"The Cathedral of Life had programs, conceived of and administered from the top down, and no program, event, or activity ever materialized without a logo... I was ready to be a servant, to do things the right way, to humble myself and be useful somewhere, somehow...
So month after month we continued to show up, hurry in, praise the Lord, hear the Word, and hurry out with the thousands. We put our tithe check into the offering plate and supported those highly trained, handpicked folks who ran all those programs with all those logos. Surely we could get used to feeling unknown and unneeded every Sunday. Someday we would conquer the cynicism we felt every time we turned to greet those around us, knowing the likelihood of ever seeing them again.
After all, this was our role as members..."
This character's sister, upon hearing about her brother's church quips, "Have you lost your mind? That's not a church, it's a Christian factory!"
In this semi-fictional account of a modern/postmodern day church, the one thing the author leaves out of the picture is the essence of what a church should be - a relationship. A church should be a gathering place of people geared towards one thing, one thing which is actually two things. That one thing is a relationship, but that relationship extends in two ways - to God (vertically) and to others (horizontally).
The way we've done church before often prefers one over the other. Your average church-goer assumes (and please pardon my skepticism here) that one Sunday morning a week or a month is enough to experience what the church has to offer. I don't want to be one to discredit whatever experience they might have during this one day, because God can work as incredibly in one day as in one century. But...I do think that if God works so profoundly in a believer's life, he or she will feel a necessity to connect on a deeper level both with God and others.
When I say that church-goers prefer one relationship over another, what I mean is that some people prefer to focus on their relationship with God. This is a great thing, but sometimes we deceive ourselves and what we profess becomes a self-seeking version of Christianity. "What can God do for me?" "How can the church meet my needs?" This is what you see in the description we started out with. That church is a factory designed to meet the needs of its consumers.
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