Recently my wife and I decided to leave our church, because we were seeking authentic and warm fellowship, relationships in which people cared for another in Christ. As we did this, so many emotions came to the surface that I had buried or had ignored for so long, but predominant among them was a feeling of being wounded, because those who were supposed to love us did not.
I don't grasp why people would have a church but not bother to get to know anybody. Even getting opportunities for service were hard-fought. What's the point of just being around nice people? And what value is nice if you're just shining on others all the time? So many there practiced a kind of standoffishness that I found perplexing and eventually, tiring. Hammering away at everyone's defenses was the only way you got to know someone and even then, that progress was erased next week and you had to start all over again.
It's a sad imitation of life, this high society role-play, where everyone has a shiny veneer of a perfect life, a nice house, and children, but in the end, share nothing. No-one ever got real. No-one broke. No-one mourned. In that dollhouse world, all the dolls had a permanent ceramic smile, and they were taken off the shelf to play with the others in a carefully choreographed dance, then put back into the display case at the end of the service.
Yet some people think that is church and that is what you do at church. I pity them. Those whom have never known anything different, come away, come to life, come to realness in Christ. Leave the fake porcelain world behind you, because there is no life there.
Those who kept this charade going perpetuated a system that prevented roots and kept everyone distant from one another; it encouraged invisibility and practiced anonymity. The hidden power structure felt that as long as the leadership remained, and put on a good show, then the members could not complain. Yet members quit silently and the machinery hummed on nonetheless. Members were expendable. And if the members had their own ideas, that was not tolerated. "We pay the staff for such things," was the silent message. To those that remained, they said, "Go and hide, safe that no-one will ever ask you about your life." This is not living. This is not love.
What can you say about a loveless church? Better that such a place were bulldozed than it kept replicating robotic people full of head knowledge demanding cookie-cutter molds for others.
