The Fragility of the Church
I have absolutely no sympathy for the churches that have lost a significant chunk of their previous attendance or have fallen apart completely the past several years because of the pandemic.
Why should I? When for themselves they have wrought destruction by creating an unhealthy dependence on the church as an institution?
When for decades upon decades they have fostered a malignant growth of complacency? When every day that passes, we delude ourselves into believing that things are okay? When instead of taking upon it ourselves to bring upon radical change, we’re fine with everything being a perpetual “work in progress”? When we’re fine with the fact that church has become an isolated bubble, where the reality of life outside rarely pierces through undistorted?
When words like “fellowship,” “family,” “brothers and sisters in Christ,” and “the body of Christ” are thrown around meaninglessly while countless individuals—those that once toiled to find meaning and purpose—have long given up on their faith and already left the cold embrace of church?
When they have bastardized the very concept of love?
Love is never used lightly in the Bible. It recalls moments of absolute despair, an unfathomable suffering, of death and of life, exemplified by Jesus, who endured an unending sacrifice and a harrowing, cruel death none of us would even contemplate inflicting even on our enemies. Yet we throw this term around as if we have a modicum of this kind of love, when we can’t even talk to each other and have a genuine conversation—to supersede anything beyond the status of acquaintance. When we’re supposed to demonstrate this archetype of unconditional love to the rest of the world, it’s simultaneously incredibly easy to find communities outside of church that surpass it in group cohesiveness, individual involvement, and commitment towards its members.
Why is this? It’s because we live and breathe by our social norms; most of us understand that people are defined by the predominant culture and circumstances of their upbringing. But we also know that the characteristics of this culture do not align with those laid out in the Bible. Yet we don’t renounce it, and we don’t fight ourselves enough to fundamentally change ourselves in any meaningful way. And so it subverts our ability to form genuine friendships with others as Christians. When we try to push Christian ideals and the Bible’s teachings onto others’ beliefs, the stark reality of discomfort—the societal norms that have taught us not to invade people’s personal space and project our definitions of right and wrong—creates an internal dissension.
Thus the struggle of the contemporary Christian is not a question of life or death, not a fight for freedom against persecution, not the toil against hunger or thirst, not a spiritual battle for heaven against hell. It is instead a vapid battle against a looming nihilistic belief that none of us even matter, against social norms and established conventions, against ourselves and one another in a inconsequential mental battle towards finding any meaning whatsoever in our daily lives. It is a battle in mustering the willpower to have faith in connecting the sparse dots of lessons learned from a text written millennia ago and somehow amalgamating them into a coherent message that we dare relate to the bleak reality of modern life. The greatest tragedy of Christianity in the 21st century is the failure of the institutionalized church to adequately confront this existential conundrum.
This is about a cultural obsession with order, obedience, comfort, and convention in a context where we simultaneously uphold a figure that was not remotely characteristic of any of these things whatsoever. Lest we forget that Jesus came here not to bring peace, but to bring a sword. His life was literally about waging war with every established convention and social norm so much so that it got him crucified. Where is that same spirit? Why is it that saying something controversial—in the pursuit of truth and progress—grants nothing but social ridicule? Why is it, like we once did to Jesus, that we alienate and ostracize those that try to challenge our established beliefs?
There’s little evidence in the Bible that necessitates an orderly Sunday service, elders that define and make the decisions for other people, and conformity to established conventions imported from our societal context. But instead, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence of a kind of love that is not even remotely achieved in our current conception of church. The more we dig, the more we realize that our church culture barely resembles anything representative of Jesus’ teachings.
Despite this seemingly unshakeable, obstinate adherence towards this model of the church as an institution, because of the pandemic we were finally forced to change. Maintaining commitment towards this institution—now without the obligation to physically attend—became untenable. Without the self-affirming routine of attending Sunday worship and service alongside friends and family, many unsurprisingly drifted away from the church, and thus, a meaningful Christian life as a whole. Most simply didn’t know how to live out this Christian life outside the archetypal church context. The pandemic is a demonstration of both the fragility of the institutionalized church and the fragility of the Christian who is dependent on such a system; they irrevocably fail to survive when the status quo—the aforementioned cultural obsession with order, obedience, comfort, and convention—finally falls apart.
Jon Ngan asserts that the recent pandemic should teach us that instead of haplessly urging everyone to come back to church and to return to the status quo, we should sustain each other as individuals to become the church ourselves. It is the notion that perhaps the church was never designed to be an institution in the first place, such that when catastrophic events seek to fragment and disperse us, Christians can still persist unperturbed. We can be well-equipped to live out our calling in society—where our work matters and where we spend most of our time. So instead of this strange vacillation between societal and biblical norms that is so characteristic of most interactions between Christians, learning to interpret ourselves as the church can integrate our beliefs into a meaningful practice.
We can learn to dispose of our preconceptions about the Christian life and dismantle the idea that our calling is confined to the walls of a building.
We can learn to approach people with empathy—not with a narrative.
We can learn to understand the nuance in the progress of an individual—not assume that they are broken and in need of fixing.
We can learn to finally and truly love, as Jesus would have. We can learn that it’s not about isolating ourselves in exclusive communities, but it’s about walking together—both as individuals and as his creation—united in a communal journey to find meaning and purpose.
If there’s anything the Bible says, it’s that while it may be our human tendency to perpetuate the mistakes of the past—our failure to understand each other as one and the same, our tendency to focus on selfish, short-term gain, our proclivity to succumb to our impulses, our persistent desire to return to the status quo amidst change—it is that same humanness that God granted us that enables us to seek for the divine, to seek for something greater, to change the world and each other for the better.
