It’s a sin for church to be boring

Discovery Church
Voorhees, New Jersey
November 11, 2007

I intended to visit a different church that Sunday, but I ended up at Discovery. The story of why I did not attend the other church will appear in the next installment. The reason I did attend Discovery Church is simply that I saw a sign on the road, and decided to check it out. You could say I discovered it.

The sign led me to the parking lot of Voorhees Middle School. I saw some people entering the school by way of the gymnasium, so I followed to see if they were, indeed, going to a church service.

Yup. As soon as I walk through the doors, a woman hands me a program. Christian rock is playing over the sound system. A small stage has been set up, and there are about 150 folding chairs facing it. An enormous video screen is next to the stage. There are black and white curtains behind the stage, and someone is arranging red, white, and blue bunting on a stand in the middle. In the back of the auditorium, a little area called Java Joe’s Café has been set up, where you can buy coffee, tea, pastries, bagels, etc. Two little tables with tablecloths and chairs have been placed near the café. A bookstore has been set up next to the café – large cases that open up to display books, set up on tables. There are also ladders and lights and sound equipment in the gymnasium, but I’m not sure if this is part of the church set-up, or something the school uses.

After I find a seat, a man comes over, introduces himself, and asks if I have a program. Yes, I answer.

Ten minutes before 10:00 am, a slide appears on the giant screen announcing that “Discovery starts in ten minutes.” This is followed by other informative slides about events and programs, including one reminding parents of small children to sit in the chairs to the back and right, so that they can easily slip out of the service and into the hallway if their kids become noisy. Every few minutes the time is updated – “Discover starts in five minutes . . . three minutes . . .” etc.

Another man, wearing a dark blue tee shirt, shakes my hand and greets me. He is walking through the gymnasium, shaking hands with almost everyone. There is a wide range of ages here, but almost everyone is white.

I fill out the visitor’s card in the program, so that I will be ready when the offering comes around.

By 10:00, almost every chair has been taken. People are bringing coffee and bagels to their seats. The screen switches to a short video in which two men make announcement about upcoming events. I think one of the men in the video might be the man in the blue tee shirt who shook hands with me earlier. Perhaps he is the pastor? While the video plays the band gets ready. It includes a drummer, two guitarists, a keyboard player, and a lead singer. Later they are joined by two more vocalists.

When the band begins to play, the picture on the screen switches to a background of wedding rings, upon which the lyrics are superimposed. Everyone stands, and some people clap.

This praise music is not very easy to sing along with. Congregational participation is weak (most of the people near me are not even trying, although a few are clapping). The weakness of the congregational singing is masked by the loudness of the band, much the way that a very loud organ hides weak singing in a more traditional church service. But really, the big problem here is that this style of music is not suitable for group singing. The lead singer is actually a pretty good rock vocalist, but it’s the kind of dramatic, American Idol-type singing that is very, very hard to sing as a group. Lots of melisma.

The lead guitarist, who is one of those jumping-up-and-down type of players, gets in some good licks. The lead singer gestures a lot with his pinkie and index finger extended, a rock habit that might have slightly unfortunate connotations for some people.

At one point the band instructs everyone in a kind of fast hand clapping maneuver, and this starts out well but dies off quickly. The band is very energetic, but they seem to have to work very, very hard to get the crowd moving, singing, or clapping even a little bit. I have the sense that everyone would rather just sit down and watch. (Watching, perhaps with a little arm waving, would be more appropriate to this style of music.)

At 10:20 the band stops and we are asked to turn around and say hello to our neighbors, which we do.

After that someone on stage asks us all to sit down for the next song. So we do, but as luck would have it, the first line of the next song is “We stand and lift up our hands.” Scattered groups throughout the auditorium immediately do just that – stand and lift their hands – while others remain seated. Half the congregation stands, some lifting their hands, and half sit and watch. I am willing to stand or sit, but since I happen to be in a group of sitters, I remain seated.

Then a set of slides honoring the armed forces comes up, showing men and women in the military, including a number of very touching scenes of military funerals. (Today is Veteran’s Day.)

The man in the blue tee shirt says, “They do an awesome job of serving us. It’s amazing and humbling.”

At 10:30 the lead singer, now playing the keyboard, does a nice bluesy-rock version of Amazing Grace. It think it’s supposed to be a solo (there’s no way anyone could sing with him on most of it - again, lots of melisma), but a few members of the congregation try to join in on the second verse.

Next – what’s this? A short clip from an old Popeye cartoon appears on the screen! Popeye is getting married to Olive Oyl, and he needs to fortify himself with spinach in order to make it through the vows. Well, that’s unexpected. I do love classic cartoons, and Popeye in particular.

The man in the blue tee shirt is on stage now, and tells us that today he is going to present the third message in a series called Ourmarriagestinks.com. The first week he spoke on the topic of the Vow of Priority. The next week he spoke on the Vow of Pursuit. Today it’s the Vow of Partnership.

The screen now shows a couple who are obviously unhappy. The three points of the sermon are:
· Couples are always becoming more unified or more divided.
· Couples either complete each other or compete with each other.
· Couples become closer to each other as they become closer to God.

In the middle of the sermon, he shows a short clip from an Asian-American comedian (I don’t recognize him, but others might), doing a shtick on “If men had babies . . .” It’s pretty funny.

The pastor then goes into his own shtick, about how his wife talks more than he does, which gets a decent amount of laughter.

Then he tackles the topic of leadership in marriage. He quotes the famous verses from Ephesians: "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."

The pastor supports a very strong conservative interpretation: man is the head of the household, and has the leadership role.

But then he does the typical thing pastors do with these verses today. After firmly stating that men are the leaders of their households, he spends the next ten minutes explaining that what this actually means is that men and women are equals. Because the leader/follower template just makes people unhappy. He says that the desire for dominance is a sign of insecurity.

He reads another part of that famous passage in Ephesians: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” He says that Satan’s plan for the home is that the husband dominate the wife and wife submit passively, but God’s plan is for mutual submission. He tells a joke about how in heaven there are two lines for men, one marked “Stand here if your wife dominated you,” and one marked “Stand here if your wife didn’t dominate you.” All the men are in the first line except one. St. Peter walks over to the one guy and asks why he is in that line. He replies, “My wife told me to stand here and shut up.”

The pastor tells another joke about how a man and woman agreed at the start of their marriage that he would made the major decisions and she would make the minor ones, and it worked very well because in twenty years of marriage no major decisions needed to be made.

The whole thing reminds me of the great difficulty conservative Christians have today: they have to uphold conservative viewpoints, but they aren’t really comfortable with them. So they first proclaim adamantly that men are in charge, and then explain that what that really means is mutual submission – and then make jokes about how women are really in charge.

It’s one way to adapt to current culture while claiming to hold fast to older viewpoints. And really, after the congregation has just seen and admired vivid photos of women repairing fighter jets, holding guns, and serving overseas in combat – how hard can you come down on the side of women’s subordination? Even quite conservative churches are often quite uncomfortable with this teaching – but they don’t know how to disavow it, so they preach around it, as the pastor today has done.

Another way conservative churches have adapted to modern sensibilities is by changing the terminology. The doctrine that men are the head of the household was called hierarchicalism for many years, and everyone was pretty comfortable with that. Within the last twenty or thirty years this doctrine has quietly been re-named complementarianism, which sounds better. It is explained that men and women have complementary roles in the home and the church. Men teach and women learn; men lead and women follow. Same old conservative teaching, but with a more palatable name. And after proclaiming it loudly, most of them apply it only to church roles - women can't preach or teach in church, or serve as governing elders.

Some churches that hold to this view do not allow women to vote in church meetings. The reason is that allowing them to vote is, in effect, giving married men two votes, since a wife would ask her husband how to vote and then follow his orders. This would be unfair to single men.

The sermon is about 40 minutes long, which definitely makes it one of the longer ones I sat through during my year of visiting churches. Someone plays softly on the keyboard while the pastor closes in prayer, and he then asks people to raise their hands if they need prayer, or want to be saved. The pastor leads us in the sinner’s prayer. The church may show cartoon clips and comedy sketches, but they come back to some pretty old-fashioned, tried-and-true standbys in the end.

Announcements come back up on the screen. The church is putting together a mission team to work on Hurricane Katrina relief projects.

There is an offering and one more short praise song, and the service ends. People immediately begin breaking down the stage and putting things away. Setting all this up and taking it down every week must be a big job. These must be some dedicated members.

I stand around for a few minutes, and walk around the auditorium for a while. An older man (by which I mean, even older than me) shakes my hand and asks me what I thought of the service. Very nice, I answer. He smiles and says, “It sure wasn’t boring, was it? Bet you haven’t seen a service like that before!” I smile. Yes, I’m thinking, I haven’t seen comedy clips and cartoon clips in church before, but I think I’ve seen everything else you have here – most of it I saw about thirty years ago. But I see that he is genuinely proud of his church, and just wants me to like it.

On my way out of the auditorium I shake the pastor’s hand. I can’t help but ask him one question before I leave.

“Thanks very much for the sermon. So my duty as a wife is to follow my husband’s spiritual guidance?”

“Well, yes, unless it’s something from Satan.” He laughs to let me know that this is sort of a joke.

“Thanks; he converted to Catholicism recently and wants me to convert also. You’ve been a big help!”

He smiles uncertainly, and looks uncomfortable. I realize that I’ve taken a little bit of unfair advantage; he can’t really respond in the few moments we have by the door. I’ve seen this trick before – the parishioner delivering what he or she thinks is a zinger on the way out the door. I just never imagined I’d be the parishioner doing it.

It’s kind of fun. (Which doesn’t mean it’s right.)

Epilogue

I received a nice note after my visit, from Bob Smith, Campus Pastor. Apparently Discovery Church has several locations in southern New Jersey, and calls individual congregations campuses. I am on their email and snail mail lists, and I receive lots of both paper and electronic messages over the next few months.

They were raising money to build or buy a facility, or campus. When I checked their website again in 2011, just before writing this post, I got the impression that things have cooled down a bit over the past four years. There seems to be just one location now, in Williamstown, New Jersey. Perhaps the Voorhees site didn’t work out; I’m not sure. If it faltered, it sure wasn’t for lack of energy on the part of the pastors and musicians.

I thought a little more about Discovery’s slogan, “It’s a sin for church to be boring.” I’m reminded of a John Updike short story in which a man attends mass, and is asked upon his return to the house where he and friends are spending a weekend, “How was it?”

He is surprised by the question. How was it? It’s the same as always. The same as it has been for decades. The same old thing. That’s the point.

Some people don’t seem to understand that the sameness – the boringness – of ritual can be very comforting, satisfying, meaningful, and beautiful. People who just aren’t put together in a way that makes them appreciate ritual and tradition are likely more attracted to churches that offer rock music and cartoon clips and comedy skits. Which is not to say that those things are wrong. But I do think that the folks who want church to be exciting and different every week may be missing out on something, something that has sustained this boring old institution for a couple millennia. They shouldn’t be completely positive that the traditions of the past thirty years that they have adopted will be as popular in the long run – or even in the short run, like four years or so.