I was just writing a comment to someone that I figured would be worth a larger discussion. What are your thoughts?

CONTEXT: I made a comment about how Jesus' physical absence makes it easier for his bride (the church) to hamster rationalizations for idolatry (i.e. spiritual adultery), just as a wife who goes away from her husband for long periods of time is prone by hypergamy toward adulterous thoughts, and often even likely to act on them. He suggested the feminine imperative invading the church as one form of idolatry and asked about others. Materialism is what came to my mind. The rest of stream of conscious thinking off that subject.


Materialism

How many mega churches do you see with massive projectors, stages, huge buildings, etc.? Ironically, the churches with the most resources are the most prone to operate on a scarcity mentality - while they have lots of resources, they have lots of expenses as well, catering their services away from the mission of the Gospel and toward what keeps the money flowing so they can maintain their massive budgets.

This is one of the things I'm talking about often with my red pilled pastor (executive pastor, not head pastor), as he believes the church should switch to an abundance mentality built through crowd-sourcing rather than asset-accumulating, much like the difference between Uber and Taxi companies.

  • Taxi: Must purchase lots of cars. Must pay lots of employees. Fulfills their mission to make money only on the net after expenses are paid, using their own company's assets and manpower, which it must acquire first.

  • Uber: Doesn't own a single car. Drivers not official employees. They fulfill their mission to make money by using other people's assets and manpower.

Back to the church:

  • Modern "Successful" Churches: Owns buildings. Pays lots of staff. Remodeling projects constantly. Pays for coffee bars, etc. - all in order to bring people to a focal center each week. Fulfills its mission of filling the seats by spending lots of money to make people want to come.

  • Networked/Crowd-Sourced Church: Core, central leadership team works on a minimal budget (office space rent) with no significant expenses and fewer needed staff members (no huge congregation/building/projects to maintain). Utilizes existing leaders by giving them a vision and sending them out to build their own communities of believers (i.e. "micro" churches) in their homes, at coffee shops, public parks, at the gym, etc., essentially repurposing the expenses people are already paying to be used for God's purposes as well, thereby crowdsourcing the expense without actually increasing anyone's bottom-line by much at all. The money that is tithed, after covering the salaries of the reduced staff, goes toward actual needs like world missions, assisting the poor, caring for orphans, funding foster parents, a benevolence fund for people in the church network in need, etc. rather than remodeling a foyer or buying new fancy chairs.

I've mentioned it before, but the book Underground Church references this networking church idea, as the author is actually living this out in Florida right now, having thousands of people within the church network. When they need to meet corporately, they rent a space or find a public location able to accommodate them (like a park) rather than paying millions of dollars on a mortgage to maintain a building to accommodate everyone.

Long story short, the modern church has bought into the materialism of first world countries by assuming we must be fancy and impressive in order to accomplish God's work. In reality, this merely placates people and forces the great commission from:

  • "GO make disciples of all nations"

to

  • "Hope all the nations come to you to be made into disciples."

DISAPPOINTMENT IN THE SPIRIT

Sadly, a lot of this stems from the fact that the church is disappointed with the mission Christ gave us and the help the Holy Spirit gives. Most people don't really see value in the Holy Spirit. It's not sexy to them. They want Jesus returned to earth - someone we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands.

While many churches give lip service to the Holy Spirit and his work in our hearts, it often comes off as an idealistic notion of what they believe the Holy Spirit is like, rather than the actual Spirit we know and understand from Scripture.

  • "The Holy Spirit told me today ... [something that I was already thinking about anyway, but I assume it must have been from God]"

  • "The Holy Spirit moved me ... [when I felt an emotional experience that even non-Christians would have felt]"

  • "The Holy Spirit convicted me ... [when I did something that everyone knows is wrong anyway]"

  • "The Holy Spirit gave me a spiritual gift ... [that I'm going to use in absurd and often-times unbiblical ways]"

  • "I saw this [normal, every day occurrence that was slightly coincidental] and just knew it had to be the Holy Spirit]"

  • "The Holy Spirit gave me a vision - an image for you ... [that is really just the first thing that popped in my head, but I can't stop thinking about it, so it must be Him]"

The Holy Spirit certainly can and does do all of these things - but we often over-spiritualize the trivial in order to do one of two things:

  1. Convince ourselves that we're spiritual, because Spiritual people hear from God all the time, so we have to assume the things we hear all the time are from God

  2. Give some credit to the Spirit for something because we otherwise don't really know who he is or what he does, so we just make up things that we think must be him

In relational terms:

  1. The first is like a self-conscious wife who wants to keep doing whatever feels right to her, but looks for a way to rationalize this as honoring her husband. "He would have wanted me to do these things. I don't know if he actually said it, but I bet he wanted it, and he probably implied it somewhere. See? I'm really doing this for him and not just myself."

  2. The second is like the wife who is disappointed with her husband. She doesn't know who he is or what he does around the house. But she's talking with her friends and doesn't want to lose the comparison game, so she starts making up things about her husband and how great he is in order to rationalize to herself that she really is with a wonderful guy and other women should be jealous ... but secretly isn't attracted to him, so she keeps hamstering ways to try to convince herself, but it never quite works.

How many times have you heard someone say something like, "I just can't wait to see Jesus someday!"? That's quite an odd phrase to me. I bet people said that about God in Jesus' day. They knew the story of Moses seeing God, and probably thought quite similarly, "I wish I could see God like Moses got to!" What was Jesus's response to this? "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). Why? He answers in the next verse: "I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me." And he reiterates it in the verse after that. I bet the Jews were utterly disappointed with this explanation. "You're not really the father. You know what we meant. We want the REAL Father."

So when someone says they can't wait to see Jesus, how many of you could confidently say, "You're looking at him!"? Later on in the same conversation from John 14, by John 17 we see Jesus saying that he is in us (v. 21-26). Colossians 1:27 also affirms that Christ is in us. The same way we can see the father through Christ because they are one, others can see Christ in us because we are one - just as people should be able to know me without ever personally meeting me if they meet my wife - because I am in her, both physically and spiritually as one. A good wife should rightly be able to say, "You don't need to meet my husband because I am a reflection of his mission, character, values, and attributes. I am molded to his likeness. By getting to know me, you should know my husband too." If someone is shocked when meeting me after knowing my wife, there's a problem.

Interestingly, despite the incredible weight and value we have in Christ and the incredible blessing it was to the earth to have him walk around in bodily form, Jesus (in that same conversation above, John 16 this time) says, "It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you." That is, Jesus says that having the Holy Spirit will be EVEN BETTER than having Jesus walking the earth in our presence right in front of us. Yet for some reason we seem disappointed with the Holy Spirit's presence and linger only on the hope of Jesus's return. This baffles me.

Yes, we should be excited about Christ's return. And yes, some churches do recognize some value in the Holy Spirit. But most people I come across - even in charismatic circles - just don't get it. Their focus in applying the Holy Spirit is seldom on Acts 1:8, which is the true reason the Holy Spirit is given to us: to be God's witnesses, fulfilling the mission Jesus gave us to make disciples. Even when they do want to "tap into the power of the Spirit" to "do God's work," it's more about feeling super-powered and impressive than the mission itself. They care more about what the Holy Spirit can do for them than what the Spirit is meant to enable us to do for Christ. Which brings us to ...

HYPERGAMOUS ENTITLEMENT

Anyway, back on point: I believe money is the biggest idol of the church - and the directive the church applies in how it spends that money is toward bringing others to themselves. "Come and see," as Rick Warren often puts it. "I don't want to go to you. You come to me."

And it's no surprise. What's the feminine imperative right now? Women just sit back and wait for men to come running over. In a beta-filled world, that's how the sexual marketplace works today - a very backwards pursuit structure. And how often do we see the bride of Christ say, "Jesus, come to us, join us, fill us with your presence here in this place"? All the stinkin' time. We treat Jesus like our beta bux.

In reality, the bride is meant to GO to her husband and the purposes he calls her. Will Jesus show up sometimes? Sure. I walk through my living room when my wife is there, and she may take notice and use the opportunity to relate with me. That does happen as a matter of chance while I go about my business.

How idiotic would it be if I told my wife to give the kids a bath and she sits in the living room and says, "Kids, come here so I can give you a bath"? Even worse - what if the kids don't want a bath? They're not going to come. The bath isn't going to get done. My wife is going to end up yelling and screaming because they can barely hear her when they're in the basement or playing in their rooms. I'm going to confront her about it and say, "Why haven't you given them a bath yet?" She's going to say: "Didn't you hear me? I've been shouting at them all day to come here so I can wash them, but they're not coming. This job you gave me is hard work, and I'm trying my best."

That's what the church is doing to Jesus. I would, of course, tell my wife: "If they don't come to you, then go get them!" That's the easy, obvious answer. But it's an answer the church isn't willing to take. "Don't bring them to the living room to get a bath. Take them to the tub." Church buildings are like the living room - that's not where sanctification happens. It might be where people get motivated to be cleansed, but the cleaning actually happens out in the world, as we live out the work God starts in us. At best, even if my wife did get the kids to come to her in the living room, she could only take off their clothes and get them ready for the bath ... at some point she still has to leave her comfy chair.