>>You encounter this in churches, and you see this wherever Christians gather today, including here.
People are still just people. The ones in church are trying to be perfected. So when you bring people a problem that is outside of their zone of comfort, they will probably respond in a way that you won’t like. Or they will run away and you won’t like that either.
I’ve given up looking for that “perfect Christian” who acts like Jesus. I’ve certainly given up looking for a whole building full of them!
That’s the problem with the criticisms of non-Christians and “new” Christians. They walk in expecting to find a bunch of truly holy people and they find people who really aren’t much different than themselves. What they miss is that those people have decided to shuffle after Jesus together. Once you get past your own expectations, you find that they really are more holy than the average person after all, but still not perfect.
The WORLD has told it's humans that the church SHOULD BE full of Holy People.
The CHURCH certainly does not make that claim.
Hopefully, any new people entering the church doors find out the world's lie before they become disaffected and leave the church.
Great reply!
Here’s some points to consider:
1. You focused mostly on part of what I wrote, the situation where I went to a couple of people for counsel and support.
What about how the church is largely embracing secular culture and those who do are offended to ever hear it called out for how it rebels against and rejects God’s Word?
There is only one form of popular entertainment that can still be exposed in the church without causing offense: pornography. EVERYTHING else apparently short of that will be zealously defended as having some noble, redeeming features or will be dismissed as “harmless entertainment with no ill effects,” and the people exposing how this entertainment opposes God’s Word will be attacked as “Pharisees.” Defenders of secular entertainment also point to that Bible verse which says, “I’m a Christian and I like it. It does me good, and so I think it’s fine. Who are you to judge? Jesus said not to.” (”Me” 1:1)
2. Now on that problem I brought to a couple of people in the church, you mention their “comfort zones.” Where does the idea of “comfort zones” come from, and how do they matter to the church?
I spoke of how the church has bought into the thinking of the world, that there’s work and there’s leisure - and leisure means being unproductive and idle, pursuing some pleasure that accomplishes nothing but bringing pleasure. The very point is that leisure isn’t work, and it must serve ourselves and indulge us, and be about us.
To say, then, that a Christian’s leisure should be productive for God’s Kingdom sounds like it isn’t leisure at all anymore, once the specter of work and being productive is brought back into it, but is that really the case? Is it God’s will for us to set aside large parts of the time and resources He has entrusted to us to being unfruitful and unproductive by design and intent? Is it His will for us to spend our lives in escapism in the free time we have when we’re not providing for our worldly needs through work? Is it His will that in the time we have outside of worldly work, we reject working for Him because it’s work, and we want leisure - that is, not to do any sort of work? What if we make our leisure about working for Him and serving His Kingdom and seeking to produce fruit for it? Is that no longer leisure then, because it is work, even though it is work for Him?
And there is another aspect to the world’s ideas about work and leisure that applies to Christians. If we accept that leisure is not to be work, and so no work is to be done, even work for Him, then not only is the unproductive accepted, but the counter-productive - that which actually works against God and His Kingdom. Accepting the idea that we need a break from everything, including from God, and we must not be productive and fruitful, even for Him, then ungodliness in leisure can be overlooked because the counter-productive is certainly unproductive.
When the world’s ideas of work and leisure, including that leisure must be unproductive, are applied to and accepted by Christians, the result is that Christians are saying in effect that in their leisure time, they will not work for God or be productive for Him. They reject anything that will be work for Him, on the principle that it’s work. The embrace of the world’s concept of leisure ultimately means not reaping for God’s Kingdom and not being spiritual fruitful.
So again, counterproductiveness, that which works against God’s Kingdom, is accepted because it is certainly not producing work for the Master, God. And that’s the story of today’s secular entertainment. It gets a lot of acceptance in the church no matter the content because it’s leisure, and so exempt from the outset from producing fruit for God. The point is leisure - a break - and not doing work, the thinking goes. As long as it’s humanly unproductive for God and pleasurable, then it can also go further and get away with rebelling against and attacking God’s Word. I mentioned Desperate Housewives. Years ago I looked up its storylines on Wikipedia. I would say it rebels against and attacks God’s Word. But it still got acceptance in the church because people can say it was leisure, and never was meant to be fruitful or productive for God and His Kingdom.
But idleness and destructiveness also go hand-in-hand. Is it possible not to be working against God somehow if we’ve decided not to work for Him?
3. Now on the church I mentioned, I was part of it for years, including years after the situation I mentioned to you. I truly didn’t expect perfect people or perfect Christians in it. But consider the parable Jesus told about the workers given a vineyard to tend and they had only to set aside some fruits for the owner for his share, but they wouldn’t. And consider how Jesus told His disciples that they had entered into the labors of workers for His Kingdom who had come before. The same thing applies when we work for the Lord today. And we are Christians because of untold number of other Christians who carried the Gospel so that we would come to hear it.
And so the possibility arises that people in the church today can merely consume what God has provided through the labors of others over the past centuries, if they decide to stop laboring and merely “enjoy the fruits” of the vineyard. Labor is nothing if not uncomfortable and unpleasurable at times, after all.
I understand, as I said, and agree that people can come into the church and just find fault. But so too can people in the church just as easily dismiss the people coming into the church. I’ve similarly seen a lot of long-time Christians in the church who only want to stand back and see which people coming in will “make it.” If they don’t, or they leave, then “they weren’t one of us after all.” And while James writes of not being partial to the rich man who comes into the church, so often in the church today the successful man who comes in, even in the cases where the overall evidence shows over time that he is uninterested in the Gospel, will be accepted with open arms as a “pillar of the community” who is invited to be a pillar in the church.
In this church I mention that was made up of middle and low-income people in a city setting there was a group of families that had been in the church for twenty or thirty years, if not more. Whenever these families experienced any problems, the whole church immediately was informed of it and help came to them.
They had about three or four series of classes while I was there that were all a version of “basic Christianity,” and these families were always in them. One series went two years, and at the beginning the class was very large, and had all sorts of newer people, both of lower and middle income. By the end, it was just made up of people from these longtime families, in the church already for decades, and me. With their social support in the church complete, and them not lacking anything, it was up to new people to try to find places for themselves, if they could, and weren’t looked as interlopers. One woman who liked singing and was a good singer wanted to sing with the praise team but the longtime members usually passed her by.
They had a church picnic a 30 minute ride away, offering no transportation for people who without it. Then they started doing “intimate dinners” of 8 or so, so “people could get to know each other better,” and almost everyone on the sign-up sheets were from those same families. Being a Christian in this world, the church is a refuge, and coming into it, one needs to find a place, and the people already in it have to be truly interested in finding a place for those who come. But having been through their adoptions so long ago, decades ago, they often aren’t so interested in doing the work of adopting others into the church. Anyone in a church knows that everyone has problems, and you will so often hear of the longtime members speaking of the troubles they have. So it is easier for them to simply turn to other longtime members, and also to the “unneedy” who come in who can “pull their own weight,” and do things like get together for golf or go on vacations with them.
When I lived as a lesbian, it caused me quite a few problems, including with employment. Several times people outside the church told me that the way I should go was deeper into the homosexual community, to seek employment there, among people who would understand my problems better and my abilities would be “put to good use.” But my experiences actually made me wary of going further into the homosexual community. I didn’t want to be there and serve it, and not being willing to, I wasn’t such a good friend to the world, which didn’t make making a living after that easy.
But I have to wonder if I had gone and served the homosexual cause, and risen in its ranks, and then either gone to church as a higher up in that world, or used it as springboard back to a more mainstream career, I would have been “better off” in coming into the church (if, that is, I ever would have escaped that life). Is worldly success, no matter how one gets there, more acceptable when coming to a church, than having suffered a lack of it because after feeling the effects of a sinful life, one starts to back off of it, and so the world is less accepting of you?
And in that church, too, I have to wonder how many of the next generation of these Christians will come to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior and stay with Him. I went looking years ago at the Facebook pages of some members and their families, and so many of the younger generation likes shows such as Modern Family. And as we know, every denomination is overall on the decline today, just some much moreso than others.
The real issue is worldliness, and accepting the world’s idea of leisure is a large part of that.