Bringing out the best in you, part 5

After the visit

Since I hadn’t filled out a visitor’s card, the church had no way of contacting me after the service. I looked at the church’s website after the visit, though, and learned more about Living Faith. It seems to be at the hub of an incredible amount of activity.

I read that Lamont and Constance McLean had built up the church from an original ten people who met in their home in 1985 to its present incarnation as an institution with more than 4,000 members. The church runs a Bible college, a television program, an elementary school, and a Wellness Center. One of their ministries, Entrepreneurs for Christ, is a series of classes, workshops, and seminars for people who own or would like to own a business. John DiLulio, the man who headed George Bush’s faith-based initiative program for a few years, had praised Lamont McLean and Living Faith for their work fighting poverty.

Attending Living Faith reminded me of one of the great divides among contemporary churches: the prosperity gospel church versus the non-prosperity gospel type. Prosperity gospel proponents believe that Christians should do well in addition to doing good – that God’s plan for His children is to reward them materially, in this world, here and now. Most prosperity gospel preachers are especially strong on tithing, often preaching a direct relationship between what you give to God (by giving to their church) and how your own finances increase as a result.

The prosperity gospel has been popular in this country for a long time, which is not surprising. After all, there are verses in the Bible that state pretty clearly that believers are rewarded for following God, and not just in terms of spiritual contentment, but with things like land, children, sheep, wealth, and health. Folks who concentrate on those verses say that anyone who doesn’t believe God will reward His faithful followers just isn’t taking Him at His word.

Folks opposed to the preaching of the prosperity gospel point out that Christians follow a leader who is rather famous for having no place to rest his head, and who advised the wealthy young ruler to sell all that he had and give to the poor. Then there’s that verse about a rich man getting into heaven being as likely as a camel going through the eye of a needle.

I know which side of this issue I’m on, but I also see how attractive the other side can seem. Churches that preach prosperity also usually seem to fall into a larger group, the self-improvement churches. That is, their primary vision of church is a place you go for self-improvement. Prosperity may be one part of that, but the self-improvement vision also includes things like banishing depression and self-doubt, having a great marriage, raising children who don’t do drugs, and so on. And who doesn’t want those things? Churches that focus on self-improvement are often successful, in terms of attracting members, and they can help people. The most famous American version of the self-improvement gospel is probably Norman Vincent Peale’s.

The downside of the happiness/self-improvement gospel, of course, is that someone who attends that type of church and experiences any one of a number of ordinary human experiences and emotions, such as grief, depression, doubt, or even just boredom can be made to feel guilty or substandard – if I had more/better/the right kind of faith, I wouldn’t feel this way! What is wrong with me?

Several months later I checked the church website again and was shocked to learn that Pastor Lamont had died of complications of a bone marrow disease just three months after my visit. His widow was now senior pastor, and the church had grown to 7,700 members.

I was very sorry I had never heard Pastor McLean speak; clearly he was a remarkable and gifted man. I would like to return to the church after my year of church visiting ends; perhaps I will have the opportunity to hear Connie McLean preach.