This weekend, millions of people will fill the megachurches of America.
They will wake-up, get into their cars, and they will drive; past hurting people and failing businesses, through bad neighborhoods and dilapidated homes.
They will drive past panhandlers and hitchhikers and broken down cars and overburdened pedestrians.
They will drive into massive parking lots, surrounded by beautifully manicured grounds, dotted with smiling, enthusiastic workers, who will treat them like visiting dignitaries.
They will be greeted with balloons and DJ’s and donuts and fair-trade coffee as they enter breathtakingly pristine facilities, and guided into spectacularly lit auditoriums, smartly converted movie theaters, and repurposed big box stores.
While there, they will witness professionally executed, technically superb productions. They will sing, and laugh, and be moved, and be challenged, and they will leave feeling refreshed and convicted and forgiven.
And at the end of the service, they will get into their cars and drive again; back through the massive parking lots and beautifully manicured grounds, and past more hurting people, failing businesses, bad neighborhoods, dilapidated houses, and more panhandlers, hitchhikers, broken down cars, and overburdened pedestrians… and home again.
And every Sunday, like some sort of religious twist on the movie, “Groundhog Day”, they will repeat the process over and over and over, and despite this happening with thousands and thousands of cars, week after week after week… almost nothing about the landscape of these trips will change.
As a rule, as churches grow, they become more slick, more organized, and more corporate. The screens get bigger, the light shows more brilliant, and the amenities more alluring. The rough edges become smooth, the rough people get squeezed out, and things get… clean.
And it’s all quite seductive, in a Disney-esque sort of way.
After a while, we are gradually lulled into thinking that this place, that this is the point; that making the trek here to this comfy Sunday oasis, is the pilgrimage. We start to believe the lie, that we can enter and exit, week after week, without doing much of anything else outside of the campus, and that God is pleased.
The only trouble is, Jesus wasn’t really the kind to stay clean.
He didn’t pass through the mess, he drove straight into it; eating with scandalous people, rubbing elbows with prostitutes, holding hands with lepers.
Jesus’ ministry was decidedly “dirty”. It unfolded over rugged hillsides, on dusty street corners, and in muddy fields. It pushed beyond the comfortable, pretty places, into the fringes of respectability and reputation. It reached directly into the lives of people who were marginalized, disrespected, and overlooked.
He called them “the least”.
And the worrisome thing, is just how difficult it is, to comfortably place this Jesus in so many American megachurches today.
The truth is, If Jesus walked into our church buildings, with the kind of crowd he often associated with, most people would avoid him, despise him… or call security.
The Jesus whose existence birthed every industrial-sized faith collective across this country, might have a hard time actually entering one.
This may sound like another mindless attack on large, modern congregations, but it isn’t. I work for and minister at one such congregation, so I speak as someone who’s lovingly fighting from the inside-out.
I’m fighting to keep our eyes open; beyond our great services and awesome facilities and comfortable settings, and into the broken places we pass by on the way to and from them. I’m fighting to remind us about the hurting multitude who will probably never step through our doors, and who will be waiting for us to bring The Church with us.
This is a gentle, direct challenge to every single person who drives to a huge, gorgeous building and plants their bottom in cushy chairs this Sunday; who sips a pumpkin latte, and hears about a Jesus, whose scandalous agenda, was the up-close redeeming of lost, forgotten people.
May you be moved to move; willing and ready to be detoured by the need you see as your travel.
And may your drive home, take your eyes and your thoughts, to those people and places it has usually avoided.
Christian, get your mind into the gutter.
