There’s nothing wrong with adding some entertainment value to your worship. However, when entertainment is the only thing happening, we have a problem. This is was my primary complaint with Life Church and a few other religious institutions I’ve experienced. The emotion and entertainment factor was the whole thing; Jesus was just a paint job on the outside.
In our home worship this morning, we decided to use our tablets for Bible display. We were using the YouVersion app from Life Church. Picture this: Using a tablet and talking about the text, you have to touch the screen periodically to keep the tablet from going to sleep on you. That’s how they work. There is virtually no place on the screen you can touch it while that Bible application is running, without the display morphing. It jumps to another chapter, opens some function that obscures the text, or does some other crazy shit — anything except simply display the text of Scripture for simple reading. That’s how Life Church is about religion altogether. It’s not about Christ and His Word, but keeping you too busy to notice what He really says.
In any given church you can attend today, the majority will simply sit still until you script some kind of movement. You can get them to stand and sing, even raise their hands and shout a little. You cannot really get them involved, judging by the lament of most church leaders. What they don’t tell you is that the activity they want from the folks is rather constrained. Pastor Craig at Life Church is nothing like those other church leaders. He plays to the crowd in this respect. His script takes advantage of this TV generation culture of indolence. The last thing he wants is for any of the members trying to actually do religion. They are supposed to absorb the stream of religion he pours out on them, along with his hand-picked staff, but God forbid that anyone rise up from the membership and actually try to express their gifts of the Spirit. He can’t script for that, so he simply structures things to prevent it. His anointed leaders spend a significant amount of time and effort squelching independence.
And Pastor Craig is simply the best at doing this, but he’s far from alone in striving to operate that way. This is the new wave of mega-church growth. The people are there to be conditioned and herded, but not allowed to actually be individuals. Don’t ever let them depart from the script. If that’s not bad enough, such leadership as he offers is a form of herding that is utterly foreign to Scripture. It’s passive faith with just enough enthusiasm to play cheerleader.
Here’s what your pastor here at Kiln of the Soul wants: Take your own lead. Don’t hand me the reins. Let me tell you a little about what I’ve experienced with Christ, then you get your own experience and do things as only you and He can decide.
Maybe it doesn’t bleed over in the verbiage I splash out on this page, but I am so excited about what God has revealed to me about the future of our meat-space mission that I can hardly contain myself. Two or three times every day I go out and stroll where I can talk out loud to God and not creep folks out. One of the things I keep praying is that we bring back to this world a powerful influence for spiritual and moral freedom. No human is more free than when he/she stands in the power of the Lord. No human is more powerful than one who embraces His moral character and lives His glory. That’s what it means to rule and reign on His behalf.
No other religious organization I know is doing this. So far, none of them even make room for it in their work. So we are starting something fresh, something that departs from the predictable flavors you might know. We aren’t selling something “better than the rest,” but we are surely doing something different, very different. We have found a path that is just too sweet to keep a secret. We want everyone to experience it, but we know better than to think it has to be on our terms. So I want you to experience the power yourself and run off in whatever direction it leads you. I don’t care about numbers, facilities and money; tell me about the power of the Spirit to remake your life. Tell me how He works through you in your own daily ministry, because if you don’t have a ministry, you don’t have the Spirit.
Now that doesn’t mean you have to create a tax-free foundation and program of outreach. It means you have your own way of living His power for others to see, something in which your heart connects as a sensory organ back into the rest of His Creation. Don’t tell me how well you mimic what I do. Tell me how God works in your life differently. We use His power to influence people and break them free from constraints, not trade one set of controls for another.
