F. X. Turk · @Frank_Turk
6th Jul 2016 from TwitLonger
The Headline-Driven church
This weekend my church family met at my house for a "normal" care-group dinner and time of fellowship, and one of the guys in my group sat down with me as we ate hot dogs and potato salad and we started to talk about the current events of the weekend, which this weekend did not yet include #AltonSterling but did include the terrorist attack in Bangladesh.
Just for a little background, our church does something which will seem weird to a lot of people: our pastor preaches through the Bible passage by passage, and does not let current events dissuade him from that path. So for example, we did not get a sermon about the theological meaning of the 4th of July or patriotism on this past Sunday. We got a sermon on Mat 24:15-28, which is about the end of the world (both in type and in final reality). From my seat, that sort of sermon is a lot more useful in dealing with events like what happened in Bangladesh than some other hash driven by a headline, but the point of fact is that my pastor did not mention Bangladesh at all in his sermon.
This bothered my friend and brother in Christ who was visiting my house that evening for a couple of reasons. I think the primary reason is that he is deeply involved in ministry to internationals in our city who are here for work or study. He sees our nation and our church through their eyes, and he often has very keen insights into things we do which are sort of tone-deaf to others who are not in our pocket of God's cargo pants.
But in this case, I think he was getting it wrong for a couple for reasons. The first reason is this: the news only reports what it finds interesting at the moment. So for example, this weekend in America, if its was an average weekend (Fri-Sat-Sun), about 368 people died from the flu (156 per day). There are no headlines covering that story because it's the middle of summer. 336 people on average committed suicide - no headlines for that. 309 on average died in traffic accidents, and the headlines are missing. 246 died from falls on average, and there are no headlines driving our attention to safety or ladders. How many abortions are reported daily by local or national media outlets? Those running the media find some things more interesting than others, and some lives matter more than others in that calculus. So whatever is in the headlines may have our attention for the moment, but those headlines are not really driven by moral or theological imperatives: they are driven by the urge to gain clicks and sell newspapers.
The second reason is also simple, but generally overlooked by a lot of Christians: the act of corporate worship in the Christian practice is not an act merely for the moment. It is said that we worship to an audience of One, not for the audience of outsiders looking in, and in this case this axiom is a great filter to see how and why a current event may affect the local church. The truth -- that is, the way things are actually happening right now and not merely the way they are being reported -- is that everywhere, at all times, there are tragic things happening. To say otherwise is frankly shallow and ignorant. This fact is constantly trotted out by unbelievers when they attempt to impugn the Christian faith using the problem of evil. Every moment in this world is stained by a tragedy equal to the value of a human life. That problem, in every respect, is dealt with at the cross. It is our place in this world to stop looking at those problems as if any of them are worse than any others and to instead look up from them to the crucifixion and the empty tomb and praise God that he has already presented the solution to both our culture which glorifies some sins, ignores others, magnifies still others as if they were the only bad things happening, and also to our actual plight as people who make this world the way it really is right now. Christian worship is not driven by headlines but by God's word, God's promises and actions, which reset our hearts and minds to God's priorirties and not the angsty-urgency of a scrolling headline feed.
My opinion: don;t let the world dictate your priorities, either in worship or in you attention to how bad the world really is. It is actually far worse than the headlines tell us, and if we lose track of the real solution, we are sunk.