Mysterium Tremendum Or Social Club?

We hear contemporary couples with young children expressing the idea that they want to find a good church where the children can learn about God. Some of these couples have not set foot in a church since they themselves were children.

Other folks come to churches seeking an alternative to spiritual and psychological attitudes that have not served them well.

Some are drawn to religion and to churches after some sort of personal trauma or loss, seeking answers to questions to which they'd never given conscious prior attention.

There are also those who seek an opportunity to give service, expecting that the social circle within a church congregation will provide that opportunity as well as one for greater social contact and interaction. Opportunities to give service in contexts other than church congregations are abundant and I would not suggest that the primary appeal of religion is an opportunity to perform some good work in a formalized moral setting.

Just what is it that our Christian congregations offer in their communities - and does that offering have a real potential of satisfying the needs or hungers of those looking through the doors and windows?

The enduring power of religion is not as a social club. Rather, it lies in the realm of the needs for meaning and purpose in living. The venue in life that seems to require endurance is more in the perceptive realm of mind and spirit and is not better countered by an approach of moralizing and exhortation to conscious believing with strict conformity to tradition and doctrine.

When our non-physiological internal hungers flare up, the void to be filled is not satisfied by lasagna, a hot bath or a good night's sleep. These hungers generate not a weakness in body, but a powerful uneasiness or restlessness with life. Often we think we are just worried about things, wanting things we don't have, dissatisfied with work, with marriage, with friends, our community, the economy or even our favorite pro team that's never going to win a championship.

We may even mislabel internal spiritual restlessness as being the above kinds of dissatisfactions or worse, as some sort of depression. TV ads are now tempting us to a kind of self-diagnosis where we are encouraged to take a predisposition toward depression to a medical provider in hopes of a prescription of the advertised "feel-better-medicine."

Christianity ought to hold out the possibility to the internally restless that there is something available that fills the void - something more than just Sunday worship, potluck suppers, and clichéd generalities around believing.

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