Greasy God

A lot of our churches are like fast food restaurants. We make it easy for someone to drive in, grab their greasy God meal and get out. We provide the spiritual food once a week, and it's optional to tip 10% to the server.

With a litle less rhetoric, I suggest that the average church makes it really easy for people to visit once a week for the Sunday sermon and worship. Say hi to a few people if you want to but feel free to slip in and out without notice. Since the Sunday service is the primary focus of most churches, and only a small number of people can be actively involved in it as ushers or musicians or whatever, the majority of the crowd must remain passive participants. We pick from a menu of services in different churches, select our order, eat up quickly and move on.

So for this passive majority, the way to get involved is outside of that Sunday service. Nursery care, youth ministry, soup kitchens, etc. These programs usually require some sort of regular time commitment and you will have less time for family and friends, naturally. And in many cases, the activity itself is the focus of your time, so you concentrate on keeping the kids entertained but don't actually get much of a chance to get to know the people you're with. The opportunities to get involved are still plentiful but they come at a price, like going to a restaurant where you wait for a half hour for your meal and the bill is more than twenty bucks each.

Churches make it really easy to simply attend a Sunday service and then it's a little harder to get involved with a ministry. And in the context of all of that, the hardest thing is to find ways to develop mentoring relationships and close friendships. It's still possible, of course, but I think that this is the most difficult thing to do inside of a church. So why are we surprised when the majority sticks with the easiest option?

To extend this metaphor even further, most people do not eat at fast food joints or fancy resturants on a regular basis. Instead, we prefer to do a little home cookin' with our own groceries most of the time. It's easier, it's cheaper and it's in the comfort of our own home. To compare that to our Christian lives, it's more like inviting a friend over for dinner to discuss God and life, and we get our spiritual nutrition that way. This method is both easy and effective, and most of us already do this anyway.

If we can agree that the one-on-one relationships are key to a healthy spiritual lives, then we need to make sure it's easy to do. If it's not easy to do then most people won't do it.