students of jesus

It’s a prominent feature in nearly every church, if you’re facing the wrong way. When the worship leader looks beyond the congregation, or when the pastor lifts his gaze beyond his listeners, each of them sees a ghastly, inhuman face: the face of a clock.

North Americans are a scheduled, punctual people. Work starts on time, our trains run on time, and regularly scheduled television shows toll the evening hours. Sunday morning is no exception. Church starts—and ends—on time.  Greeting, 2 minutes. Music, 18 minutes. Announcements, 3, Special Music, 5 Offering, 3, Sermon, 27, and the Altar call (where eternal destinies hang in the balance) is 3 minutes. When a church has three Sunday morning services, 8:30, 10: 00, and 11:30, the clock is part of the planning. Maybe it's the master. Nor does it matter if our liturgy is one hour, or 75 minutes, or 90. When the speaker runs overtime, the congregation will signal their impatience with the mighty rustling of closed Bibles or the gathering of belongings.

I want to tell you why we should break the Sunday service clock, and why this idea will almost certainly fail.

THROW AWAY THE CLOCK:

The Puritans of old listened to three-hour sermons, broke for lunch, and then listened some more. Modern Chinese house churches gather for music, meals, and all-day teaching. Latin American Pentecostals sing for hours (usually with the sound system blaring into the street).

But we are efficient: the mystery of Christ explained in a thirty-minute sermon, or the majesty of the Eucharist delivered and received within a reliable timeframe. It’s true: the Holy Spirit can change lives in flash of a lightning bolt—but the work of God is as difficult to schedule as a lightning strike.

Dream with me:

• What if we served Sunday breakfast at church? Let’s put grandma to work in the service of God’s kingdom.
• What if we took the time to listen to one another, pray for one another, or even helped repair each other’s cars in the parking lot?
• What if we—all of us—took the children outside to play and sing under God’s good sun?
• What if we finished church up by noon—and stayed together to watch football? (We could provide easy chairs so Dad could fall asleep)
• What if we were the family of God?

WHY IT WILL FAIL:

It will fail because the clock is inside all of us. It will fail because any attempt at external change in the Sunday schedule without addressing the internal change in our hearts misses the point. Changing the schedule without changing our hearts is doomed to failure.

Any outer change to the North American Sunday schedule is an attempt to put a Band-Aid on a clogged artery. Band-Aids are fine for surface issues, but they cannot heal the heart. We need open-heart surgery—but what will open our hearts?

To crack our chests we must ask questions like these:

• What is the meaning of Sabbath?
• Why do we gather once a week?
• When does Jesus get what he wants out of church?
• Is “family” a metaphor or a reality?
• What would make church meetings so compelling people would never want to leave?

Nor can any of these questions be addressed on the blogosphere, Twitter, or even in the halls of our seminaries. These are questions first for our individual hearts, and then for the family of God to gather and share. Perhaps we could all (individually and corporately) start with, how and why have we let the world press us into its mold?

Leonard Sweet calls it the “Big Jug” theory of learning: when one source (the expert) has all the knowledge in a big jug and the rest of us (the students) gather around: “the little jug's job is to catch all the droppings of the big jug.” I’m sure still there must be a place for this kind of learning, but that place has nothing to do with discipleship.

At the beginning of this year I began visiting other churches with a subversive agenda: to engage in conversation about discipleship rather than to lecture folks on what to do. This is the birth of DEEPER Seminars. It’s an interactive small-group setting that leads to discovery of our deepest assumptions about what it means to follow Jesus. As the facilitator of these conversations, I’ve learned more than I’ve taught. Here are three examples:

Each person’s history holds the presence of God. Through good decisions or bad, our lives confirm that Jesus really is Emmanuel, God with us. I’ve heard story after story of how the Father is able to use our past as the foundation for spiritual understanding, and how he infuses every life experience with the wisdom necessary for our good and our growth.

God’s grace is about more than forgiveness: it’s about growth. I’ve listened to men and women tell stories of how the Spirit of God whispered to them in their failures and taught them lessons that go way beyond book learning or mere doctrine. In the messy everyday situations of life, the Spirit brings insight and revelation, and this, too, is the proper operation of his grace.

Sometimes we box Jesus into the role of “Savior.” Together, as we read the scripture in intimate settings and look closely at the life of Jesus, we discover the Lord’s longing for us to receive him as “Example” as well as “Savior.” This is good news with a deep challenge: instead of merely appreciating his actions, we are called to imitate them. I’ve discovered there’s no greater transition required of us today, and lectures can never accomplish transformation.

Each year thousands of people (tens of thousands, really) descend upon Atlanta or Dallas or Chicago or Los Angeles to attend Christianity’s big shows, conferences that are the parachurch’s equivalent of mega-churches. On stage is the big jug and the little jugs in the stadium seats soak up the droppings. I’m grateful for these gatherings and the excitement they generate. I also see how much is spilled and wasted when the big jug distributes the water of life apart from listening and relationship.

I’ve found that the deepest transformations come in living room sessions, church basements, and in the circle of sharing the word of God with one another. This discovery has given me the passion to schedule DEEPER Seminars in the most unlikely places, and to realize that in God’s kingdom even the teachers have much to learn.