Chapter 4

Journal Entry #2, September 28.

Church fair today. It was interesting to see how many of the churches tout culture as a drawing force. Some use it just as a tool, with projector screens in the church auditoriums, and a well-designed church website. Others used it even more, to the extent of watching films for Sunday school, and Bible studies with well-known teachers done via dvd sets.

Then you had the churches with little or no attention to culture. Usually with hand painted signs, and a few very earnest people at the table.

Are these the only choices? Culture as tool, culture as sacrament, and culture as distraction? It seems there must be, or at least should be, a middle way.

Resolved: to visit one of each of these church/culture traditions and report on them.

The first Sunday I went to one of the large churches in the area, one of the ones with the let’s-watch-films-for-Sunday-school mentality. I saw a lot of my classmates there, including a few from literature class. I scanned the Sunday bulliten as I sat in a pew waiting for the service to start.

This church had a women’s reading group, a men’s reading group, a children’s puppet team, youth and adult drama teams, and an upcoming art appreciation lecture. One thing was for sure, this church liked its culture.

The worship service was one of the best shows I’d ever seen. The band was in tune, and genuinely talented. The words to all the songs showed up on the animated screens in correct order and timing, so no one tripped up on the lyrics to any song. There was a good mix of loud, wake-you-up songs, and the slower, more “worshipful” variety.

The solo was sung was sung by a young blond, while the ushers collected the offering. After another prayer, the pastor got up to speak.

“Good morning, folks!” “Good morning, Brother!” came the response from the regular attendees all around me. He went on to speak about a recent move that had made the top listings at the box office. It was a semi-artsy film, one that at least pretended to be philosophical and questioned the basic structure of reality. Since I’d never much bought into the normal perception of reality, it hadn’t bothered me much.

The pastor had picked some of the scenes from the film and had them played on the screens, before commenting on them, and drawing out his lessons for the congregation. As an ending though, he played the concluding scene from the film:

A man had been on a personal journey, with his female partner. After discovering that everything his psychotic pastor father had taught him was untrue he’d gone searching to find the truth. Over the course of the film, the woman he’d been traveling with had instructed him in the true nature of reality; that each individual constructs his own reality, and that the highest virture was excerising the greatest control over one’s own perception. “Who knows,” she remarked once upon passing a group of Jesus Freaks holding signs on a street corner, “maybe that’s why Jesus was taken to be a god—his ability to change the perception of those around him. Even his death couldn’t make people stop seeing him. That perception shift has lasted for nearly two thousand years.”

At the end of the film, the woman had died suddenly and pointlessly, hit by a steel beam falling off a scaffold. In the scene that played in the church, the man was standing on a beach, holding the urn with her ashes in it. He closed his eyes in deepest concentration, and upended the jar into the wind. As the ashes floated off-screen to the left, the woman, now clothed in white approached the man. She held out her hand to him, and the sun shone between their touching fingers.

I think the pastor’s point was something about an analogy between the church and God, but all the same, the film itself was not at all conducive to the analogy.

In the coffee and doughnuts hour after the service, I was approached by several people, asking how I’d enjoyed the service. I made the usual positive remarks—good preaching, lively congregation, yes, the worship certainly was fantastic—then began to ask the church members around me what they thought about the relationship between culture and religion.

“Well, I think that we are called to reclaim the culture for Christ. I mean, if there’s any truth in it, then that truth is God’s truth, right? So we should get at it, and enjoy what’s out there.”

“I think culture is one of the greatest gifts of God; it moves us, educates us, and shows us the human condition.”

Journal entry #3. October 1^st.

Culture as sacrament: I may be overstating it by that term, but that’s what it seems like. The highest end of man is to create culture. But if that’s the case, why bother with the extraneous things, like worship?

________________________________________

Stephanie Fletcher never came back to Literature class. I heard that she dropped the class, and took a creative writing class instead.

This shouldn’t have bothered me. I thought her views were childish and naïve; she’s destined ot get married as soon as she graduates, and she’ll probably raise a couple of kids, and never have to think or read again. She wouldn’t have used anything she could have gained in the class anyway, and would have slowed the rest of the class down. So why was I sad that she was gone? Why did I feel a slight pang everytime Dr. Hudson called the roll, and went from “Sarah Felton” to “Isaac Greene”?

I was determined to keep my resolve to attend different churches for research. Each week a different church, and each week another disappointment. Nothing ever seemed quite right.

I was discussing this dilemma with James, a sophomore who’d been assigned to me for my Introduction to University Life class, to answer any questions about college life I had. James had been a reliable resource about college life, but he seemed less than patient with my current woes.

“Ok, Jase, so you’ve been to all these churches, and not a single one has met your needs or risen to your intellectual standards. And I’ll agree, they seem to have problems. The sermons are full of logical and theological holes, the people are largely uneducated in their faith. Or is it that the sermons are too dry and academic, and passionless? Is it that the people you meet in these churches are too forceful and outspoken about their faith?” He let out an exasperated breath of air, and slapped his knee. “Dang it, did you ever just sit and listen to the sermon for what you could learn from it? Did you actually worship, or did you just stand there taking mental notes and watching everyone else worship? That’s about as tacky as watching a man propose and then critiquing his technique and choice in rings!”

I flushed a deep red as he ranted on, wanting to break in to defend myself. He must have noticed because he cut me off. “No, sorry, you need to listen to someone other than yourself for once. You’re spending all your time playing smarter-than-thou, and accusing others of simplicity when they might just, in fact be holy!”

He fell silent then, watching me for my reaction. I sat there for a moment, unsure of what to say.

“You don’t think the intellect has any place in a Christian’s life, then?”

“I decline to answer that question, because it’s not a question. It’s a defense mechanism. What do you really have to say?”

A few long moments passed before, having rejected several other automatic reactions, I realized that I had nothing to say. A deep terror came over me, as if my whole self were suddenly laid bare before the world. I leapt up from my chair and ran for the door, slamming it behind me.

I suppose James must have thought I hadn’t taken in any of what he said, but I had. In fact, I knew a lot of it was frighteningly accurate, though I’d never realized it before. Usually, when I pointed out a logical problem in a sermon, or brought up a difficult question in a group everyone else got very uncomfortable at their inability to answer. I’d never wondered if perhaps they simply didn’t want to be swatted down by a know-it-all who wouldn’t accept any answer at all.

Even now, I don’t know whether it was shame, pride, or simply pig-headedness that made me email Ryan the librarian, but I sent him a message asking if he could pick me up for church the following Sunday.