XENITH

There’s a part of me that despises the idea of ‘Church.’ Not my church in particular or even any church in particular (with a few unnameable exceptions), but simply the idea of it even existing. The feeling I get is akin to the one I get for democracy: taking the worst bits out of the concept of ‘government’ and throwing the rest to the dogs. Likewise, Church always gives me this sense of chopping God into little bits and latching on to those that pander to the lowest common denominator. Modern Church Growth strategists have to deal with the danger of Church becoming a kind of godless social club, a centre of vaguely deistic activists or starving gossip-mongers, but I wonder if there isn’t a more long-term problem underlying the whole concept of communal worship. Yes, community is for the large part a positive thing, a strengthening and stabilising thing, but the nature of Christian community is unlike most others: at its most diluted it is a community with unlocked doors; at its purest it is welcoming, all-embracing and accepting of everyone.

There is, I suppose, much to be lauded in this – in theory. In practice, very few communities are truly open, and what could we find for examples of those that are? The only other group I could imagine swallowing people up so completely and with so few standards is a mob. Normal communities are drawn together through a common interest, a common goal, something that exists before entrance into the community: there are certain prerequisites, if not requirements, for entry. One does not usually join a tennis club with no intention to ever play tennis, or participate in chess club matches with no knowledge or understanding of the game of chess. But no such standards exist for becoming part of a church community. Certainly there is hope among the existing congregation that the new entrant will ‘take up their cross’ and become a fully-fledged member of the Body of Christ; certainly there is a desire to see those who walk through the door become more understanding and capable of ‘the Christian Life,’ but this does not change the fact that with Christianity, acceptance comes first, and integration comes a far and by no means inevitable second.

This is how the Christian church has interpreted the Call of Christ, it is how it has chosen to exemplify its own unique brand of brotherly love in the world, and it may be the reason churches are dying. It is a great and terrible thing to be so open that one must internalise everything, to be so accepting that one must absorb blows as if they were a joy! Because, people who seek out community not to share in its common goal, but rather for the sake of having a community, these are some of the most subtly dangerous subversives to threaten society today. Why? Because what a community or group stands for, what they strive towards means absolutely nothing to these people except as far as it keeps them included in the community. To such people, the values of the community are fluid, changeable whenever it serves their own personal needs, the need for attention, for respect, for mastery that they cannot get through legitimate means because they simply do not possess the necessary abilities or characteristics to command or inspire these responses in others. People whom society deems pathetic and unworthy will forever search for a loophole, a way to bend the rules to avoid society’s estimation of them.

And so what we have is a body of people to whom nothing is sacred, with no qualms about cheating their way up the social ladder despite the consequences, who masquerade as honest members to ingratiate themselves into a group they have no intention of aiding or respecting except as far as it will improve their own sorry lot in life. And who are their prime targets? The all-embracing, loving, generous, gullible Christian Church. Christians look for the work of the Devil? Nothing follows better the example of the banished Morning Star who, cast out of the society of heaven, says, “very well: I may be as repugnant as hell, but I bet it’s the good ones who’ll let me in!”

It’s no surprise that the Christian Church is failing. People say the church is full of hypocrites? It is! People say the church is inward-looking, behind the times, slow to change? It is! People say the church is full of self-interested, self-righteous, self-worshiping bigots incapable of looking past their own over-inflated egos? By all that used to be held as Holy, it is! But the one thing you will have trouble finding, the one thing the church is no longer filled with? Christians.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t any Christians in churches, or to say that they aren’t truly trying to follow Christ, or that the church is entirely and hopelessly corrupt. It is to say that, time and time again, some of the few good, selfless, caring people in this world capable of performing very human miracles of kindness are undermined, subverted and taken advantage of by people who are precisely the opposite, the people they have unwittingly invited into their churches and grafted onto their skin like leeches. And the truly sad thing? I think probably many of them are not so unwitting, that they know it is so, realise they are being abused and sapped of their prodigious strength – why do they let it happen? Because they see the churches they love failing, they see the Church they believe to be the one final hope for humanity slowly dying, and they have to believe with every fading scrap of will they have left that if they only struggled slightly harder, if they only drained one more ounce of their reserves of life they could push the Light of the Nations back to its feet.

And perhaps the saddest thing of all? They could. If the church were full of Christians, they could blaze with miracles like a bonfire, shine the unique and inexplicable light of hope like a fortress city on a hill in a land of anarchy, darkness and death. They could do anything. But will they reach out as they do, to those they do, giving what they do they will never be free. The Church has been shackled to a legion of dying parasites by its own goodwill. Ayn Rand writes that, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.” The life-blood of the Church and its Saints is draining through a thousand holes drilled through their unflinching good-nature. One way or another, it is time for Christians to shake their leech-like dependents off like dust from their sandals. Only then can these giants of faith, these giants of hope be free to save the part of the world they’ve been sent to save. Perhaps, at long last, it is time Christians went on strike: perhaps, at long last, it is time Christians realized they are only required to carry one cross, not a world full of people too lazy to carry their own.