We Can't Bottle It Up

There's a polarizing gap emerging between The church and today's pop culture.

I see it every Sunday. I see it in the eyes of the new people who come and sit in our church pews. 

What the heck are these crazies all about? They're a bunch of sensationalists seeking their Jesus fix. I can see the thoughts racing through their minds. 

And from the outside looking in, they may be somewhat right. 

Sadly, the church is guilty at times of reducing an encounter with Almighty God to hype and holy goosebumps... 

And for this, my heart breaks. 

Where does this need to perform come from? The need to have every experience deliver a certain quota of emotion, passion and energy? Where does this unending pursuit of the next experience outdoing the previous one come from? 

Meanwhile, while we play our little Sunday hype game, we drift further and further from connecting the gospel to a world that is being overrun by pop culture, an unattainable view of self-image and quality-controlled social media living. 

Why can we not stay grounded and content with simply inviting the King of the universe to converse with us corporately, and leave the results out of our hands? 

We need to stop thinking of how we can package everything. 

Bottle it. 

I will never forget the story my grandfather told me about the individual who forever changed the trajectory of the company we know as Coca-Cola. 

His strategy was simple. Bottle it. 

And that's exactly what we try to do in the church. We try to bottle the experience. 

There's a dozen ways we do it. We market sermon series. Try to entice people to come with clever slogans and niche topics. 

We record and sell worship albums. 

We broadcast sermons online.

We create social media personas and try to connect with the outside world. 

We launch multiple campuses and package our sermons. 

None of these things are at all evil or even wrong. 

The first realty is that we are likely presuming questions that people aren't asking. No one really cares about a sermon series; they just want to hear what the Bible says and apply it to their life. And hopefully they are reading it on their own, but Sunday is a special time to meet with other believers and rub shoulders. Or as the New Testament says, let iron sharpen iron.

Here's the problem. 

Our programmed, minute by minute services leave no room for that. The bigger our churches get, the greater the risk of it turning corporate and loosing the organic, relational context that made the New Testament a contagious environment that spread like wild fire. 

There were no formulas. 

No two fast songs, then offering and a sermon. 

The problem is, they have the potential to remove prophecy from our gatherings. 

Prophecy is a God-inspired word for a person or group of people at a unique moment in time. 

Now before you go writing me off as a big church hater, hear me clearly. 

I love that Jesus dealt with large crowds. I love large crowds. In fact, I lead worship weekly in a large church. 

My point is simply this: the moment we become more concerned with getting one crowd out and the next crowd in with hype and holy goosebumps than we are about tapping into the supernatural at this moment in time, we have missed the whole point.