Dear Humbuck: those who leave

Dear Humbuck,

I completely understand the general excitement when we hear that churches are growing fewer and those that remain are growing emptier; I understand, and to some degree I share in that excitement. Yet I would also give a word of caution and even warning, because such news should not make us at all complacent.

Remember that I said that nigh unto 1500 years ago we were able to remake the church into our image and after our likeness, and that we then told it to go and take dominion over all the earth. We could do that because we knew that, much like the religious leaders the one we left spoke to, the people we were forcing to be baptized and take the sacraments and listen to scriptures and ceremonies spoken in a language they themselves did not know would not be citizens of heaven but would instead become 10-fold more the denizens of hell. The church became a thing of forms that had no substance, and we would happily let people go through forms to their hearts’ content so long as they have nothing else.

Of course, there is always danger for us in the church, and even in those times the apes call The Dark Ages or the Middle Ages when it seemed we had almost complete control over the church and the societies it ruled there were still some occasional voices that seemed as if from nowhere to spring up and call out the leaders we had installed, or some small quiet believers who despite anathemas and persecutions still remained faithful to the one we were faithless to. Even under our power, the church is still dangerous, which is one reason we went to such lengths to, for example, create the idea of a holy language that no one spoke anymore but in which all divine ceremonies must be performed and all sacred texts must be read and written. We were reversing that Pentecost when the one we left allowed his followers to speak in many languages they should not have known.

Nowadays, it could maybe be said that we do not control the church quite as powerfully as we once did. Maybe that is true, but we should also not devalue our continued power and influence.

True, at this point almost all peoples have at least some portion of the sacred writings in a language they can read; true, most church services are in the vernacular, the languages the common people know; and, true, we would be very stupid to think these and some other developments are not troublesome to us; yet, I would say that overall we would be wise to keep people in the churches rather than see them go out on their own, though much depends on why some people have left.

One of our greatest achievements was when the made the church into a theater. Many people who look with critical eyes at the modern church see how theatrical it is now, but this is not something we accomplished yesterday, but I would say we did this at the inception of our control, and to a large degree it is one source of our control.

The church became a theater where we put one man or a group of men on a stage and put the rest of the people in a crowd on the floor and made them spectators or gave them some minimal participation. They stood or sat while men stood on stage and spoke to them, lectured them, told them what to do, then those same men on stage became the dispensers of sacraments. The people became passive, they became powerless, their concerns were silenced, what they thought became meaningless, they were just there to watch and listen, and most of them did both badly.

Gone was the familial group of believers who spoke to each other about their troubles and tried to understand the sacred writings together and then helped each other do good in the times when they were doing all the things of their normal lives; in other words, gone were smallness and humility, kindness and neighborly love, and instead there was pride of platform and position, stage acting, fake grand rhetoric, learned lectures filled with idiocy, and a crowd of people so bored with the whole thing that they were ready to riot for almost any reason they didn’t really understand.

It was wonderful!

While the theater may be different, the common church of this day is still a theater. The raised platforms on which the preachers stand are still a stage. The performances may vary; there are the loud and crude haranguings of the fundamentalist baptist preachers, the chaos and confusion of the charismatic carnivals, the more polished feel-nice presentation at the seeker-sensitive churches, the more traditional grand-feeling meetings in the high churches, the down-home rustic ignorance of the small country churches, not to mention the camp meetings and the occasional revivals which do more to bring excitement than holiness.

Games and circuses, Humbuck. We can’t overvalue such assets.

So, while I can agree there is good in seeing people walk out the church doors never to return, our grip on the church is such that we should not feel too very threatened by great numbers of people in a church building. We are the ones who are concerned with telling people the things they want to hear, while the one we left is more concerned with telling them what he calls truths. As such, when we see a large church, we more often than not feel rather well at home, and able to mostly have our ways in it.

Of course, even some of these churches can be problematic for us. It is entirely likely that some megachurch pastor might come upon something in his reading of their scriptures that we’d rather he not think about. He might, for example, wonder about things like humility and pride and if he himself may be feeling too proud of his accomplishments, or he may wonder what real holiness is, or how he and his church can show true charity and compassion to people and do it without the need to brag about themselves on social media.

But, to borrow a phrase from the humans, we have plenty of firewalls against such viruses. Virtue is often difficult, and someone as busy as a megachurch pastor is too busy to be concerned with such difficulties. And isn’t that what the annoying blogger said he should do, the one who called him names and insulted him? And look at what he had accomplished! Look at these thousands of people who are at every one of his five sermons every Sunday! Look at the numbers of people who have “surrendered to Christ” through his sermons! 

So long as we can keep him proud and afraid, we need to not worry too much about him until the time comes for him to go to his eternal reward or until we break him there on earth. Still, we must remain vigilant.

Concerning the people leaving, no doubt many are leaving because of disillusionment. The hypocrisy in the church at all levels has worn them down, and they want nothing more to do with it. We can take some satisfaction in that.

But some are leaving because for them the church is little more than theater, and they want and need something that isn’t just another show. They want something that isn’t just another performance. They want substance, not mere forms.

So long as these people are few and scattered, let them go there way, and we can deal with in their isolations. They are not many, they have no power, and in leaving the churches they put themselves outside of church power structures. They are nobodies. They are scorned by the church faithful. Their voices are small, even puny, and at best all they can do is cry on a few of each other’s shoulders.

Still, they should be watched. Well should we remember what happened early on. The church was nothing, it was filled with nobodies. It was a creature of the poor and the enslaved. A very passing few wise or learned men wanted anything to do with it. It was a gathering of the despised. Yet it grew. At a critical moment we stepped in and turned that growth into an asset for ourselves, but we should not forget that it grew despite us.

I do not anticipate these few scattered sheep of his to do much, but he seems to love doing things in ways that are unreasonable to us, of using methods that should fail and making them work for him. We must remain vigilant, and have our defenses ready for even the most unlikely of assaults on our church strongholds.