Why I don’t attend a Megachurch

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I resist the trend toward megachurches, preferring smaller palaces out of the spotlight. i never fully understood why until I cam across this paradoxical observation in G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics : ” The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world…The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.”

Precisely! Given a choice, I tend to hang out with folks like me: people who have college degrees, drink only Starbucks dark roast coffee, listen to classical music, and buy their cars based on EPA gas mileage ratings. Yet after a short while I get bored with people like me. Smaller groups( and smaller churches) force me to rub shoulders with everybody else.

Henri Nouwen defines “community” as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives. Often we surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, which forms a club or a clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.

The Christian church was the first institution in history to bring together on equal footing Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and free. The apostle Paul waxed eloquent on this “mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God.” By forming a community out of diverse members, Paul said, we have the opportunity to capture the attention of the world and even the supernatural world beyond(Ephesians 3:9-10).

In some ways the church has sadly failed in this assignment. (Yes, Billy Graham, eleven o’clock Sunday is still the most segregated hour in America.) Still, even all-white or all-black churches show diversity in age, education, and economic class. Church is the one place I visit that brings together generations: infants still held at their mother’s breasts, children who squirm and giggle at al the wrong times, responsible adults who know how to act appropriately at all times, and senior citizens who may drift asleep if the preacher drones on too long.

I deliberately seek a congregation comprising people not like, and I find such people less avoidable in smaller churches.

A Fall to Grace

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Grace did not come to me initially in the forms or the words of faith. I grew up in a church that often used the word but meant something else. Grace, like many religious words, had been leached of meaning so that I could no longer trust it.

I first experienced grace through music. At the Bible college I was attending, I was viewed as deviant. People would publicly pray for me and ask me if I needed exorcism. I felt harassed, disordered, confused. I began to climb out the window of my dorm room and sneak into the chapel, which contained a nine-foot Steinway grand piano. In a chapel dark bur for a small light by which to read music, I would sit for an hour or so each night and play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes, and Schubert’s impromptus. My own fingers pressed a kind of tactile order onto the world. My mind was confused, the world was confused–but here I sensed a hidden world of beauty, grace, and wonder light as a cloud and startling as a beautiful wing.

Something similar happened in the world of nature. To get away from the crush ideas and people, I would take long walks in the pine forests splashed with dogwood. I followed the zigzag paths of dragonflies along the river, watched flocks of birds wheeling overhead, and picked apart logs to find the iridescent beetles inside. I like the sure, inevitable way of nature giving form and place to all living things. I saw evidence that the world contains grandeur, great goodness, and yes, traces of joy.

About the same time, I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a stat on unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

I was experiencing “common grace” to use the theologians’ term. It is a terrible thing, i found, to be grateful and have no one to thank, to be awed and have no one to worship. Gradually, very gradually, I came back to the cast-off faith of my child hood

God’s Voices

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Think of God’s plan as a series of Voices. The first voice, thunderingly loud, had certain advantages. When the Voice spoke from the trembling mountain at Sinai, or when fire licked up the altar on Mount Carmel, no one could deny it. Yet, amazingly, even those who heart the Voice and feared it–the Israelites at Sinai and at Carmel, for example–soon learned to ignore it. Its very volume got in the way. Few of them sought out that voice; fewer still persevered when the Voice fell silent.

The Voice modulated with Jesus, the Word made flesh. For a few decades the Voice of God took on the timbre and volume and rural accent of a country Jew in Palestine. It was a normal human voice, and though it spoke with authority, it did not cause people to flee. Jesus voice was soft enough to debate against, soft enough to kill.

After Jesus departed, the Voice took on new forms. On the day of Pentecost, tongues–tongues–of fire fell on the faithful, and the church, God’s body, began to take shape. That last Voice is as close as breath, as gentle as a whisper. It is the most vulnerable Voice of all, and the easiest to ignore. The Bible says the Spirit can be “quenched” or “grieved”—try quenching Moses burning bush or the molten rocks of Sinai! Yet that Spirit is also the most intimate Voice. In our moments of weakness, when we do not know what to pray, the Spirit within intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. Those groans are the early pangs of birth, the labor pains of the new creation.

The Spirit will not remove all disappointment with God. The very titles given to the Spirit—Intercessor, Helper, Counselor, Comforter—imply there will be problems. But the Spirit is also “a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come,” Paul said, drawing on an earthly metaphor from the financial world. The Spirit reminds us that such disappointments are temporary, a prelude to an external life with God.