Where the Grass Is Greener
People who are new to our church often tell me why they like Trinity better than the church they used to attend. They have been drawn to Trinity by any number of things: the music, the preaching, the youth program, the missions emphasis, the overall spirit of the congregation. We seem to offer them something that their old congregation couldn't offer.
There is always a part of me that loves to hear these comments. In business, of course, that's what it's all about. You develop a product that people will like and that will cause potential customers to transfer their loyalty from the product they used to use to the new and improved product. If they've been driving a Honda for twenty years and you're a Toyota dealer, you want them to believe that owning a Toyota will be a much more satisfying driving experience than they ever had behind the wheel of that old Civic. No Toyota dealer ever feels guilty when a former Honda owner makes the switch and buys his product instead.
The Church of Jesus Christ, however, is not a business. And I can't help but wonder about the unapologetic consumerism that seems so prevalent in the search for a church. In the past years Trinity has been pretty competitive in the local church business. But the longer I'm around the more I realize that the very people who come to us thinking that Trinity Covenant Church is the best thing to come along since sliced bread are also likely at some future point to become disillusioned with us and to begin looking around for a new and improved "product" that will be more to their liking.
I'm not suggesting that when someone joins a church they ought to sign some sort of lifetime loyalty pact. Neither am I suggesting that there aren't good and valid reasons for changing churches. Some congregations may be so toxic that to remain there may be downright dangerous to a healthy Christian faith. There are some churches that have totally ceased preaching and living the good news of grace--where all you get on Sunday mornings is an extra large helping of guilt and anxiety-producing bad news. I would have a hard time coping with a church like that. There are some churches that are just terminally ingrown--that have no sense of mission apart from taking care of themselves.
But to spend my life looking for a church that "I like"--or that "meets my needs" is, it seems to me, approaching things in precisely the wrong way. Neither the universal Church of Jesus Christ nor the local congregation exist to "meet my needs". The church is intended to be the one place in our world where we come to understand "our needs" to be the least important thing on the agenda. The church ought to be a group of people who are learning to put their personal needs and preferences aside and to learn what Jesus meant when he said that "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever is willing to lose his life for my sake will find it." In the search for the right church, as in so many other things, we can be so intent on saving our lives that we end up losing the very thing we wanted to save.