Comfort Zones

The Church is altogether too comfortable. It’s not hard to see why; we’ve had almost two thousand years of tradition and ritual to fall back on, and for most of that time we’ve been one of the largest public institutions around. We got used to things working a certain way, and to people adjusting themselves to our standards, working to meet our approval. We’ve gotten comfortable in assuming that since we carry Good News, all we have to do is remember to spread the Word, and everything else will sort itself out for us. Maybe this approach worked once, but it doesn’t really work today. One way or another, the church is going to change.

Far be it from me to tell us all how we are to worship and build our Fellowship together, but I can’t help but think on the ministry of Christ. Temple was part of it, to be sure, but it’s hardly the centrepiece of Jesus’ work. It was out there, in the world, that Jesus did his stuff. In the community, out in the world. God, crucially, didn’t just expect everybody to sort themselves out and come over on God’s terms. God reached out to us, lived among us in community. If there’s an example to follow, its this; that the world and the people aren’t all in our comfort zone, but are out in the wilderness, and it’s our job to come to them. That’s the thing about being a messenger of Good News. It’s not enough to just know the message: you need to get out there and deliver it. And the message of Christ isn’t simply a series of talking points, but an example of a life and heart transformed by the love of God.

In the span of a generation or two, the church has been struggling to reach people – churches are closing as fewer see Christianity having any relevance or respect for them. This isn’t a formula for long-term success. Picture Source.

I find myself asking, why do I encounter God? Where is it I spot Christ and the Spirit in my midst? Is it just at the Church, in the rock and stone of buildings ancient? Is it in the normal, weekly rituals of my faith life? Sometimes, certainly. But at least as often, I meet God out on the road, in conversations and communities far from my expectations. God isn’t constrained by the walls of a church, nor by borders and certainly not by the rules one needs to follow to be ‘decent.’ We’re always trying to put God into a box, make that which is awesome and shocking and earth-shattering into something a bit easier to manage. But we don’t get to ‘manage’ God.

God is where our control ends, and the great openness of possibility begins. So why is the church so determined to stay in its comfort zone? Why do we stick to our buildings, our structures, and our rules, demanding that everyone work with what we want? I know we spent a long time developing our traditions and expectations, and by many accounts it is pretty comfortable in that space – as long as you’re the right kind of person, of course. But that’s the trouble: we’re too used to people conforming to meet our standards, we’ve forgotten that we were first the messengers going out into discomfort to get the Word out. And nowadays, the world is changing – we need to be able to adjust ourselves alongside it, or we’ll stop doing God’s work in the world.

There’s a very good chance your church was founded by people trying to change or adapt the church, and that your favourite theologians were actively challenging the church they lived in. There’s a reason people like Luther were called ‘reformers’, after all. Picture Source.

If that seems unfair or outrageous to you, if you think the church does do everything the ‘right’ way and that everyone should get with how we do things, if you think it’s blasphemy to suggest the church change with the times – I can only point out that at one point, Bibles and Worship services weren’t in English (or any local language). I can only note that for three centuries, the church existed purely as a counterculture and fringe movement without any political legitimacy. I can only suggest you look up how your preferred translation came into being, and how your denomination developed. We’ve changed before, and there’s no reason we can’t change now. In all honesty, we’re going to be changing either way – the thing we get to decide is what the change will look like, and if we want it to happen on our terms or not. Because if we can’t accept going outside our comfort zone, we’ll just see our presence shrink and fade.

In the end, God isn’t just in our buildings or our gated communities. God’s out there, in the streets, in the people we would never expect, in the places where our control and our comfort ends. We might not be called to be of the world, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to be removed from it. We should step out of our comfort zone, into the uncertainty and the mess of the world as it is. That’s where the work of building a better future begins, where we’ll meet Jesus on the road, where the kingdom of God breaks into our lives and hearts.

– The Teaspoon