Sermon
Why Church?
Speaker: Cynthia Lapp
Why Church? It is a question that the youth discussed a few weeks ago when they met. It is a question that Menno Media is asking youth across the country. What do youth in Mennonite churches say about why they go to church?
It might seem like an obvious question. Church is where we go to experience God’s love, to learn about Jesus, to experience the mystery of the Spirit, isn’t it? Church is part of what we do when we are Christian – though actually there are plenty of people in this country who say they are Christian but don’t attend church. So, Why church?
Church leadership gurus are often more concerned with the adjacent question: “Why have people stopped going to church?” Research shows that church attendance has been waning for more than 20 years. The pandemic, with physical church closures, became one more excuse, for people who had already been waffling about their church commitment or involvement, to stay home. During the pandemic times, families found that they liked having Sunday mornings as a time to be together. Sunday became a morning to catch up on housework and chores, a time to have a relaxing cup of coffee and read the paper – if you do such old fashioned things. Some people used what had been church time to reconnect in nature, with creation. Now that churches have opened back up, it is hard to get people to show up in person.
Sometimes it feels like the underlying hope is that if we can just crack this question of why people have stopped going to church, then people will come back to church like they did before the pandemic. Or maybe like they did in the the good old days when family life centered on the local church with Sunday School and worship on Sunday mornings, “special” meetings Sunday night, Wednesday night bible study for adults and bible clubs for kids and teens, and Thursday night choir rehearsal. Not to mention the week-long revival meetings once or twice each year.
In the good old days, the church may have been the center of “traditional family” life but LGBTQ folks, single people, women who wanted to be defined by their gifts instead of their gender – how was church for them? Do we want to go back to a church that was held together by rules, roles and rapture, patriarchy and power? By the fear of hell and God’s wrath?
Even if some of the rules and fear have eased, why would people go to church when there are so many other good options for a Sunday morning – or afternoon, or whenever the church gathers. Can’t God show up at home, with family, with coffee, in the woods, as we wash the dishes, as Brother Lawrence experienced God (and wrote ) in the 17th century?
Maybe if we try to unpack why we go to church, we can understand why so many people no longer go to church.
For our youth and young adults (and some not-so- young adults) that I have talked to recently, community is the number one reason given for attending church or being part of a congregation. As Mennonites, we major in community (in fact, cultivating community – and deepening joy – is our congregations’ theme for this church year.) Cultivating community in this country, which for decades has been described as “polarized,” is no small feat.
The church, at least this congregation, has a good track record in terms of community. We know how to reach out to each other with hospitality and love. We know how to be there for each other in hard times and in times of celebration. We know how to work together to create community between people who have been around for a while and those who are newer to the congregation. Being part of a church community can be a sort of safety net for when the hard times come. We have been known to share food, visits, child care, transportation, and finances with each other, in addition to hard questions of faith and life.
This is not easy; it is not automatic. Creating and living in community takes deliberate attention and a constant renewing of our commitments to hospitality. It takes time and energy. There is real joy when we arrive at a comfortable place of love and fun together, when we crack the code of how to live hospitality and community. We relax into the community that we have built together. Then someone shows up who feels left out and we realize again that the church community is not static; it is alive and changing just as we humans are changing and connecting. Children and youth, young adults, older adults, we all know that community is an important reason we come to church – and it is an instinct and habit that we have to keep practicing.
Gathered around the biblical text each week, we have models of how community can function well, like we read together from I Thessalonians (in the confession this morning.) The biblical text also has plenty of examples about how community can go wrong – and what to do about it. Think of some of the recommendations – or rants – in I Corinthians or I Peter. Think about Exodus or II Samuel. There are so many ways for community to go awry. Try reading the bible through the lens of community and see what you learn – about what to do and what not to do to create community.
At its best, the church as a community is also a place where we can be who we truly are. That is not always the case of course. Sometimes and in some traditions church is a place to put on our very best self, to dress up and put on a show – at least that is how it looks in the movies. Church can sometimes look like the brothers James and John, vying for a place on either side of Jesus as we heard described in Mark’s gospel. And church is sometimes used as a place to gain power. It doesn’t happen here, but I think I have heard of instances where getting close to the pastor is a way to gain social currency. Jesus doesn’t support this kind of jockeying for power yet we humans continue to try and position ourselves as close to heaven as we can get. (Not that pastors are like heaven.)
It might not be the number one reason that people come to church but there is something unique and meaningful about being together, in a ritualized way. It is at once empowering and humbling. We connect to each other and to something beyond ourselves in a mysterious way. Or that is the hope, we don’t always get it quite right each week.
As Mennonite Anabaptists, we do not have a high liturgy or a lot of ritual. But gathering together:
to take a breath and sing,
to remember that we yearn for peace,
to pass the faith on to the next generation,
to listen to scripture,
to listen quietly during that outmoded thing called a sermon,
to hear and share the stories of each other’s lives,
to pray, hold silence and hold each other in care and healing,
to offer our monetary and spiritual gifts,
to be blessed for another busy week –
this is the Mennonite version of ritual. Stopping for an hour, to turn inward – and outward, binds us together, nurtures us in an inexplicable, even ineffable way. It is different from an hour with a book club or the Rotary Club.
Coming together, on a regular basis, in a ritual community where we belong can help us find our place in the order of things. We remember and recognize that the world does not revolve around us as individuals or even as humans. Reading the bible, an ancient text that describes things in ways that are not always the language we would use, helps us remember our place in the larger scheme of things, in the history of the world. We may not read the text literally, for instance the conversation between Job and God (as we heard in the call to worship.) Yet this recitation of the things that are greater than humans, that are uncontrollable by humans, keeps us humble. Maybe remembering our place in the world is another reason to come to church.
One of the reasons that people don’t go to church is because they don’t believe the bible literally, and they don’t believe what they hear preached. Too often the contemporary church is a place where you have to have all your beliefs worked out before you walk in the door, certainly before you are allowed to belong as a member. And you better have your behaviors (and ethics) all lined up too before you belong. In church lingo, things come in this order: you believe, you behave, then you belong. Or maybe you believe, you belong and then you better behave.
We try something different here at Hyattsville Mennonite. We belong because we choose to be here. We can bring our questions and our disagreements and still belong. We can bring our messy selves that haven’t quite worked out all the problems of life and still belong. And because we belong, we talk about things that matter, values and behaviors that we want to live into, that we want to embrace – though not without asking questions about them. The values that we share are not just assumed because Mennonites have always done it that way. We can question, we can wrestle, we can disagree and still belong.
As we belong and live into shared values, we may find that we live our way into belief, even some shared beliefs about how to behave and live our lives. Like community, this pattern of faith, belong behave believe, is not static; it is fluid. You don’t have to have faith and church and God all figured out to be part of this community. You don’t even have to have it all figured out to belong publicly, to become a member here. That we can figure it all out is a fallacy that too often the church has perpetuated.
In fact, if it didn’t sound so violent I would add another B to the belong behave believe trio. Battle – as in wrestle and struggle. That is the B that keeps faith and church dynamic and real and honest. Belong, battle, behave, battle, believe, battle, belong… Faith and church are a process not a destination.
Another reason to do church, to be church, to go to church, is to work together, not just for ourselves but to bring more love and belonging into the world. If we want to bring Jesus into this, and since this is church maybe we ought to, we remember that Jesus didn’t stay in the synagogue and temple. He walked and talked among the people who might not have had enough money to get in with the religious people. Jesus gathered people together to help them find healing and freedom.
For Mennonites, working together has often meant cleaning up after floods or tornadoes with Mennonite Disaster Service. Or making comforters and school kits for Mennonite Central Committee to distribute around the world. We at HMC have a whole array of ways that we take the love and community we are building here, outside these walls. This way of working together is not drudgery. Ask anyone from the comforter group or the LAR group or the Day Center servers. There is a strange joy to be found as we work hard together.
This week as I watched the Mennonite Action webinar, I was reminded that our work together does not have to be limited to acts of service. We can also work together to influence policy. That might feel strange to those who grew up Mennonite, to be publicly political, as people of faith. My grandfather, a Mennonite Bishop, did not even vote in all his 84 years. My Mennonite pastor parents vote but marching in the streets or strategizing about policy change is not something they have embraced. Now we have this new idea, Mennonite Action, Mennonites taking action politically together.
But is it really new? Being political was part of what it meant to be an Anabaptist from the very beginning. Anabaptist is the derogatory name given to the law breakers who challenged the state by being baptized again, as adults (after having been baptized as infants in the Catholic church.) Early Anabaptists challenged the church and the state, since they were one and the same. It was dangerous, even deadly, to be public about faith in this way. Perhaps it is that remembered danger that has kept so many of us, 500 years later, from finding our political power together.
In this country, churches are not permitted to work, or even speak out, for a particular candidate but we can advocate for particular policies. We can encourage voting. Could this be another reason to go to church, to be part of church, to work together to challenge unjust policies of the state?
This is not an exhaustive list of answers to the question Why Church. We haven’t plumbed the traditional, spiritual reasons like to find support in following the Jesus way. Or to have an encounter with God or the Holy Spirit.
I wonder what makes you show up for church? I wonder what you say when asked, Why Church? I know that in this group of faithful Christians and agnostics, of faithful agnostics, and those who might lean more Buddhist or Jewish, there is something that pulls us together.Consider this your invitation to respond in the sharing time or later in the week or in the chat (for those blessed folks who show up to church each week on Zoom) Why church? What is it that brings you to church? What makes you want to be part of this congregation?
As we cultivate community and deepen joy, I hope we will also find ourselves recognizing and appreciating the power, possibility and mystery of this thing called church.