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| Source 1, Source 2* |
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious...the search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where the Enemy [God] wants him to be a pupil.
What He [God] wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. (You see how grovelling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighbouring churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us much satisfaction.
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter XVI, emphasis added
The earliest one I found was The Screwtape Letters, which I read over and over again as a nighttime devotional. It continues to prompt me to ponder from time to time, though I haven't read it in years and realized recently that my childhood copy is no longer in my library.
The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of letters from a mentor demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, an apprentice demon in charge of making sure a certain Englishman's soul will be damned rather than saved. In writing the book this way, Lewis creates a sort of theological treatise in reverse, one which must be read for the exact opposite of its surface sense in order to serve its intended purpose. As a teenager I found this to be irresistibly clever, and I have not ceased to find it charming in the years since.
In my teen years, I learned from The Screwtape Letters a list of the pitfalls available to Christians. I had only to notice my fellow Christians doing something heartily recommended by Screwtape, after all, and it was clear that it was a practice worth avoiding and, where practical, criticizing.
Few Christian practices were more obviously problematic to my teenage self than "church shopping," which is what it sounds like: going from church to church until you find one that suits you. In Letter XVI, Screwtape talks at length about the usefulness (read: danger) of church shopping; he highly recommends sending one's human round from place to place till they become "a taster or connoisseur of churches." The point of church, I reasoned, was not to feel comfortable or to demonstrate one's tastes, but to learn, to worship, and to be part of the body of Christ. I was flabbergasted that adults found it acceptable to be choosy about church. It was astonishing to me that people within my own denomination would drive past my parents' church on their way to one with a bigger scouting program, better music, or whatever.
I was a teenager, so it was easy to judge and difficult to empathize. It would only be a few short years, however, before I would be taking a train past a dozen churches in my own denomination (and hundreds in others) in order to keep going to my church from high school. This wasn't church shopping so much as staying where I was comfortable, but I still felt guilty, as it was, after all, a step away from "going to church where it makes sense" toward "going to church where I feel personally at home and comfortable."
David Shay and I have debated the question behind all this anxiety and hand-wringing a few times. "What," we've asked each other, "are the right reasons to go to a specific church?" For a while, he was feeling uncomfortable and unhappy at his church. He wanted to leave and go somewhere where he could be happy, but was happiness a legitimate reason to change churches? Meanwhile, I'd moved across town and was now an hour away from a church I originally joined because it was close to home. But I was a choir member and a Sunday school teacher there now! Was high participation in a particular church's life reason enough not to change churches (to somewhere that might need me more—or that simply wasn't as silly to get to)?
We didn't know. In the end, we both did what we thought made sense after prayer, reflection, and consultation with friends and mentors.
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I got married recently, and my wife and I moved to a new place to start our new life together. We are church shopping, heading to church after church, Sunday after Sunday, to find one that suits us. Each time we do, CS Lewis's warning via Screwtape's Letter XVI flashes through my brain: Don't be a "taster" or "connoisseur" of churches. Just pick one already and stick with it! And yet instead of heeding this warning, I hem and haw through the service, tabulating which elements of the service I do and don't like, evaluating what social opportunities are available, gauging whether the music or the architecture fits my taste.
Being a teenager is incredibly challenging in many ways, but a few things are easier than they are in young adulthood. I miss the self-righteous feeling of knowing I would never stoop to church shopping and that I could comfortably judge anyone who did.
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It takes only the eyes to see it to notice that American Christians are nothing like as radical as the men and women who founded our religion two millennia ago. They wandered from place to place, calling society to repentance, renewal, and change. We are sedentary, suspicious of change, and resistant to calls for radical action. My biggest worry in all this is that I'm simply not radical enough to truly follow Christ. If I were as radical as Christ was, as radical as Paul or Peter, I would just go down to the nearest church and do church there. Never mind doctrinal nitpicking, never mind the music; we're all the body of Christ, after all, so I'd just go be part of the body!
Over against this worry, though, I have learned to take some comfort in the idea (and perhaps, just perhaps, it is God who comforts me with it) that, in seeking and finding churches where I feel happy, at home, alive and nourished, that I will be preparing myself to be radical in other ways: radical in faith, radical in joy, radical in hope, and above all, radical in love. At all events, this is my prayer.
*Behold the magnificence of my photoshop skills.
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