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It’s funny how your mind wanders when you’re sitting in a reclined position with sharp instruments and hands cramped in your mouth, loading your taste buds with the flavor of latex. I was recently at the dentist for my regular cleaning, and that experience helped me process today’s story. What I have for you is most certainly more enjoyable than a trip to the dentist.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode #714, “Church of the Hygienist.” I’m Darrell Darnell, I didn’t go to the dentist for the first time until I was in my thirties, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
It may have taken me well into adulthood to find my way to the dentist, but I’ve been going to church for most of my life. Sometimes against my will, and often by my own choice, but in one way or another, church has always been there in some form.
My earliest church memories go back to when I was five or six years old, sitting next to my parents and my brother in the pew. We didn’t go every single week, but we went regularly. And on the weekends my brother and I spent with my grandparents, which happened a lot, church wasn’t optional. We went. Every time.
After my parents divorced when I was nine, and honestly probably for a while before that too, church mostly disappeared from my life except for those weekends with my grandparents. It became a grandparent thing, not a family thing.
Then when I was 15, I surrendered my life to Christ and something shifted in me. I made a personal decision, on my own, that I would find and attend a church as often as I could. I knew, even as a teenager, that being around other believers mattered for my growth. After high school, when I moved to the city for college, I found a local church with a group for college aged people. A few years later I married a girl who took church just as seriously as I did and twenty seven years of marriage later, church attendance is still a priority for our family.
I tell you all of that because I know this podcast has a wide range of listeners. Some of you have a story a lot like mine. You grew up around church, in church, and somewhere along the way you made it your own decision to keep going as an adult. Others of you never grew up around church at all. Maybe you’ve only ever set foot inside one for a wedding, a funeral, or a Christmas Eve service you got dragged to.
And a lot of you land somewhere in the middle. You’ve had seasons in and out of church. Maybe you went begrudgingly for years and then, surprisingly, started to love it. Maybe a life change or an illness pulled you away. Maybe you got burned out. Or maybe, and I say this gently, you got hurt or even abused by a church, a pastor, or people who called themselves Christians. And that hurt caused you to walk away, not just from church, but from Christianity altogether.
Wherever you land in that spectrum, I hope the next few minutes are helpful. I hope this encourages you to take church seriously, or to reinvigorate a relationship with church that’s gone cold. I hope it helps some of you find healing. I know that’s a lot to hope for in one episode. But stick with me.
I started thinking about this topic last year, and it started with Colby and Natalie.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that at some point during their dating relationship, Natalie moved from her hometown to the college town where Colby lives. Once she was there, it made sense for the two of them to start attending church together. And since Colby was already going somewhere, it made sense for Natalie to simply tag along to his church.
They started attending as a couple, and pretty quickly decided they wanted to get plugged in and serve somewhere. That’s when things got hard.
Natalie found that the group she wanted to serve with was a clique. They ignored her. They sat around while she did the actual work. It was not a positive experience. I don’t remember all the details of Colby’s situation, but he ran into his own roadblocks trying to get plugged in too.
So they talked about it. And that conversation turned into a bigger conversation about church in general. What did they actually want to get out of church? What did they want to contribute? What style of preaching and music fit them? Eventually they realized that maybe the answer wasn’t to keep trying to force themselves into Colby’s church. Maybe the answer was to go find a church that wasn’t his church that she happened to attend, but a church that would be theirs.
I love that so much, because it reminded me of Kari and me at their age. It became really important to us, as a young couple, to find a church that saw us as an equal couple. Not a church that saw us as Darrell, and the girl he’s married to. We wanted a place that was ours, together, from the start.
But the more I thought about Colby and Natalie’s situation, I saw that it reveals something bigger, both good and bad, of how our culture approaches church.
There is no shortage of churches in America. Something like 68 percent of churchgoers travel less than 15 minutes to get to church. I’ve got seven churches within ten minutes of my house. One of them is the one our family attends.
The good side of that is obvious. It’s not hard to find a church, or get to one. But the flip side is that it’s easy to treat church shopping the same way we treat shopping for almost anything else in our consumer culture. We can walk in asking, “what can this place do for me?” And when something doesn’t match our preferences, we start looking somewhere else. Before you know it, you’re bouncing from church to church, looking for the perfect one, and giving up before you ever find it. Or you leave the moment something goes wrong, whatever “wrong” means to you that week.
You could make the case that this is exactly what Colby and Natalie did. I left out some details for the sake of time, but I talked with Colby about this at length, and I can tell you their decision wasn’t selfish and it wasn’t about them getting what they wanted. In fact, the church they landed on skews toward an older congregation, which they actually saw as an advantage. They wanted people ahead of them in life to learn from, and opportunities to serve that weren’t about being noticed.
That’s the difference. Shopping for a church that serves you is one thing. Looking for a church where you can grow and serve others is something else entirely.
Here’s what I learned.
The purpose of church was never to just serve and cater to the people who attend it. The purpose of the church is to gather believers together to worship God, to teach and build each other up, to enjoy real fellowship, to care for the needy, to share the good news of God’s Kingdom, and to represent Christ to the world around us. That’s not just my definition. It’s basically the description you find in Acts 2, where the early church devoted themselves to teaching, fellowship, breaking bread together, and prayer, and shared what they had with anyone in need.
Every believer is part of the universal church, the body of Christ. But every believer should also be plugged into a local church, actually interacting with actual people. Paul describes the church like a body with many parts in Romans 12. An eye can’t do what a hand does. A hand can’t do what a foot does. But cut any of them off from the body, and they stop working the way they were made to work. That’s what happens when we stay disconnected from a local church too.
Last week you heard from Jeff, and his story included some incredible details about how his local church surrounded him during the hardest season of his life, after losing his daughter, Abigail. That’s what church is supposed to do. It’s supposed to serve, to care for people inside its walls, to care for widows and orphans and the community around it, and to do all of it through the love of Christ. James puts it plainly. Pure religion, the kind God accepts, means caring for widows and orphans in their distress. I believe it’s important to plug into a church that’s actually doing that.
For those of you who aren’t part of a church right now, let me offer a gentle encouragement.
If you’ve been hurt or abused by a church, I’m not going to excuse that. I won’t pretend it didn’t happen or tell you to just get over it. An abusive church, pastor, elder, or Christian is not demonstrating the love of Christ, period. But I will say that many churches, mine included, have real programs, real counselors, real classes, and real mentors who can walk with you through that pain. I’d encourage you to seek that out, even if it feels scary.
Some of you are more like a friend of mine I’ll call Karen. A few years ago she told me she and her husband stopped going to church because of all the hypocrites there. And honestly, she’s probably right. If you’re looking for hypocrites, church is a pretty good place to find some. But I’d ask you to be careful how freely you throw that word around. Most people sitting in those pews are just broken, hurting, hopeful sinners who found grace at the foot of the cross and are trying, one messy day at a time, to let the Holy Spirit shape them into something a little more like Jesus.
In the meantime, we’re all still a bunch of screw ups. Does that make us hypocrites? Sure, some of the time. But that’s not a reason to walk away from church. And if you’ve used that as your excuse to walk away from church, I’d challenge you to look internally rather than toward those you call hypocrites.
I was in the dentist chair recently getting my teeth cleaned. I can’t clean my own teeth properly. And the hygienist cleaning mine, who could see spots I’d never find on my own, also has to sit in someone else’s chair and let them clean her teeth. Same with the dentist who came in at the end to check her work. None of that makes them hypocrites. It just makes them human.
Church is full of people who need someone else to help clean up the spots they can’t see themselves. As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just what being human, and being in process, looks like. Flawed people, helping flawed people. Of course, that means you have to be willing to be vulnerable, to sit in the chair and open up to someone else.
Here’s what I’d love for you to walk away with. Have standards for a church. Look for sound teaching, real community, and a heart to serve the people inside and outside its walls. Those things matter. But don’t expect perfection, because you won’t find it. Every church is made up of broken, hurting, hopeful sinners, those Karen called hypocrites. People just like you and me.
The writer of Hebrews tells us not to give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but to encourage each other instead. I think that’s a good reminder that church was never meant to be a spectator sport. It’s not a show you watch and grade on the way out. It’s a family you show up for, mess and all.
So here’s my challenge. If you’re not connected to a church, find one that’s actively worshipping, teaching, caring for people, and sharing the gospel, and go serve there before you ever ask what it can do for you. If you’ve been hurt, seek healing, and don’t let the actions of a few define the character of the whole. And if you’re already plugged in, go look for the person in the corner who’s struggling to get plugged in themselves, the way Colby and Natalie were, and invite them in.
Are there bad churches out there? Absolutely. Are there churches that will hurt you? Unfortunately, yes.
But most churches are good. Most churches are full of ordinary people doing their best to be the hands and feet of Jesus in a broken world. Like a lot of things in life, it’s the big, loud failures that cast the longest shadow, and that shadow can unfairly cover up all the quiet, faithful, wonderful work happening in and around churches everywhere.
Don’t let the shadow fool you. Go find your church. Show up. Serve before you’re served. And watch what God does with it.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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