Books and Church

There is some tendency within many of us to put off things we know will be good for us. It's like the way, when I get the first stirrings of a headache I put off taking painkillers, knowing they would nip the problem in the bud, not because I actually believe the excuse I give about not wanting to become too dependent or resistant to them, but really because I simply hate swallowing pills. And perhaps, if I'm really being cynical, there is some part of us that wants to be able to sit around moaning to ourselves about our affliction with the blasted headache.

Well, for over a year now I have been having a steadily increasing "headache" with the church. This didn't really come as a big surprise; I haven't had a church I really felt at home at since Brentwood Presbyterian back in High School. But I had rather liked Sandyford when I went sporadically as an undergrad and so it has been painful to become steadily more disaffected, frustrated, and outright angry with the church as time goes by as a "regular" attender. And I've known, all along, that there were books out there that might shed some light on my predicament. And then I did some research and didn't find quite what I was looking for. Instead I came across Phillip Yancey an author I had first heard about way back at Brentwood Presbysterian where the minister, Charles Shields, had read out some passages now and again. At that point I had thought those snippets seemed quite good--enough so that I miraculously remembered the name--but I was a busy teen and largely happy with my faith and practically allergic to non-fiction reading that wasn't assigned homework or astrophysics-related, and so I let it go. The name came up again back in my first visit to Glasgow which had likewise been marked by a sustained crisis of faith...or rather a crisis of doctrine. But I was a again a busy student and I didn't pursue it. Now Yancey came up again, and I no longer had the convenient excuse of a busy schedule. Sure, I fill my days and even manage to feel downright frantic at times, but 90% of it can be juggled around to fit in something else if it matters enough. Well, I got down to looking some up, even ordered the books through the library's interlibrary loan system and borrowed another from the church bookshelf.

And so then I had a stack of four of five Phillip Yancey books sitting around the house. And then came the reluctance to swallow the pill. I mean, it's not like it's even guaranteed to work. They're just books, by some guy, and they're on church and faith and whatnot not on the theological, doctrinal issues I'd intended to research. I read a chapter from one, a chapter from another. But it was the skinniest one that my eye kept coming back to...I was a little afraid of what it might say...what challenge it might hold. Because if it held answers I could actually swallow, then, well, then I would have to actually do something.

Well, I've just read half of Church: Why Bother? in one sitting. It's definitely the best case for the Christian Church, the actually church, showing up on a Sunday, reasonably organized church as well as the amorphous community of believers "church" that I've encountered in a long long time. Certainly my current church has made the case for church in sermons with far far less impact on me. Now, the book does discuss finding the right kind of church...but I don't get off the hook that easy. Yes, now I might have to actually do something.