WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE CHURCH: NICE BUILDING—WHAT’S IT FOR?

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Colossians 3:1-11

August 5, 2007

Colossians 3

¹So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ²Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, ³for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

⁵Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). ⁶On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. ⁷These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. ⁸But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. ⁹Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices ¹⁰and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ¹¹In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

What in the world were they thinking? As we barreled across the Kentucky state line near Williamsburg, I spotted a couple on the side of the interstate who had gotten out of their car. They were leaning over the guardrail, taking a cutting of a vine and putting it in a plastic bag. Know what it was—this vine that they were so gently readying for transport and transplant? Kudzu. All children of the South know that at the beginning of the world there was one plant created not by God but by Satan - kudzu. Kudzu was introduced to the United States in 1876 and it now covers over 7 million acres of the deep South. Its vicious, uncontrollable vines grow as much as a foot per day during summer months, up to sixty feet each year, climbing trees, power poles, and anything else they contact. James Dickey writes,

In Georgia, the legend says That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house. The glass is tinged with green, even so...

For eighteen years Dr. James Miller of the U.S. Forest Service in Alabama has researched methods for killing kudzu and has found that while many herbicides have little effect on it, one herbicide actually makes kudzu grow better! And here they were on the side of the highway--kudzu gatherers unwittingly preparing to sow destruction somewhere else.

That’s what’s wrong with the church today. We are letting the church fade in importance with nothing to put in its place to remind folks to set their minds on things above. And instead we are unwittingly planting the vines of destruction, planting secularism, planting hedonism, planting immediate gratification in the fertile hearts of future generations. What in the world are we thinking?? The church has become for us just one more club to join, just one more activity on the crazy calendar of our children’s lives, just one more civic organization to attend, just one more old mossy relic of traditions past.

So it comes as no surprise to find church membership numbers plummeting across America. It’s a whiny song of lament and despair and the verses keep growing. Verse one, mainline denominations are losing members faster than sand castles disappear on the beach. Verse two, membership and attendance are now declining in evangelical churches in the U.S. such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Churches of Christ. Verse three, Christianity everywhere is on the slide: the Presbyterian Church in Canada showed a 35% loss in membership in just ten years, Catholic churches in Latin America are now in decline, even though ½ of the world’s Catholics live in Latin American, census studies in Canada and Britain show 16% of the population responding “no religion.” And if you want to be surrounded by atheists, go to British Columbia where 35% of the population claims to have no personal religion. Kenneth Inskeep writes in The Lutheran, “It's quite clear that the baby boom simply came to an end. And as the boomers became teenagers and adults, they felt free to leave the church. They didn't join conservative churches. They quit going to any church.” Will there be a day in the future when people will look through the hedges and trees on the corner of Glendover and Bellefonte and say, “Nice building over there—what’s it for?”

What’s wrong with the church? Maybe what’s wrong is the attitudes of people about it and, to be honest, even the attitudes of people in it. If our lofty attitudes about the church have slipped, and they have, it is time to reset our thinking, “to be renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator” as brother Paul tells us. Paul admonishes the church at Colossae that, if they have been raised with Christ, they are to set their minds on the things that are above, not on things that are on earth. Once the tallest buildings were cathedrals, designed to lift our eyes and hearts heavenward, to express the grandeur of God, to show the size and importance of the spiritual life. Churches dwarfed all other buildings in size and importance. But now cathedrals hunker down between huge factories and towering skyscrapers; churches sit mostly empty while office buildings buzz with energy and activity. Where would you say our minds are set these days?

Paul tells us that the point of the church, of faith in Christ, is to move our minds from idle carnal pleasures and to push us toward higher goals. The powers of earth will never rescue us from our innate human tribalism and egocentrism and move us toward sacrificial self-giving. Only the church preaches that truth. Paul urges us to discover a whole new self, the true inner person, the real you. And where is the place that pushes us toward that discovery? It is that old church on the corner. Unlikely as it seems, its creaky or smudged doors open to a vision so beautiful that modern words fail to express it.

When I was in the third grade, my mother who had grown up in the Missionary Baptist church decided that it was time for us to become a church-going family. There wasn’t any discussion of the matter that I can remember. No family councils were called; neither my brother nor I got a vote. My dad declined the invitation for a few months but my mother’s “final decisions” were hard to resist and before long my dad was the church-goingest one of us all. I can’t imagine the scene if I had said, “Mom, I have joined a baseball team (you see, soccer hadn’t been invited to America in the 1950s) and we play our games on Sunday mornings, so I’m going to need a ride to the games instead of the family going to church together.” It was inconceivable that I would make such a statement or even think that way. No child psychologist waited to scold my mother for not giving us boys a choice in our spiritual expressions. We were going to church. And the closest one was on the end of our short block, Decatur Street Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

I don’t recall a single friend that I ever made at that church in the three years before we moved out of that neighborhood, so I certainly wasn’t going there to make friends or because all my friends were there. I was going because my mother told me I was. I don’t remember who taught my Sunday School classes, so I wasn’t there because some impassioned adult touched me theologically with her amazing intellect. I do remember the communion services every Sunday where every Deacon uttered some sort of prayer before communion was served. I do remember the church pews vibrating from the volume of the hymn singing. But mostly what I remember in those first early years was that church was important to my mother and therefore I knew there must be something to it, something in it for me. Even through my increasingly-rebellious early teen years when my buddies and I would slip outside during the sermon to tell jokes that were much funnier than those the preacher was allowed to tell inside, even then my mother fought the good fight each week and made me go to church. The things I learned in those early years about my relationship to God and my responsibility to others have formed the foundation of my life today. I wonder what I would have been like today without the church. What kind of things would I be seeking? Where would my mind be set?

I have a wisteria vine that I trained to grow up the post at the corner of my back porch. I had to use nails and wire and twine to hold it there at first until the vine finally realized that the post was its support, the key to its survival and strength, and began then to wrap its own branches tightly around the post. That’s what my mother did. She held me close to the church until I realized that it was the strength for my life, until I wrapped my arms around it myself. I want to make sure that my children and grandchildren get that same foundation whatever it takes to accomplish that.

Jesus said, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” (John 15:5) And that’s what the church is for. To make sure that we are planting the right vine, the true vine that offers welcome at the table to all, not the kudzu of exclusivism and preference. Not the kudzu of narrow-minded, nose-down, uninspired drudgery, but the true vine of higher goals, deeper purpose and greater vision. Not the chaotic, grasping kudzu of oppression and greed and war lust, but the true vine of hope and compassion and peace. Not the kudzu that obscures everything else beneath its sinister foiliage, but the true vine that branches out to reveal God’s people doing God’s work in God’s world.

Set your minds on things that are above, seek the things that are above, discover a new self. The world may be full of kudzu, but there will always be the church, overgrown perhaps, overwhelmed occasionally but always rising up through the tangled mess to proclaim that Christ is all, that Christ is in all. Not just a nice building but a head-lifting, vision-setting, culture-correcting, life-changing, foundation-forming, mind-clearing, glory-revealing earthly outpost of the living Christ. That is what the church is for.