What is church?
June 1st, 2023
Why does the average American Evangelical attend church? What are their goals, and do they find those goals met?
My history in the Christian church began in my childhood. Most of the sermons I heard came from my father, standing near (but not behind — his personal preference) the pulpit of whatever church we were attending at the time. My father pastored several churches throughout my time in the family home, sometimes in church buildings and sometimes in the house of one of the people in attendance. I love my experiences in those years and the communities that formed.
I had a bit of an adversarial approach to other churches in the community. I matured in a somewhat sequestered monoculture, often not being exposed to denominations or viewpoints that didn’t match those of my mentors. As a result, I saw anyone else who disagreed with me as being sadly misinformed to morally degraded, so I kept to my community because I was certain that we were what remained of “true Christians.”
I retained this mindset even after leaving the family home and moving across the country to Oklahoma for a job. For about a year I continued to live-stream my father’s sermons because I was certain that there was no other decent church available, even in the “Bible Belt” of Oklahoma. When I finally felt it was time to build a community of friends in my local community, I visited with deep trepidation my first non-denominational church in my life and the first non-father-led church in years.
While I had a few prickly moments of uncertainty about the methods of the sermons and the culture of and practices in the church, I discovered that I appreciated learning different views on Bible verses and stories. I began to better understand the differences between denominations and doctrines and why they were a struggle for so many. I met my wife at this time and we both began regularly attending this church with our friends.
Eventually we began attending a small group, where we had our own little Bible study time and then casual conversation around a few snacks. The church didn’t have a good structure around small groups, so when that small group’s leaders chose to step away from their roles, the process to reintegrate felt chaotic and mostly hopeless. After finding little success in forming a new group and tiring of the sermons that had begun to feel confined in their scope and study, we moved to a new church farther down the street.
The new church didn’t have small groups outside of church hours but instead had “Sunday School,” in the sense that the small groups attended either right before or after the sermon on Sunday. This felt like a step backward in terms of building a community, so it was on to the next church.
The new church had wildly different views on Christian doctrine, so that was a short-lived visit. Besides, it was time to move to Houston for a new job.
The process continued in Houston. The experiences were the same when we returned to Oklahoma. I shared with my wife my beloved memories of childhood church attendance, but we couldn’t find a match in culture in any of the churches I attended.
Was my childhood mentality of the American church being weak being proven true? Had I made a decade-long mistake in choosing to give any one of these churches a chance? Were the only good churches those found in my past? Or was there perhaps a deeper problem of which I was only now becoming aware?
Church as a place of learning
I have many deeply important memories of the intense Biblical debates I observed or in which I participated during my childhood. My father was often involved in them, and through him I formed much of what I believed to be true about the Bible and the manner in which it should be interpreted. Effectively starting my life as an empty vessel, I filled it with the teaching of my father and those around him, and I heard that teaching spoken often. When I left home I felt confident in my righteousness and certain that what I believed was the most obvious viewpoint one could have and that all good people would share that view. What I discovered in other churches deeply challenged my understanding of the Christian community.
The other denominations and viewpoints within the Evangelical Christian churches weren’t based on malicious interpretations as I had expected. People weren’t actively rebelling against my view of the Bible as I had declared in my past. Every church member was behaving in a way that they thought was proper and striving to meet the standards that they believed were set for them through the text of the Bible and the church culture that they preferred. Denominational differences were based on reasoning that appeared sound for both sides. My understanding of the Bible was just one of many.
While the diversity of opinion was exciting, it got me wondering: if all these groups read the same text but came to different and equally confident conclusions, then how could I really claim to be certain that what I believed was the best interpretation? I didn’t know these viewpoints existed until I started visiting these churches and I had only seen a small selection, but one of them had to be true, right? It seemed mathematically conclusive that at least one of the churches in existence had the fully proper interpretation of the Bible. Was one of those churches in my proximity, or were all the churches around me teaching at least one falsehood?
It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power.
Robert G. Ingersoll — Mistakes of Moses
A multitude of questions started to flow through my mind, overwhelming me and leading to great distress. What were the pastors not telling me? Was a pastor from a seminary a more reliable or a more biased source? Was a confident pastor an ignorant one or a learned one? If I was visiting churches looking for one that seemed “right” to me, was I really looking to learn or just confirm my own presuppositions?
A major moment of change for me was when I learned of the long-fought debate between people who based their faith on free will versus those who believed in determinism. My early interactions in this area were watching debates on YouTube between James White and Leighton Flowers, who passionately and regularly sniped back and forth about the exclusively correct state of their opposing interpretations of the Bible. Mr. White tended to boast of the ancestral credentials to his viewpoint, following the lineage of the view back to Aurelius Augustinus, an angst-ridden man who tortured himself with worries about his moral state with God, and Mr. Flowers’ viewpoint which focused more on how God couldn’t be a loving god while also purposely creating people intended to be doomed to eternal punishment.
What was alarming to me in watching and reading their reasoning was discovering that they were both correct. They had very good points on which to base their views and verse after verse to support them. The whole reason the debate had continued for so long was because the writers in the Bible also had differing views. The disagreements between the founders of Christianity are documented within the Bible, never mind the centuries of councils and denominations that formed based on those differences.
In sum, a number of passages in our surviving manuscripts appear to embody the apologetic concerns of the early Christians, especially as these relate to the founder of their faith, Jesus himself. Just as with theological conflicts in the early church, the question of the role of women, and the controversies with the Jews, so too with the disputes raging between Christians and their cultured despisers among the pagans: all of these controversies came to affect the texts that were eventually to become part of the book that we now call the New Testament, as this book—or rather, this set of books—was compiled by nonprofessional scribes in the second and third centuries, and occasionally came to be altered in light of the contexts of their day.
Bart D. Ehrman — Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
I didn’t find the answers to my questions in any of the churches I attended; instead, I only witnessed apologetics for one position or the other, argued in a vacuum with the opposition as a boogeyman. Every verse was bent and twisted to fit one harmonious view, only to be distorted in the opposite way to fit the contrasting view in the church across the street. One church could be lead by a pastor wishing to kill gay people while another church could be employing a gay pastor. Some pastors might advocate for the eternal torture of sinners for their finite faults committed during their life; some that there is no Hell; others might claim that Hell is misunderstood; some might attest that the issue is moot because everyone can or will eventually go to Heaven. Each view would claim divine authority and would have enough Biblical support to be convincing to those seeking that particular viewpoint.
I began to understand that if I were to stay within just the learning experience of a church sermon, I would have to accept that the source of my understanding of the Bible would likely largely stay within myself. I was like every other church member: unconsciously forming the interpretation of the Bible based on a personal worldview and then seeking out a church that would confirm that view through selective reading of Bible passages. That is a comforting state to many and one that I experienced for many years of my life, but I wanted to understand more. I was worried that I wasn’t going to find a reliable informational source within the walls of a church. I sought out wider opinions from scholars, historians, and philosophers who had a greater amount of experience in not only the matters of the Bible but the context in which it was written and the societies around it during its formation. I wanted a more scientific method of discovery where opinions could be tested in a more public forum. Once I realized that there was so much more to learn about the Bible than what one denomination or another could offer or allow, and that deeper thought was actually rather widely available, I knew that a church would likely never again be a place of learning for me.
Church as a community center
When moving to a new neighborhood where no friends or family live, one might ask a local how they found and formed their own friendships. In Oklahoma, the primary response one should expect is to attend a church. Church is often where people claim to have met some of their deepest and most meaningful connections. In my experience, many people might be saying it, but few are living it.
A church sermon isn’t really the place for one to have a conversation with even the person in the next seat, so church leaders came up with the solution: church, but smaller, in the form of meetings with a limited selection of church members who share common interests or stages of life. Nearly every church I’ve visited has encouraged the assembly of smaller groups of church members to meet within the church building on Sunday or within each other’s homes during the week. Usually the suggestion is to attend all options provided: a community group and a sermon on Sunday morning and a small group at some point during the week. These groups usually convene in the form of a “Bible study,” where a group leader reads the Bible and then pilots discussion afterwards. Sometimes the studies involve the same book as what is being discussed in the sermon on Sunday morning, and sometimes the sermon itself is the focus of discussion. The purpose of these groups is to build friendships with a selection of church members and to keep the Bible as a priority throughout the week. Pastors will often say that the sermon may be a place where someone gets to learn about the faith, but that the effects of that sermon and the community to support the changes that it produces are found within a community group and small group. One pastor I heard went so far as to say that very little value could be produced from exclusively attending church on Sunday morning; community groups were that essential.
The goal of these community groups is to build deep friendships with the others who attend, share painful moments from the week with them, and then receive or give encouragement. But these aren’t friends, they’re strangers. Meeting for an hour or two a week will not produce friendships.
Casual friendships emerge around 30 hr, followed by friendships around 50 hr. Good friendships begin to emerge after 140 hr. Best friendships do not emerge until after 300 hr of time spent. Whether spending 30 or 600 hr of time together, the percentage of all relationships formed in closed systems (e.g., work, school) remains relatively constant. Logistic regressions offered 3-point estimates: 94 hr when acquaintances become casual friends, 164 hr when casual friends become friends, and 219 hr when friends become good/best friends. These numbers are likely conservative estimates due to the inclusion of both closed system and chosen relationships and due to the retrospective nature of the study. It is quite likely that the friendship status transitioned to a higher level before these cut-point estimates.
Jeffrey A. Hall — How many hours does it take to make a friend?
In my experience, the community groups that tend to succeed don’t prosper because the members met in the community group, they prosper because the people attending met and became good friends before forming their own community group. The community group doesn’t appear to regularly be the catalyst for the formation of a community, but rather the byproduct of one built elsewhere. This pre-existing friendship makes it incredibly hard for new community group members to break through, either requiring a separate clique of new members becoming acquaintances or forever feeling like an outsider among the community. If there isn’t enough growth within the community — and due to the decreasing numbers of churchgoers, that is often the case — then the general expectation I have for community groups is the slow withering of new members who quietly leave and never return.
Church isn’t the place to build community, but it’s often cited as such. What options are available to those who no longer see church in that way and who seek an alternative? The choices seem limited, in part because enough churchgoers see church as the ultimate source of community, rejecting many other legitimate and perhaps superior methods available to them even if their preferred meeting choice of a church isn’t leading to a thriving base of friendships. For some, leaving that hub to instead experience long periods of loneliness and uncertainty is too painful; but for others like me, staying within a broken system is even worse.
Church as a cultural example
In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making. Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture. And they had been right all along. The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation.
Kristin Kobes DuMez — Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Growing up I heard Christians say that churches make up (or should make up) for the social services that are lacking from state and federal government, so that charitable giving to churches was a net good as that money was then sent out into the community. That belief may not be fully grounded in reality, but it is a useful example for the point that I’m trying to make. Churches are often depicted, at least in the areas where I’ve lived, as a moral example to the rest of the world. Real love, guidance, companionship, and mentoring can be found only in a church, or so the claims go. I used to believe there may be some credence to these claims, but I find them pretty dubious now.
Churches claim moral supremacy, but they regularly prove themselves to be incredibly dangerous outlets for repressed emotions. Despite the origin of Christianity being founded within the oppressed and weak, modern churches share a legacy and continued reputation for bigotry and hatred of minorities. Pastors regularly advocate for a political party that actively harms its constituents with a leader who flagrantly violates the lifestyle that Christians deem acceptable to their god. Church leaders regularly commit sexual assault against their followers infrastructure exists to keep it hidden. Some pastors can’t manage to say the phrase “Black Lives Matter” without at least a caveat. During Covid-19, churches were sources of misinformation and anti-science sentiment, leading to numerous deaths from super-spreader events. Churches offer mentoring, but not the variety that is based on science intended to aid those in need, unless one is to believe that monster trucks teach men how to be decent humans. One churchgoer was so frustrated by the lack of good leadership for men in his church that he started his own non-profit to assist men who felt they didn’t get proper leadership from their churches. These are training tools for men, by far the most favored sex in the patriarchal complementarian view most churches prefer. Women instead receive the special treatment of an extra dose of purity culture and victim blaming.
Ironically, complementarian theology claims it is defending a plain and natural interpretation of the Bible while really defending an interpretation that has been corrupted by our sinful human drive to dominate others and build hierarchies of power and oppression. I can’t think of anything less Christlike than hierarchies like these.
Beth Allison Barr — The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth
Over and over and over and over again churches do not behave in the way that they say they do. Some will admit to this hypocrisy, but refer to their poor behavior as “their mess,” a euphemism for the same type of behavior for which others outside the church are condemned.
I certainly understand why people within the churches feel that they have the best of everything within their culture, but it’s because they’ve been conditioned to never step outside of that bubble. They’ve been trained to believe that their neighbor is “the enemy” if they don’t follow the church’s exact blend of philosophical or doctrinal standards. They’ve been indoctrinated to never seek answers outside of a certain circle of speakers, even though there is an abundance of scholarship available for free to anyone with a library card or an internet connection. Christians have been told to live in constant fear by the very people helping to engender that anxiety, and to give their money and their bodies to the cause.
What is church?
I want to be able to honestly answer the question I raised in the title of this post, but I know I’m terribly biased these days against the church. I didn’t find that it followed through on its promises and I don’t like feeling lied to.
Churches are spaces where one man may share his worldview in a position of authority and use an ancient collection of texts to support that position. If enough people like hearing their own worldview confidently repeated back to them, then the pastor becomes popular and the viewpoint becomes the more accepted position for moderate Christians. The text of the Bible contains sections of letters that share this tension amongst its followers, even in its early stages of formation:
For the time will come when they will not tolerate sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires, and they will turn their ears away from the truth and will turn aside to myths.
1 Timothy 4:3 (New American Standard Version)
Or in this passage, where Paul, who repeatedly made the claim that his particular viewpoint was directly inspired by God and therefore the only complete and accurate viewpoint, makes this observation:
Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment. For I have been informed concerning you, my brothers and sisters, by Chloe’s people, that there are quarrels among you. Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am with Paul,” or “I am with Apollos,” or “I am with Cephas,” or “I am with Christ.”
1 Corinthians 1:10–12 (New American Standard Version)
The Pauline view of Christianity prevailed through centuries of debate, inspiring later followers like Augustine and Martin Luther to further expand upon his foundations and build a devoted following throughout the centuries. Other viewpoints, existing within the Bible and throughout history, have fought and lost the battle for public acceptance, branded as heretical. That this opinion was swayed by the current events of the time is rarely accepted among Christian churches, who advocate for divine inspiration throughout generations as the reasoning for the evolving standards of the faith.
Churches could be a forum for discussion on how to adapt the faith to the era in which is it currently being spoken, or a safe area to discuss the Bible and the complexities of its interpretations without judgement, but it is instead a machine for dogmatic thought and unquestioning application. Questioning is doubt, and doubt that doesn’t lead to a result that the church favors is ultimately a sin, so people choose to be told what to think rather than risk being seen as a sinner. Learning about the Bible’s history outside of the walls of a church has been far more interesting to me because I’ve been able to explore all lines of thought without judgement by a pastor or community group. The result is that I have been able to understand far more about the Bible, its history, and the impact it has had on the world.
Let us forget that we are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, or Free-thinkers, and remember only that we are men and women. After all, man and woman are the highest possible titles. All other names belittle us, and show that we have, to a certain extent, given up our individuality, and have consented to wear the collar of authority—that we are followers. Throwing away these names, let us examine these questions not as partisans, but as human beings with hopes and fears in common.
Robert G. Ingersoll — Mistakes of Moses
Maybe I can answer what church is by advocating for what it shouldn’t be: a hurdle to being a decent human being. As soon as a pastor or a denomination starts setting rules in place that seem to be getting in the way of being loving to others or asking difficult questions with uncomfortable answers, I believe that it’s in everyone’s best interest to choose something different to do on a Sunday morning.