The two-party system of church

"You're just throwing your vote away!" is often what you hear if you don't vote for the elephant or donkey. What that means is you only have two options that really count, when it comes down to it. You're crazy if you don't pick one of the two options.

That's kind of the same thing that has happened with churches and religion over time. You're either a church supporter or an atheist/pagan/reprobate. If you try to say there's a different way, you're crazy. Both "sides" tell you that you're throwing your vote away.

It's okay, I think. Someone has to challenge the system in order for the system to wake up. Or better said, for those who keep the system going to wake up and work for something different. It probably takes a lot of people, over time, pushing, questioning, and showing something different is possible.

God's Spirit has a little something to do with all that as well. The Spirit goes where it wants. We see the effect of the Spirit, even if we don't see it - kind of like the wind blowing. We're so used to looking at our own metrics, we can be blind to any kind of metric God uses to achieve "success".

Over the past year, I've listened to a lot of people, had a lot of dialogues, and read a lot of opinions about all this. The "done with God" crowd doesn't care unless it makes them look good for making all people who have faith of any kind look bad or stupid.

The "religious side", for the most part, can't imagine a faith that doesn't worship their worship services and their social network. God isn't honored, in their mind, unless you can measure it. God isn't happy with you if you're not going to a building, giving money, being nice, avoiding icky looking people, etc.

What started off 2000ish years ago as a movement of people who learned they could trust and depend on a God that wasn't keeping score to determine worthiness, returned to needing to keep score to determine worthiness. Sure, grace is important, but you have to earn it somehow - "God isn't THAT good!"

We like to see where God's Spirit is moving rather than trusting that the Spirit is moving, even if we can't see what it's doing. Or we think we've figured out how to measure the Spirit's work - even though it often doesn't include the actual fruit of the Spirit as the primary metric.

It's interesting reading through the New Testament after Acts 2 comes and goes and seeing the wide range of things that were happening in different places, cultures, and collections of people. A way of life seemed to be developing that included people getting together, but didn't center exclusively on "going to church".

We project back into time and on to pages of scripture the only way we can imagine it possibly having been - a two-party system where people either "went to church" or were pagans. And of those who "went to church", they were like us and did it like us.

The idea of a "way" of being that is fluid or Spirit led is foreign to many of us because of the excesses of some groups over the past few years who needed to have evidence of the Spirit happening in some grand way inside the context of a "church service". We rejected a whole lot out of a fear of being labeled.

God's Spirit IS at work in the world and apparently never has stopped being at work. He lives within us and we are invited to keep in step with Him and not to "quench" His work in us. We've spent decades learning to quench and, at least in some places I'm hearing from, He's helping us learn to listen again.

I don't know what it will look like as it moves forward. No idea. And I get the sense that, at times, it is part of hearing from the Spirit. It's not just okay, but it's good to quiet our preconceived ideas and let Him work. Quit shoving everyone into a building and letting a stage be the only place He is heard. Listen.

Regardless of what people think about the recent election, it showed that people outside of the two-party system can and do have influence over the two-party process. The third parties might get screwed over as result of their joining with a party, but they definitely got a voice heard that wasn't before. And that's good.

I wonder if something similar might happen in religion and churches in the short years ahead. There's plenty of popular discontent, desire to have clarity of some kind, and a push back from what seems to be a lot of vague, yet dangerous inclusion of anything and everything, just to get a vote. Who knows? I don't.

Probably the biggest thing I've picked up on in the last few months is that none of the above is necessarily anything God wants us to pay attention to. Many will move heaven and earth to "save churches" or reform things. I get that 100%. It makes sense if worship services are the most important thing. But maybe not.

So the months ahead, for me, are exploring what that means. How do you live in trust and dependence on God along side others who are also wanting that? Will we re-invent the wheel? Maybe so. If that's where God leads, so be it. But I've seen evidence from other countries that He doesn't always do that.

God has done SO much for us, it's hard to process it all if we only allow ourselves to do so through the lens of what others who WANT to be the ones to tell us what to do, how to invest our time, etc. May we not throw out the baby with the bath water, but may we cease confusing the two.

And that's enough abstract stuff on a Saturday morning.

The KC Chiefs are about to play.

Grace and peace to you.

_________

POSTSCRIPT: I remembered what I'd started thinking about yesterday! Just like if we pursue happiness, it will always elude us because happiness is the byproduct of the pursuit of doing good, meaningful things, etc - if we pursue a "better church", it will always elude us because "church" is the byproduct of walking with the Holy Spirit.