The Con

21st century American church often looks like a rip-off combination of fun fact session and a variety show. Church leaders seem to believe people desire to be entertained at church. Sermons look a lot more like Christian trivia, sharing obscure facts unknown to the average observer and not a bit relevant to the current state of things. Pastors come up with some vague novelty, gimmick, innovative, obscure topic and share "neat" pieces of info leaving people completely unchanged as human beings, but pleased because they can say, "gee, I did not know that ___insert fact here ____."

People leave their hour long church service with a pleasant look on the fact armed with the knowledge of what type of wood Jesus used was likely to use as a carpenter based on research of first century tree growth in Israel. Unfortunately they haven't the slightest understanding of how God interacts with them and their relationships, divorces, addictions, self-esteem issues, financial struggles, and world view.

The same goes for the art in church. So often churches make minuscule leaps of creativity by taking a pop-culture fad and tweaking it into some movie clips, series titles, dramas, and top 40 cover songs. People are impressed briefly, because so many people have images of priests, or televangelists and dull traditions tied with confusing doctrine and the trivia laced variety show contradicts their paradigm. This can't last though, because people are wising up to the concept of "cool church" and are seeing the same scandals, hypocrisies, and hurts happen in the auditoriums as they did in the cathedrals.

It must be frustrating for the person who hasn't read the Bible to reconcile these concepts with the knowledge they do possess of Jesus. Most people know Jesus as a peaceful man with a desire to impact the poorest in resources and heart. But poverty gets worse in America and globally and so does the state of the human heart, which could only defeat your hope that Jesus' church is going to do something.

Those people should keep looking, just not in the big buildings. Check out The Bible instead of the oxy-moronical, Christian self-help manuals published with exponential frequency. And his people, individuals who work in restaurants and volunteer at shelters. Most importantly remove yourself from the trivia, the debates over the beginning of time, and the political cat fights and observe your friends, the natural world, and the thought of what is not seen, because these things are much more fascinating than migratory patterns of the first century church!