Bible teaching, but the human dynamic remains the same. Come, be an audience and give so that professional salaries can be paid. In many cases, the bulk of our funds go to executive salaries and expenses with no thought as to what volunteers could do, given half the chance.
We can add new flavours, add new products, but the packaged process remains. It has to. It is what it is. The only way to avoid the degradation of our basic reborn humanity into semi-robotic consumers of the performance of professional leaders is to sweep away the structures and get back to the basics described in Scripture. The real danger is that we become like Sardis (Revelation 3) “I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.”
A reputation for being alive in our culture is accounted for in numbers, budgets, and activities and, today, especially, good “worship” music. In the New Testament it is accounted for in spiritual maturity of each member within the group resulting in “each part working properly” and the entire body building itself up “in love.” (Ephesians 4:11-16)
Serving?
Look at the service opportunities in most churches for most people to sign up to.
Bible Reading in the service; Prayer in the service; Music (Instruments/Vocals); AV/Sound Desk; Crèche (Teacher/Helper); Kids Church (Teacher/Helper); Youth Church (Teacher/Helper); Welcome Team; Coffee Cart; Morning Tea; Supper; Set up/Pack up; Money Counting; Preparing Communion; Handing Out Communion; Taking Up The Offering; Cleaning The Building.
Every one of these is related to the Sunday meeting. We are urged to serve God in these ways. But which of them requires a spiritual gift (charisma)? Some, perhaps. The final indignity is that they are often rostered which means they take absolutely no account of who or what a person was created and equipped by God to become. Sunday morning is mostly where the leadership gets to exercise their public gift or persona. So it is their focus, it is their time to shine.
Some do it a better way
Need it be so? No. There are some churches whose Sunday mornings are a gathering of connected people whose relationships and conversation mid week are rich and engaging. The leadership spends it time and energy equipping people for their life-related connections and facilitates the mutual ministry of one to another. They care for them people who are caring for each other. And a major feature of such churches is a wide range of small groups of true sharing of lives and learning. So their Sundays, even if it is mostly run from the front, are abuzz with expectation and energy that comes from the excitement of belonging and growing. But such churches will remain rare while ever Sunday ‘services’ remain the unchangeable planet around which little moons of spiritual connections wax and wane.
Our denominational seminaries support the prevailing church culture and the prevailing culture supports the seminarians. This guarantees that it is all but impossible to contemplate deep cultural change in local churches to whatever extent they are franchises bonded to head office by a constitution or codebook (or career structure). Too much is at stake to contemplate unilateral moves towards a more Biblical way of being God’s gathered people. While we raise our new generations on these packaged presentations, they may inject their own flavours—the new dessert flavours or slice of pineapple on a chicken burger in the form of a new style of songs played by a more upbeat band—but they remain meetings prepared by others and calculated to prevent any true interaction between people and true expressions of mutual ministry.
