Doing Church by Kayla McClurg

Doing Church
Written by kayla June 13th, 2009 in Saturdays By Kayla McClurg
Last week I wrote about the inward/outward journey that some of us choose to embark on together, particularly as it gets expressed through churches or faith communities. I think we “do church” partly because it’s one place during the week that can be counted on, one place where there’s some consistency and calm in the midst of the world’s ruckus. And this isn’t a bad thing; in fact, it’s a pretty amazing thing, that hearing ancient religious words together, singing sometimes ancient songs together, passing a plate and a cup together can remind us of who we are. Whose we are. When we’re “at church” we can more or less predict who’s going to be there (if not in the particular, at least in the general) and what’s going to happen and what the reactions, and lack of reactions, will be. Most of us like to be in a church that feels like home, assuming home is a place we don’t mind being, where we can breathe comfortably, where we can sit loose and not be jarred too much. We prefer not having too many strangers drop by and not having our routines interrupted. We like familiar faces, familiar activities, familiar conversations, familiar problems. For most of us, church that feels like home tries to accommodate one of our deepest human needs … for a comfort zone. We all need places of refuge and safety. No argument there. And yet I wonder, was the church ever intended to guarantee our comfort? Did God “call us out” to be the ekklesia in our towns and rural communities and city neighborhoods in order to make us more at ease and “cushioned”? Or is the church the one place and the one people we should be able to count on to disrupt and disturb us? I returned to some of Annie Dillard’s writings this week, in particular some of her descriptions of church. I think I should just stop talking now and give you some of her words instead of more of my own: First, from her book Holy the Firm . . .
Nothing could more surely convince me of God’s unending mercy than the continued existence on earth of the church. The higher Christian churches—where, if anywhere, I belong—come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy…. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom. And now from her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk . . . Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, watching the radar screen, noting weather reports radioed in from shore. No one would dream of asking the tourists to do these tings. Alas, among the tourists on Deck C, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, we find the captain, and all the ship’s officers, and all the ship’s crew…. The wind seems to be picking up. On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return…. Well, I’ll see you around somewhere, out at the edges of the “church proper.” I’ll be looking for the ones with the crash helmets on.
Kayla McClurg is point of contact for the scattered churches of
The Church of the Saviour and facilitates inward/outward. see it on the web