Lent is beginning tomorrow. 

I received so much deep, healing good this past year that I am certain that this Lenten season I need to do better than sacrificing the Splenda in my morning coffee (dear as that is to me ). I'm going to give up this Xanga site!! (here comes the withdrawal ) So for the next 40 days I'll  be largely out of touch.

[Those of you whose religious tradition doesn't include Lent may be interested to know that Sundays are never supposed to be fasting days; they are always feast days, so I may drop in on Sundays and see how you all are doing.]

In the meantime, I'll miss you all. Enjoy your Fat Tuesday evening, and I'll see you on the other side!

[Edit 2/5/08, 10:08 PM--Even though I won't be blogging, I will answer private messages. You won't be bothering me!]

I have seen both boring churches and churches that really grab your attention and make you think that things are really 'happening', and I am convinced that an exciting, interesting church may well be the most unhealthy place a Christian can be.

Think about what goes on in places like that. Maybe there are intense doctrinal debates, or a cutting edge ecclesiastical movement, or maybe the church is in the middle of a big explosion in growth, or the head pastor is taking the city by storm with his preaching. Any of these things can be very appealing and exciting and can make church members feel like they are at last in the center of things--that they are finally in a true church. But you know what happens when we start to feel that our church is the only true church--we get proud, insulated from the rest of the Christian communion and judgmental. We stop critiquing ourselves and starting only critiquing every other church. What happens when our pastor is the best preacher around? We tend to idolize him and without being quite aware of it we let him take God's place in our spiritual lives--and open the door to allowing him to abuse his authority. What happens when we are in the middle of an exciting big church growth phase and our church is building buildings and starting new programs or 'shaking things up' and reengineering the whole idea of church? We get caught up in the excitement and busy-ness of the thing and forget about the need for serene contemplation and communion with God. And we don't stop to question whether our capital expansion projects or our new worship styles are really what we should be focusing on. Who wants to spoil everybody else's fun?

And what happens if our church or denomination or our preacher are the only ones that really understand the Trinity or salvation or true holiness? We become fearful of everything outside the church--maybe even terrified of falling short of the standards and risking judgment from God just like all those people in those other 'dead' churches. We start working very hard to make sure we stay pure. We let the church tell us what to believe and how to behave and we lose our own identity, and worse, we lose our personal relationship with God and substitute it with a dysfunctional human relationship with the pastor or other leaders.

When I finally found myself in the only healthy church I have ever been in, I must admit that I found it quite disappointing at first. Nobody stood clustered around after worship arguing about theology. There were no classes where people feverishly studied up on the evils of Islam or Mormonism. There were no new movements or fads taking hold, nor was anybody interesting in talking down anybody else's new movements or fads. Mostly people talked about our 12-step meetings or the next community project we were helping with or so-and-so's new baby. Bake sales. Food drives. Stuff like that. When folks talked about theology, it was to try to understand the lectionary readings for that week, or to get a better handle on what is really the mission of this congregation: healing, grace and forgiveness. You can easily see that topics like healing, grace and forgiveness aren't nearly as exciting to talk about as law, purity, new church styles or discussions about all the ways that everybody else is sinning. You can hardly get indignant about anybody but yourself when you are focused on God's grace, can you?

The long and short of it is that the more exciting something is, the more readily we will idolize it and let it distract us from our true Christian duties. A nice, quiet, boring church may be the best place to examine yourself, get in touch with God, and learn the gentle virtues that we are most in need of. I know it's right for me, at least.