Sunday mornings at the Las home when I was growing up always included “The Hour of Power” TV program playing on the background as we readied for church. Service at the Crystal Cathedral was always spectacular and star-studded! Famous people got interviewed for testimonies, recording artists were featured for special music! Broadway musicals pale in comparison to its Christmas and Easter productions. Last Friday, it was finalized. The world-renown Crystal Cathedral will be sold.
I was a little kid when churches’ heyday began to wane. If I had not been raised in a church-going family, I would probably be like any other person in my generation of the de-churched. Now that GenXers are all grown up and many are raising families, having little or no church exposure growing up, do not know any better, just like their Boomer parents who didn’t bring them to church very often.
Now that I live in what is considered Canada’s Bible Belt it’s interesting to note that churches around here aren’t even half full on a Sunday morning, or worse, some have even closed their doors. There seems to be better things to do and places to be at on a Sunday morning- a hockey game, the mall, etc.. In a city of 28,000 that has 21 churches with a collective Sunday attendance of 2,000, ours is not exactly a churchgoing town. A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday morning following my sermon, a woman came up to me to say, “I didn’t think of coming to worship corporately with the church was important until today. I’ve always espoused the idea that I can always worship alone, and didn’t have to go to services with others, especially when it’s not convenient for me. Truth be told, I always went to church out of convenience, hence my adult kids have the same idea.” My recent trip to Toronto to attend my denomination’s annual convention corroborated this generic view of church life. Church and Christianity just no longer belong nor fit in to the wider culture.
Collectively pretending the spiritual realm doesn’t actually matter does not make it any less real, just less regularly accessible. And here I’m guessing my readers would be community of people who are supposedly hip to this. We know that sometimes life interruptions can re-animate the spiritual realm in real time, and Christians and churches can be those interruptions to people’s lives that can rekindle spirituality. Our existence and our lives should lead people to ask about God, the Bible, Christ and spiritual life and the possibility of change. Does a community like the Church really matters? How it cuts against the grain of the wider culture bearing a message that dignifies our humanity and elevates our concern into the realm of the things that matter most? Can you see how important it is to have friends to help our becoming courageous agents in a world that values far lesser things? Have you felt the downward tug of the lesser things? And can you now feel the upward pull of the better things? Can you see what’s at stake out there as well as inside your own heart? Are you willing to take Christianity to the streets of the Post-Christian city! Are you willing to make your church a “city on a hill” that cannot be hidden?
Once mighty now closed and abandoned church in Michigan
