There are seemingly endless expressions of how to do church. It’s something I love about my faith because there are always new, creative, interesting things happening. The church is not homogenous, thank goodness.
This is true globally of course. Cultures, traditions, languages, and contexts all contribute to the diversity.
It’s also true locally. It’s expressed through dozens of denominations, traditions, and teaching or worship styles.
Despite all these options, most of us, most of the time, attend one kind of church. The upside of this is we come closer to true unity because we surround ourselves with people who think a lot like us.
The downside is we create a whole group of people with a narrow minded viewpoint. Like Twitter (especially) and other social media outlets, our church relationships become an echo chamber. We say something and hear it echoed back to us. The echo chamber reinforces our bias because we are surrounded by people who think, believe, and act like us.
Now to some extent this is true for all organized groups. The reason you gather with people is because you find commonalities.
But the church has a special role to play in the world and needs to be held to a higher standard. The risk is serious. If we become so acclimated to our theological context we begin to think everyone should see things as we do. Becoming narrow, insular, and detached can lead to becoming petty. And then worse, we become irrelevant.
Once irrelevant to the world, we begin to attack each other. Their theology isn’t right. Their worship style is wrong. Their preacher has a tattoo, and theirs still wears a tie. We become so good at defining our theological cultural context that when we find out it doesn’t work in another context we get frustrated. Then we become judgmental and accusatory.
Folks, we have to become more loving toward each other. More generous toward each other.
We live in a messy world. We have a messy faith. And if you wait for perfection – in the world, your faith, or your neighbor – you are going to be perpetually waiting.
You know how I use the tagline “because generosity can be messy” on this blog? This is an example.
Being generous toward others means we have to wade into the mess of their viewpoints.
And it is there that we discover the mess of our own viewpoints.