Churchy Church

I still remember the cute young couple that arrived at our small, thriving church in Southern Illinois. I couldn't have been older than 12 at the time, but my mother's comment to me has managed to survive the intervening years: "They're not used to it here. They come from a churchy church."

Odd, now that I think about it, that she should say that. Her statement was somewhat cryptic, of course, unless you knew her. As a refugee from superficial evangelicalism, she had developed a reflexive fear of a program-heavy Protestantism that emphasized appearances and lingo at the expense of community and day-to-day obedience. She had found safety in our local PCA congregation, where young families embraced the Reformed faith with enthusiasm and sincerely struggled to consistently live out its ramifications. The vitality of this congregation was obvious, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its lack of a youth group, ladies' Bible study, cell groups, outreach committee, etc. Put another way, our church was vital because it was an organism, not an artifice.

I'm too familiar with the anarchy attendant upon the "home-church" movement to naively think that a lack of organization generates an organic community. But I have had opportunity in the last few years to discover that the temptation to create a "churchy church," where programs, committees, and general busyness crowd out that sense of "bodyness" that one finds so rarely, is a very real one, even in the most ardently Reformed communions. Maybe Aristotle's "golden mean" is not a myth, but a secular statement of the sacred imperative to "turn not to the right hand, nor to the left."