A Charming Church

Many churches today prioritise entertainment, but we do not need entertainment. We need truth.

The intensification of entertainment at sports events is widespread and ever-increasing. Go to the rugby and you’ll get gymnastics. Go to the cricket and you’ll get pyrotechnics. Go to the football and you’ll be a gambler before half time.

This is obviously to ensure that people keep coming back. If cricket stadiums only offered five-day test matches without the pyrotechnics, many people would stop going. This incessant focus on entertainment has infiltrated the bulk of human institutions, from football to faith.

Many churches, too, are hell-bent on ensuring that people keep coming back. The goal to ‘make disciples’ is often just about drawing as large crowds as possible.

In achieving this goal, churches utilise a variety of seemingly Christian practices, which in reality have tenuous or no Biblical support, but are rather for entertainment. As a result, rich doctrinal teaching is neglected. Entertainment replaces truth, and no one realizes. But Jesus was no entertainer. Christ was no clown.

I attended a church in Cape Town for some years, and most services, someone would go up and say that they have a God-given image. These images would always be nostalgic pictures of beaches and sunsets, where God told them some banality, like He has been with them all along.

God speaks to His people with images, but is He going to do it every Sunday evening? Are the images always going to be heartfelt? Is it not more likely that these images were often entirely fabricated? If God is truly sending images to a church, He will surely also send some challenging ones about salvation or repentance. But people don’t want to hear that.

When someone claims that they have an image from God when they do not, spiritual forces will take that opportunity with both hands. It is a formal invitation for opportunistic evil, and it won’t go begging.

People come to church mourning the death of loved ones or struggling with their faith. God knows what needs to be said to them, and He will say it. He does not operate on our schedules. Praise be to Him whether He sends an image or not. The ‘gaps’ shouldn’t be filled for the sake of uniformity or entertainment.

I once heard a Godly image at another church. The woman said that there is a small white door with peeling paint that someone needs to open, because behind it is what they fear. This would’ve spoken to someone specific. It could’ve changed their life. It wasn’t used to entertain everyone.

People often prayed for healing over the whole congregation. I could only find one example where Jesus healed more than one person at a time.¹ It was otherwise always a personal affair. Christ and a broken body.

Crowds came to Him, but He saw individuals. He went to the pool surrounded by cripples, healed one man, and then slipped away.² He could’ve prayed for healing over all of them, but He didn’t. He could’ve attracted much attention, but He didn’t. It could’ve been a performance, but it wasn’t.

Large-scale healings happen when God leads them. Not when a ‘high-profile’ pastor with the gift of healing tells everyone to pair up and heal their friend.

People had tears in their eyes believing that they had been healed, and maybe they had. But maybe, with the pressure of the whole congregation waiting with bated breath for you to say that your neck pain has gone, it starts to feel better. Maybe it feels worse, but you couldn’t bear to disappoint everyone.

This practice paints Christianity as a patent medicine. It paints the Holy Spirit as a tool to be used. It sets up a false standard for closeness with God: if I get healed then things are good between Him and I, which leads to despair when not achieved. It is contrived and misleading. But it is entertaining.

The pastor would often, with cathartic music playing, ask everyone to close their eyes and raise their hands if they want to give their life to Jesus. He continuously reminded us not to be scared because no one is watching.

To decide to follow Christ should be a public display of celebration, not a secret ballot. Is not the pastor seeing how many souls he has saved? Would it not be better for him to encourage those earnestly seeking Jesus to come for prayer and conversation afterwards, instead of embarrassing them? Is it the Holy Spirit you are encountering (as the pastor insists), or is it just the music?

Jesus called people to do life with Him. It was a personal invitation, not a broadcast message. It was exciting and daring, and not the offer of a desperate salesman. But it’s easier to ask people to raise their hands.

The worship sessions often got out of hand, even for an evangelical church. The pastor once asked everyone to open their mouths and drink the Holy Spirit. I had regretfully brought friends to that service.

Worship has predominantly become the singing and dancing to music. But we are told:

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”³

“God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in spirit and in truth.”⁴

‘But Samuel replied: “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”⁵

“These people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.”⁶

Worship is obeying God’s truth by honouring Him with our bodies, and thereby drawing near to Him with our hearts. It is not a performance of acts or sacrifices that we have been taught. Throughout the Bible people of course sing to God in worship, but it is always in tandem with this underlying obedience.

I often witnessed people acting insane under the ostensible influence of the Holy Spirit. Once at another church, we were all forced to run laps around the hall in worship to God. Imagine an inquisitive non-believer arrived on the scenes? I felt sorry for others running with me who thought that is what Christianity is. We are told to run with perseverance, but not in circles!

When encouraging this behaviour, which also includes hysterical laughing, fits, and rolling around on the floor, pastors substantiate it with King David’s words, when he said that he was willing to look foolish to celebrate the Lord.⁷ This happened after God led David’s army to defeat the mighty Philistines. David was celebrating a great victory surrounded by His fellow believers. Are these people at church celebrating the Lord? Are they surrounded by fellow believers? I think often not.

The pastor would invite the Holy Spirit to manifest Himself. He would then wait for something to happen. And eventually someone would start loudly singing or speaking in tongues. Anything to fill the silence.

We read of the Holy Spirit coming over crowds of people in the Word, but only when God drives it. When the pastor drives it, people feel uneasy. Is God’s Spirit a spirit of uneasiness? If it were truly Him, people would surely feel His joy or strength.

Someone once started a sermon by praying in tongues. No one knew what to do. Scripture says that tongues should always be interpreted, and if it can’t, then ‘the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and God.’⁸ We are also told that God is not a God of confusion or disorder.⁹

The pattern is clear now. There is a church practice with some or no grounding in scripture which is taken out of context and done incorrectly to entertain.

I never grasped the dubiousness of these practices at the time. What happened seemed fine under the guise of “the Holy Spirit is moving.” But if I had stopped and asked first order questions, I wouldn’t have been able to validate the acts.

Why are we doing this? Where is it in the Bible? How is this bringing me closer to God? Asking this would’ve made me realise that the church wasn’t exactly leading me closer to God.

These widely employed practices cause inquisitive observers to either build their faith on half-truths, or to run. It was often said that these practices were uncomfortable but at least they aren’t portraying a diluted Christianity.

I think of Jesus’ reluctance to perform His first miracle at Cana of Galilee.¹⁰ He was awaiting instruction from His Father. Christ never used miracles or spiritual practices to gain followers, impress people, or to prove something. His miracles brought glory to God. It is Christ’s teaching and character that has inspired His followers more than anything.

The sermons preached over my two and a half years there could be summarised on a page. They were aimed at non-believers, they were anecdotal and repetitive, and they seldom mentioned things like salvation, repentance, or wrestling with God - such ideas being indispensable for young restless minds.

We would always be subjected to a barrage of announcements, and it often took up to forty-five minutes for scripture to be read. The pastor once spent an entire sermon telling us about the plans for the church’s new venue.

Christian couples were once advised to utilise the “Christian pillow” when sleeping together. If not misleading, such as this, much of the content was simply irrelevant to a truth-thirsty audience. Superficial sermons are a waste of everyone’s time at best, and a spreader of lies at worst.

I don’t remember ever feeling spiritually challenged. We were always told what we wanted to hear. But we all know that truth often isn’t nice to hear. It’s not a money spinner or an ego tickler. It stings and challenges, but it then motivates. It heals, and healing is painful.

There has never been and there never will be a perfect church, but the closest mankind came was with Christ and His disciples. In that sacred circle, the focus was not entertainment. The disciples could walk out whenever. There was nothing forcing them to stay – in fact they had compelling reasons to go. Jesus endangered their lives and made them integrate with the lowest of society. But they had truth, and that’s why they stayed.

The next best example we have is the early church in Acts, and it could never be described as a place of entertainment. They didn’t care about drawing big crowds. They operated with very little. They were constantly on the run. But the truth of Christ was so present that they laid the very foundations of Christianity and changed the world forever.

Let us be content with a group of people meeting up to hear Jesus’ truth. Sometimes miraculous things happen, but not often, and that’s okay. We have an eternity of miracles to look forward to.

Different churches do things differently, and that’s good, as long as Christ and His Word are centre stage. It’s another story if a showman takes centre stage.

Churches must stand out as the one institution which doesn’t prioritise entertainment, but truth.

Perhaps there is no greater entertainment than truth.

1. Luke 17:12-19

2. John 5

3. Romans 12:1

4. John 4:24

5. 1 Samuel 15:22

6. Isaiah 29:13

7. 2 Samuel 6:22

8. 1 Corinthians 14:28

9. 1 Corinthians 14:33

10. John 2:11