Christianity and Insanity

A couple of days ago downtown I passed a church sign, and in the changeable portion of the sign it read: Revival! | Thursday Night | 7 pm.

Now that’s a common enough sign on churches these days. Many churches have a tradition of an annual revival. At the same time each year an outside speaker is scheduled, and there are revival services. This sequence of events is the annual “revival,” and one supposes that following these services, the church is “revived.”

Of course, also by tradition, when the scheduled time for next year’s revival comes around, the church will again be in need of revival. And so it goes.

This is a pattern in the church. We take a moment of special blessing from God, and we build a building, create a schedule, appoint a committee, and make it into a series of traditional activities we can place on the church calendar. And then we keep doing the same thing irrespective of results.

We’re like Peter on the mount of transfiguration. We see the vision, and then we want to put up a shelter and make the place of blessing a place to camp. Unfortunately, unlike Peter, we seem to miss the moment when Jesus tells us to move on.

If insanity is to be defined as doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results, then Christianity seems to have fallen into insanity.

It’s not that I’m opposed to organization, structure, or even tradition. But tradition is only of value when we learn from it, not when we repeat it blindly. If I read the Bible correctly, one of the strongest traditions is that we’re called to keep moving, not to set up camp.

The worship service can mark the grave of worship in the church. The revival meeting can mark the grave of spiritual growth and life. Somehow we need to learn to prayerfully and openly meet each new challenge rather than simply repeating the things we’ve done before.

Related articles

• The Church is Dead! (barefootpreachr.org)