On Sunday I attended a different church and it made me realize just how religious Christianity has become. The church was much more liturgical than any church I’d ever been to (aside from a Catholic church I attended with a friend in elementary school). The bulletin was full of call and response text that my wife had memorized from her days in a liturgical church.

What seemed odd to me was what all this liturgical stuff had to do with Jesus. I couldn’t quite figure out what Jesus had to do with this extremely ordered, prim and proper kind of religious service. It seemed more like religious ritual than Christianity. And then I wondered what any church service has to do with Jesus. Your Baptist church service has just as much order and primness as a liturgical church, it’s just it comes in the form of announcements and special music instead of the second lesson from the New Testament and the post communion canticle.

I’d be curious to know the origin of the typical church service. Some how I don’t think Jesus threw on a robe and a stole and recited a bunch of high sounding text for the Sabbath service. It’s no wonder the church has such difficulty reaching the world when you compare the average church service with the person of Jesus.

Another thing I don’t get is padded kneelers. We’ll take on a humble posture, but we want it to be a comfortable humble posture. That seems to embody the problem with the American church today.