Are we daft?
It’s an uncomfortable thought, and it sounds quite uncharitable to ask it, but I’ve had a persistent question nagging away at me recently: are Christians actually quite stupid? Would a “revival” mean the mass production of yet more somewhat daft people?
This potentially unkind question nipped at my ankles while I was watching a chap on Christian television recently. He was loudly offering the promise of guaranteed riches and hyper health, in exchange for a donation to him of course. The fact that he himself looked about three hundred years old, on the brink of immediate death, and had the onscreen presence of a grinning ghost train skeleton seemed like a slight contradiction to my simple brain. He was proclaiming his message of massive riches from a building that looked like the inside of the Gents on Waterloo Station, but that didn’t deter what P.T. Barnum referred to as “suckers” from calling in droves to take advantage of the offer. I was stunned. Why this rush of lemming-like believers willing to hurl themselves over the precipice of mindlessness? My wife has now banned me from watching the chap at breakfast or indeed any other time, as she doesn’t like soggy cornflakes down the television set.
I have been to an event where the speaker continuously emphasised two key messages. First, he regaled us with testimony about how his personal sense of security no longer comes from his ministry; no, the size of his ministry is not important. Secondly he peppered just about every other sentence of his sermons with phrases that told us all, loud and clear, just how his ministry is big, growing, expanding, touching the nations, and is generally intergalactic. People bought his books in droves, oblivious to the glaring fact that, not only was he not practicing what he was preaching – he was not even preaching what he had just been preaching, if you get my drift. Mad.
I have witnessed further corporate stupidity in services when an apparent “word of knowledge” is shared. The landscape is perhaps familiar.
Leader: “Mmmmm, thank you Lord, yes. Yes, there’s someone here tonight with a bad back….”
(The crowd visibly cheers up, apparently oblivious to the fact that 50% of the people present have got bad backs, due in part to the cheap metal and canvas chairs purchased for a knockdown price from that Brethren church that closed down last year……).
Leader: Yes, I can further say that this person with the aforementioned back problem is either male………….
….or female….
(Crowd looks around to scrutinise people of either gender in the midst).
Leader: “Mmmm, there’s more. This person with a back tormented by Satan who is either male or female was born of a woman…”
(Crowd amazingly impressed by this revelation, mutters gasps of astonishment at this precision and accuracy…).
And then there’s that kind of “praying for the sick” when it’s not just that people are being given a little shove in order to help them fall over, which is bad enough. But I’ve been in meetings where the evangelist was using more karate chops that Jackie Chan.
I know that God describes us humans as being like sheep, which, let’s face it, aren’t that bright. But is it really that many of Jesus’ followers have in fact permanently kissed their brains goodbye and are now dabbing mint sauce behind their ears? Was Josh McDowell right in his assertion that most Christians have only got two brain cells – one’s gone missing and the other’s gone looking for it?
Perhaps not. I just think that all too often we are so desperate for something, anything to happen, that we rush like Sahara bound hikers to sip from any pool, no matter how muddy. But God’s Name isn’t honoured by sleight of hand miracles, testimonies smattered with exaggeration, and Pavlovian congregations who are ready to jump whenever the leaders ring a bell.
We feel that we must buy into belong, and that to think that something was meaningless perhaps betrays our own lack of depth and spirituality. I saw this in action when I attended a conference where the speaker shared what many described as “deep” teaching. “That was really deep” often actually means, “I haven’t got the first clue what he was rattling on about, how about you?” Everyone that I asked said that they thought the sermon was great. When I asked the follow up question – what was it about – everyone looked clueless.
And there’s another internal conspiracy that, in the desperate desire to believe, and to be positive, we feel that we might be letting the side down if we ask awkward questions. But a genuinely enquiring mind is actually a sign of faithfulness, not treachery. Questioning shows a hunger for the authentic rather than the superficially satisfying that fails any close inspection. Cynicism is deathly, but opening our mouths and swallowing everything wholesale ultimately brings discredit to the good Name of God.
So let’s think, for God’s sake. And I mean that reverently.