Because Jesus Didn't Die to Start a Country Club

I’ve been into church all my life. 

I was raised in the church. We were definitely twice a Sunday people, in part because my dad was the pastor, but I’m pretty sure we would have shown up anyways.  My mom helped lead bible studies.  All my childhood we lived in parsonages right next door to the churches my dad served, in fact.   The church was just there.  

My parents always made it clear that God was the center of our lives, not the church, no matter how it might seem.  But at the very least, the church was our family business, pretty deeply woven into the fabric of our everyday life.   I suppose my dad could have quit his job and gone to drive a truck somewhere but, truth be told, I couldn’t have imagined that.  I don’t think he could have, either. 

It was a good business to be in.  We had good people around us, and experiences we shared.  Ministry was good to us as a family.  Sure, my folks faced plenty of difficulties along the way, but thankfully they didn’t drag us kids through all that. 

I’ve been a pastor for quite a few decades myself, now.  I’ve helped a middle-aged suburban church work through its growing pains as it matured. I’ve helped launch a brand-new church in a movie theater, mostly with people who hadn’t been going to church anywhere.  I’ve struggled with an adolescent church who hadn’t yet discovered what it would take to become a grown-up church on their own.  And I’ve worked as a transition coach with numerous other churches along the way.  Nowadays my wife and I simply get to belong to a church, without being the person in charge.   That’s kind of nice, too in its own way.

I love the church. I’ve been into it all my life. 

Organized religion, on the other hand brings very mixed feelings for me. 

As a life-long pastor, I’ve recognized how people’s responses to the institutional church can vary widely.  I try to be discrete with strangers about what I do for a career, but if I need to explain it, sometimes I’ll see people’s faces light up like I'm a long-lost relative (which, in a way, I suppose I am).   Other times, I'll see people quickly checking exits the way they might if they had accidentally stumbled into multi-level marketing presentation.

And church work behind the scenes?  Definitely mixed feelings about that.  On the one hand, there are few things more satisfying that helping a conflicted group of leaders figure out what God seems to be doing and helping them make realistic plans to follow Him together.  That’s what makes it all worth it for me.  But there’s something about the combination of leadership challenges and spiritual issues that can combine like nitric acid and glycerin, creating the church version of nitroglycerin with people who might otherwise be a picture of sanity. You definitely have to be careful when working with that.

Senior pastor joke: ministers need to learn from Jacob in the Old Testament who leaned on his staff and he died…

Over time, I’ve learned that churches can be a lot like country clubs, and not necessarily in a good way.  Both organizations tend to exist to meet the needs of their members, who are the ones paying the bills, after all.  Both groups tend to reach out to their own kind of people, often subtly discouraging people who might not really fit in.  And they both usually have golf leagues. 

But along the way I’ve learned that underneath it all there’s a big difference between the two, at least when the church is at its best.  I’ve seen people in churches pour out their time and efforts to quietly help another member behind the scenes, knowing they might never receive adequate thanks for their efforts.  I’ve seen people make changes in their lives, not because someone told them to, but simply because the more time they spent with God the more they felt Him prompting them to turn over a different leaf in some way.  And I’ve been in heated leadership meetings where someone laid down the pet causes he’d been trumpeting, explaining simply that God had  convinced him that it wasn’t his charge to lead any more.  There’s something that starts to happen in a church when people begin realizing what it means to have a savior who gave His life for you. 

I’ve never belonged to a country club. I have little interest in ever doing that, as I’m a horrible golfer.  But as a pastor, I’ve had plenty of chances to be part of church like church was meant to be.  Church, for real.  And, let me tell you, there’s nothing like it. 

As I read our Bible, I become aware that Jesus didn’t die to start a country club.  In fact, he had a dark way of suggesting that anyone who followed him trying to get a life would probably end up losing it (Matthew 16:25). And that wasn’t just marketing—of his first 12 charter members, the only one not executed for the cause spent his sunset years in isolation on a prison island named Patmos (Revelation 1:9).   

You may belong to a country club.  Maybe you happen to like golf.  If so, more power to you.  I could never do it. 

But if you belong to a church, I hope you can see that you are part of something that God intends to use to change your part of the world for His eternal purposes.  Maybe your particular church has found their place in that purpose.  Maybe they’re still in the process of discovering it.  In either case, I hope you don’t settle for anything less. 

I won’t.