It started out as one of those Sundays, when I was filled with the excitement to experience the presence of God. I was looking forward to visiting a church that is known to be one of the fastest growing church in her own denomination. I read a book that was written by the senior pastor of this church. I was truly inspired by this book since the book was all about how the every aspect of church’s ministry is to be centered around prayer.
I was welcomed by very friendly greeters who were strategically placed all over the church. The sanctuary was very well architectured with comfortable chairs, great acoustics, and wonderful multimedia equipments. The worship began with an introduction of the children’s choir from Africa that came to tour around US to raise fund for their country. It was great up to that point, but I began to feel little uncomfortable after the children’s choir have left the stage. The worship Pastor came on the stage and said, “Today, we are going to use our good ol’ hymn books. Please take out your hymnals from your pew pockets and shout out the hyumn number that you would like for us to sing.” There were several shouts from the congregation and the leader called out the number and said, “Ok, Hymn # 367! We will sing first and last stanza.” So the congregational singing portion ended with singing randomly picked stanzas from randomly picked hymns. I am sure this is not this church’s normal way of worshipping on Sunday service, but I was getting little upset. Where is the preparation of the worship? Yeah, we got to sing some of people’s favorite hymns, but if we are going to do that, we should at least sing the entire hymn rather than picking few stanzas from them.
The children’s choir came out again and sang few more songs. After they left the stage, big screen was placed on the stage as the associate pastor came out and said, “This morning, we will hear from a pastor of our church’s eastside campus. The message is being broadcasted simultaneously as the eastside campus is hearing this live. We are starting a new sermon series called, Gospel Cinema…” Well, I was curious to hear what this was about. By this time, I forgot about how upset I was with the congregational singing portion being so casually led. I was excited to hear the Gospel being presented in a very innovative and creative way. The pastor began telling a story about how everyone enjoys watching movies and went on about great menu of summer movies that are out in the theaters. She devoted about 5 minutes talking about that. And then, she began telling us about this particular movie titled, “August Rush,” and how she is going to introduce this movie to us. Well, I will not bore you with every detail of the sermon I heard, but the 95% of the sermon was devoted to explaining what this movie was about in order to to build up to the big conclusion. Those of you who have already watched this movie, you know what this movie is about. It is about a son who was parted at the birth by force, but kept his hope in finding his mother. Of course, the mom was searching form him as well. Her conclusion was that God is looking for us as this mother in the movie was looking for her son.
When the message was finished, the holy anger came over me. I felt like I came to this luxurious restaurant expecting a great meal, but leaving with such bad taste in my mouth and disatisfaction in my stomache. Perhaps my analogy was poor. I didn’t come to receive food, but to give my service to God. No matter what experience the church provide, I should be able to worship God and find something to take back home. I wasn’t angry because this church didn’t provide what I needed. I was upset because this is the reality of many churches in America. We became very casual with God and take the worship so lightly. There is not much preparation with reverence and fear for God. We are to usher people into the presence of God, aren’t we? As a preacher, I realized how many of us, including myself, have been so preoccupied with concerns to make our messages relevant and to connect with people. We spend great portion of our given time–30 to 40 minutes–trying to make people laugh or make some connection with people. Because of that we have so little time to expound on the actual content of the message.
I am not criticizing this specific church. I am in no position to criticize anyone. I simply realized that this could very well be our church or what our church is trying to become. We need to stop trying to become churches for people but churches for Christ. I believe this is the very fact why Jesus became angry when he came to the temple. Jesus said in anger, “This house is a house of prayer!” People have made the temple to be a place of convenience. They were to prepare and bring sacrifice from home, but they were selling those inside of the temple. We need to be “Seeker-sensitive,” yes! We need to make them feel welcomed and loved. However, we should not neglect our God in the process of welcoming the seekers. I pray that we will see more of God-sensitive churches.
