Hold out for the real thing.
Rare are the industries where handcrafting still exists. Automation is the way to go, at least when you’re trying to produce a large number of units at low cost.
But I’m not sure if we understand the true cost involved when we bring such systems into the church.
The first casualty of that approach is primal faith–the loss of simple, direct connection to Christ–basic, foundational passion for Him.
Primal faith has a few identifiable signs about it. First, it’s characterized by a love of learning Christ. A lot of verses have to do with growing in the knowledge of God. The apostles frequently mention this in verses like 1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Tim. 2:25, Ephesians 3:19, and 2 Peter 3:18. Without belaboring the word too much, “knowledge” has both informational and experiential aspects. A characteristic of new faith, then, desires the Bible, not for love of reading, but love of Jesus. We want to know everything we can about the living object of our faith. That’s why it’s so normal for newer believers to read, and search out the scriptures, to memorize them, and even to hand write them.
And then there’s the devotional intimacy with Christ, the joy of first-person experience. It is the worshipful basking in His glory, beholding Him, as spoken about in 2 Corinthians 3:18, and being filled with living water like in John 4. We intuitively dislike the things that interrupt this kind of worship. And so we confess sinful failures to Him as honestly as possible, so we can continue along undeterred and unbothered in His presence.
There’s also a strong inclination to practice. This includes our attempts to obey Christ, all awkward, of course, but born out of love and zeal, nonetheless. We know He is with us. He approves of our attempts. We endeavor to take the narrow way, to accept the cross measured to us. He blesses it, though not sparing us the necessary learning curve. We understand He has already fully received us in grace. Our walk and our work is as sons under a loving father and gracious redeemer. In other words, we treasure his smile.
Finally, there’s a desire for camaraderie with other people of the faith. We want to be around them. We want their support and comfort. They help us to apprehend the impossibly large person of Jesus and accent our understanding of Him in a multitude of ways.
As robust as this description sounds, primal faith, due to its high level of impressionability, can still be negatively affected. For instance, let it enter the culture of an assembly line church, and that young faith will quickly hollow out.
Yes, it will continue to superficially resemble learning, service, experience, and church, but no more than the way t.v. dinners resemble home-cooked meals. You know how it is. The front of the package always has a photo meticulously photoshopped. But after cooking on 350 for forty minutes, it still ends up looking like something that has rolled off a conveyor belt, probably not much different than your car once did.
Knowledge gets reduced to a fill-in-the-blank workbook. Service means a scheduled thing you heartlessly check in and out of. Experience is the dopamine delivered during a Sunday morning rock concert. Church is a massive crowd of people whose faith we never interact with.
Why do we find ourselves caught in this matrix? Well, the automated church model is popular because it’s efficient. It spares the church the unbearable agony of being small, of looking dreadfully un-corporate, like a do-it-yourself enterprise, a garage production. Along the way, though, it sacrifices the “first love” Jesus, so highly valued in Revelation 3:2-4.
The loss of “first love” that I’ve labeled primal faith, creates a powerful downward spiral. That’s why there’s the sequence of events in Revelation chapters 2 and 3. It leaves a vacuum filled with fear of loss (Smyrna), attraction to the world (Pergamum), and, finally, in the case of the church in Thyatira, toleration of the latest perversions.
Do yourself a favor. When someone offers you the low-cost, mass-produced version of faith, just pass on it. Factories are good for producing lawnmowers and electric toasters, not souls. Hold onto the beautiful, primal faith you had at the beginning, and grow it.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Mark Pan4ratte on Unsplash
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