Stuff Christians Like (3 page)

If God were really happy with what they were doing, wouldn’t they have a building as big as the one I go to church in? Wouldn’t they have 15,000 on an average Sunday? Wouldn’t they have a staff of 400 instead of 4? Wouldn’t God bless that church and make it mega if he were pleased with what they were doing?

He would, and that’s pretty much what the Bible teaches. In Luke 15:10 it says, “I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” I know what you’re thinking, “Oh, one person is mega to God.” But maybe that “one person” is God math, just like some people will argue that six days of creation could equal the human equivalent of 6,000 days. Maybe we’re supposed to interpret “one person” as “one greater metro area.”

It can all be very confusing. And I’d love to get some wise counsel on it from my small neighborhood church, but I don’t even think they have a New Testament specialist on staff. I’m actually pretty convinced that the pastor is also the guy who mows the lawn. Which is so small you couldn’t even hold a night out at the movies event on it. How sad.

I attend a megachurch, which means that occasionally, Christians who like to discount the validity of a large church will debate with me why megachurches suck. People don’t ever come out and say, “Megachurches suck,” but sometimes I wish they did, because it would be a much shorter monologue than this:

Here’s the thing. If a caravan of school buses came to our church one Sunday, thousands of visitors just showed up out of the blue, I’d turn them away. Right then and there, I’d say, “No thanks, we don’t want to be a megachurch. Go on, get out of here.” I’d probably have to turn on the hose
to chase off the stubborn ones, but the last thing I want to do is attend a megachurch.

I am pretty sure God is not happy with those churches. The music is too loud and the service feels like a concert. Without any hymns I’m not really even sure that counts as a time of worship. You can’t form real relationships with people when you’re surrounded on a Sunday morning by four thousand other members.

And they use lasers. God hates lasers. And in the great commission, in Matthew 28:19 where it says, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus didn’t mean “all” as in everyone. He meant all as in “all the people that can fit in an appropriately sized building.” What’s an appropriately sized building? The one my church is currently in, and don’t go getting any ideas about attending. I’ve got a hose and I’m not afraid to use it.

Christians occasionally swear. They don’t do it a lot. I’m not talking about thirty-second tirades laced with profanity. I just mean that every few days they’ll say a swear in the middle of a conversation. Why do we do it? I think we want you to know that we know those words exist. We want you to be aware that we are aware they are out there and we know what they mean. Plus, everyone knows that swears are nineteen times more powerful coming out of the mouth of a Christian. That’s a scientific fact right there. If you’re a nonbeliever and swear a ton, it’s just not that big of a deal. If you’re a Christian though and you swear, birds fall out of the sky. Trees shake to their roots. Magma gets fourteen degrees cooler under the crust of the earth. Wielding that kind of power is too tempting to ignore.

Every Christian has a slightly different idea of what heaven is going to be like. But the one thing that is consistent is that chances are, someone you know who is super holy is probably going to have a nicer house than you. You’re good, but you probably know people whom God is going to take extra special care of when it’s all over.

That’s why I hope I get to visit my neighbor, Lynn, in heaven. She’s definitely going to be in a gated community. I’m sure the gate will be unlocked, because it’s heaven and no one is breaking in, but she’ll probably still have to buzz me in or maybe trumpet me in. I assume there’s a lot of trumpets and harps in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll have a nice place in heaven too, but I’ve never roofed someone’s house after a storm. I’ve never let my mother-in-law move in with us and nursed her through an illness for a year. I’ve never babysat my granddaughter two days a week for two years just because that was the right thing to do.

If things continue the way they are, I’ll probably have a loft. It will be small, but it will have a nice view, of Lynn’s house mostly, because it’s going to be so huge it will be hard to be anywhere in heaven and not see it. I’m just saying, she’s going to get hooked up.

Have you ever met a Mormon who was a jerk? I haven’t. Every Mormon I’ve ever met has been nice, friendly, and well dressed. But I know they have them. Surely someone in Utah is a jerk. But for my money, Mormons are slightly nicer than Christians.
And here’s why: Sometimes when jerks become Christians, it’s like a bully learning karate. Instead of having Christ transform our hearts and attitudes, we now have a new method with which to beat you up. Our formerly judgmental personality is now backed up by a newfound spirituality. What was once just “forcing everyone to agree with my opinion” is now “forcing everyone to agree with my opinion in the name of God.”

Saying “I don’t feel led” is the greatest way to get out of a Christian chore, like having a daily quiet time. Which, by the way, shouldn’t feel like a chore. It should feel like an uncontainable desire to spend time with the Lord. You should jump out of bed each morning and throw open your Bible with the gusto of a hungry man at a buffet. Or that’s how you think everyone else feels about doing quiet time, except you. They’re all excited about it, but not you—you’re some sort of grumpy sinner-heathenpagan.

So to assuage that guilt of not having a consistent quiet time, you’ll say, “I don’t want to just go through the motions with my quiet time. I want it to be heartfelt, not just something on my to-do list.”

That’s a great excuse for a number of reasons. First of all, it makes you sound holy. “Wow, this guy is so passionate about spending time with God that he’s not going to just phone in his quiet time. He’s going to wait until he’s truly motivated.”

Second, it’s one of those lies that if you say it often enough, you eventually start to believe it yourself: “That’s right. I
do
love spending time with God, and the best way to show that is by not spending time with him until my heart is right. I want to be on fire for God and not fake it. Until I’m sincere, I’ll respect him enough to avoid him.”

As a Christian, you’re obligated to think about going into full-time ministry at least once every three years.

The first time this thought hits you is on your second church retreat. Some people assume that it’s during your first retreat, but they’re wrong. Especially if the retreat is to a camp where other churches all meet. During that retreat, if you’re a boy, your primary thought is, “Will I be able to be that guy in my youth group who makes out with girls from other youth groups?” At least that was my thought. And if you’re a girl, you’re thinking, “I wish the pastor’s son wasn’t such a jerk.” Or at least the girls in my youth group were thinking that. Mostly because I was.

But on your second retreat you’ll get a little nudge, a spiritual bump, and it’s going to be pretty tempting to interpret that as the call to ministry. That’s probably not what you’ve received though; you’ve just received the call to thinking about the call to ministry. And we all get that. So you fight it through high school, tell all your friends you’d never be a pastor, avoid living in Africa as a missionary, and eventually make it to your mid-twenties.

And here it comes again. You start to think about how awesome it would be to go into full-time ministry. Reading the Bible all day and worshipping God at work. You’d never feel frustrated or bored because you’d constantly be doing exactly what you were handcrafted by God on high to do. Then you meet a minister your age. And he’s all stressed out and having a difficult time making room for God in his life and you think, “What? You’re a professional Christian. You’re not supposed to struggle with the things I struggle with.” But he does, so you stop thinking about going into the ministry full time.

The urge quiets for a few years and then you get some jerk for a boss. And you think, “I wish God was my boss. That would be awesome. He wouldn’t care about my sales sheet. He would care about my soul sheet.” Then you feel a little embarrassed
because that was such a low-quality joke. And you get a little grumpy. You tell your friends, “I think God is calling me into full-time ministry. This job can’t be what my life is all about. There has to be more to life than this. I need to be serving God with my talents full time.”

Which is a good thing to say except one of your friends is going to be that guy who says, “We’re all in full-time ministry. We should all be serving God full time. Regardless of where you are, you should be worshipping God and reaching people.” He’s right, but that’s still no fun to hear, especially if he loves his job. It’s horrible when people who love their job tell you how much you should love yours, and then they bring God into the conversation as further proof of how you’re blowing it.

That doesn’t make you want to go into full-time ministry. You can’t even get your ministry popping at the job you already have. If you can’t witness to the people you work with right now, how are you supposed to go into full-time ministry? So the urge fades away again.

But then you hear a really convincing minister or read a book with the word “dream” in the title and you think, maybe, just maybe. And then…

There are two things you need to know about missionaries:

1. You should always support them.
   
2. You should never complain around them.
   

The first one is pretty obvious; they need our money and our prayers to go serve wherever it is God has called them. The second one is a little more subtle but equally true.

Because even if your missionary friend is quiet and never judgmental, I have to suspect that when you say, “My hot water heater broke and I had to take a cold shower this morning,” he’s
secretly thinking, “Water? I remember water. It’s that wet stuff that comes out of pipes sometimes, right? I saw a picture of it in
the
book we have in the desert schoolhouse I teach in, and it reminded me that I had not yet taken a shower this month. But perhaps I will walk into the city next week and see if one of our host families will empty a plastic bottle of gray-colored water on my head. That would be nice, I think. What was that you were saying about your hot water heater? You had to call a plumber after you looked up his number on the internet while eating a sandwich in your house that didn’t have snakes regularly coming in through the holes in the wall? No please, go on, I am riveted by this tale of survival and hardship you are spinning, much like the black widow spiders I routinely sweep off my dirt floor or ‘bed’ if you will. Please do go on.”

I once worked with a guy named Matt who had a really long goatee and a shaved head. For some reason I assumed that meant he hated Jesus. Maybe if his goatee had been a few inches shorter I would have assumed he was indifferent to Jesus, but given the three or four inches of goatee, I was pretty convinced he was violently opposed to Christianity.

One day though, I felt like God was prompting me to talk with him about my faith. In situations like that I usually try to prayer-whisper back to God, “What? Oh come on. I’m at work. I know you’re all-knowing and all that, but can you not see the length of his facial hair from up there? He doesn’t want to hear about you.” But he kept pressing, so I eventually asked Matt what books he had been reading lately. He rattled off a few and then returned the question to me.

In a split second I googled my head for a Christian book title that didn’t sound too holy. I instantly landed on Donald Miller’s
Blue Like Jazz.
The title is perfect. It sounds like a book about jazz or poetry or perhaps jazz poetry. And I assumed that someone with a goatee that long might like both of those things. So I replied, “I really like the book
Blue Like Jazz.
”

He turned in his seat and smiled, “I love that book. My wife is a Christian author and we both really enjoy Donald Miller’s writing style.” Over the next few months we became friends and shared our faith with each other openly.

What did I
think
would happen? That perhaps upon hearing the word
Christian
Matt would think of every bad image of Christianity he had, the screaming protests, the musicals, the faith-based hand soaps, and throw them right on me?

When my cousin Martha moved to Brooklyn she deliberately wore her Young Life T-shirt on the subway in the hopes that another Christian would recognize the ministry and strike up a conversation with her. It was kind of her way of drawing half the
Jesus fish symbol in the sand the way that persecuted Christians would back in the ancient times to find another believer without getting in trouble.