Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

A CHURCH THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Imagine a small farming community in the Midwest U.S.A. There are two churches in town, the first is a painted church with wooden pews, and the second is a brick church with fold-up chairs. One Sunday a member of the brick church visited the painted church. He wrote an Email to his friend about the experience:

CHURCH ONE: PAINT AND PEWS
I just had the strangest experience. I went to this church, and it was sooooo dead. They even played funeral music. We sang songs out of a thick blue book, and it seemed like all of the singing came from behind me. The funny thing is that I was in the back row .. then I noticed that there was a balcony and they made the singers stand up there. I guess there wasn’t room for them on the stage because of the big table. They had two pulpits, and neither of them were in the middle. When we prayed everyone was completely quiet, and the guy praying was reading his prayers. What’s the point? No one seemed very excited about anything. DON’T THESE PEOPLE KNOW THAT JESUS DIED FOR THEM! The preacher stood behind one of the pulpits and said a bunch of stuff … He didn’t seem very emotional about any of it. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was so bored. I really feel sorry for them.

A few weeks later someone from the painted church went with their cousin to visit the brick church. They wrote an Email to their friend, too:

CHURCH TWO: BRICK AND CHAIRS
This morning I visited the other church in town. Dude! I had heard things about this church, but I really wasn’t ready for this. The music was terrible! A rock band complete with spiky hair and shiny shirts. It just went on and on and on … “I could sing of your love forever … and I will … this morning.” Everyone was acting crazy. Lifting their hands in the air, crying (in public!), shouting, and the prayers just kept going in circles … like they hadn’t thought about what they were actually going to say. Note to self: When you are going to address the Creator of the Universe, have a clue as to what you might say. The pastor (I think he was a pastor?) walked all over the stage and seemed to be very excited about whatever it was he was saying. Everybody kept coming up to me and giving me hugs, saying they were so excited to see me. Honestly, if I hadn’t been with my cousin I would have been completely creeped out. It all seemed so phony.

They didn’t know it, but they had a mutual friend. And this friend is the person that they both sent their Emails to. Actually, it was me. I am the friend. I knew them from Illinois State Choir Competition.

I wrote them back:

BALANCE
Church is a funny thing. Some people want to build a beautiful fireplace and then never light a fire in it. Elaborate fireplaces that have never seen fire. Other people want to light fires, but don’t bother to build any fireplace to hold it. They just burn everything in sight (probably why they don’t have a table, or pews anymore.) Some people want church to be an exciting and completely separate event from the rest of their life, and other people want church to feel “normal” and “ordinary.” What appears to be dead might actually be very much alive, and what appears to be alive and exciting might actually be made of plastic cheese. Jesus has true followers at both churches, people who are there to love God and love others, people who are there to worship and thank Him. I don’t have to tell you that there are people at both churches that are not true believers, you already know that.

Matthew 13:24-30 (The Message)

24-26 He (Jesus) told another story. “God’s kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn. When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up, too.

27 “The farmhands came to the farmer and said, ‘Master, that was clean seed you planted, wasn’t it? Where did these thistles come from?’

28 “He answered, ‘Some enemy did this.’

“The farmhands asked, ‘Should we weed out the thistles?’

29-30 “He said, ‘No, if you weed the thistles, you’ll pull up the wheat, too. Let them grow together until harvest time. Then I’ll instruct the harvesters to pull up the thistles and tie them in bundles for the fire, then gather the wheat and put it in the barn.’”

May we come together in the communities of faith where God has placed us, and worship Him without pride or arrogance toward our neighbors.

(Thanks to Pastor Douglas Wilson for the fireplace analogy)