Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s good for your soul to attend a church of another denomination than your own. I grew up in a Baptist church. Now I don’t have anything against the Baptist church–well maybe a few things, but my point is there’s nothing wrong with the Baptist church that has driven me to explore other denominations. I guess you could say I’ve realized the richness of diversity.

Growing up in a Baptist church you have absolutely no idea what liturgy is. That’s what the sinning Catholics use because their church doesn’t stand for anything anymore so they have to fall back on something. Or at least that’s the impression you get in a Baptist church. Not that the impression is based on anything more than ignorance.

I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a fan of liturgy. But I’ve come to understand it a little better after attending a few services that follow liturgy. Okay, understand isn’t the best word. Perhaps appreciate. I really don’t understand liturgy. But there’s a certain peace to it. A certain unity. A certain comfort. I can definitely see downsides to those, but now I can also see a positive side.

You also have no idea what church history is. I read the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed for the first time in a world history course in college. Apparently some liturgical churches recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday. What a concept: sitting down and writing out the tenets of the Christian faith in a such a short form. I bet very few Baptists could do that successfully.

It seems to stretch your mind a little bit when you walk into a church that sees God a little bit differently. They don’t use grape juice, they use wine. They don’t sit in padded pews, they kneel. They may seem like minor differences, and really they are, but when you’re talking about God above, this universal concept that so few of us seem to get close to right, a change of pace a change of perspective can be a good thing. It helps sharpen your mind, sharpen your faith, sharpen your understanding of the Spirit.

I sat down on the bus tonight next what looked like your average old man. He looked a little odd, but not to freakish. He had a tote bag on his lap, a tattoo that said “Dee” on his arm — and he was missing at least four bottom front teeth, creating a really bizarre looking gap. So he seemed a little odder than I first thought.

I sat down and opened my City Pages, eager to check tonight’s movie listings. But the old guy wanted to talk. I guessed immediately guessed he was a Christian. It wasn’t anything he said. It was just in his manner. He was nice. Overly nice. I felt like I couldn’t get out of the conversation, and I didn’t want to be rude.

It turns out he was saved at a Billy Graham Crusade in Denver over 20 years ago. The guys been involved in Christian counseling, ministry, and the charismatic church. He was trying to convince me that healing and speaking in tongues are still common occurrences today, at least at his church. I nodded and smiled, wondering if this was just another bus passenger conversation for him. I wondered why I had so little desire to talk to him. Why would I rather read a so-so newspaper then talk to someone.

Sometimes I can be pretty shallow. At first I hoped he’d get off at the next stop. But then I realized he was probably in for the long haul. He ended up getting off a few stops before me. Long enough for me to sit there by myself and wonder why I cared so little about this fellow brother in Christ.

Some things never change.

“But we’ve got to follow through on our ideals or we betray something at the heart of who we are. Outside these gates, and even within them, the culture of idealism is under siege beset by materialism and narcissism and all the other isms of indifference and their defense mechanism knowingness, the smirk, the joke.” – Bono’s address to the Harvard University Class of 2001

A bloody nose seems to be standard protocol for me. They happen fairly often, so it’s usually not much of a surprise. That’s why I stock extra Kleenex in my backpack. It’s happened more than once that while I’m on the bus or waiting for the bus my nose will start bleeding.

Today it happened while I was between buses. I step off one bus, walk half a block, and get on another bus. Just before the second bus pulled up my nose started bleeding. Not a big deal. Although I’ve learned from experience that bus drivers aren’t too keen about letting you on the bus when you’ve got a bloody Kleenex held to your nose and blood smeared on your fingers. One bus driver actually told me I had to get off the bus if I had a bloody nose. I told him it stopped. Another bus driver shrugged his shoulders and apologized for not having any Kleenex.

But since I was at the bus stop, I figured my best bet would be to sit down with my Kleenex and wait for it to stop. I’m usually early to work anyway, so I had no reason to hurry. I sat down, Kleenex to nose, blood on fingers, waiting for it to stop. My eyes focused on the concrete sidewalk, but I could see the people rushing this way and that way, catching their buses and walking in to work.

Then I started to wonder if anyone would stop to see what was wrong. If someone was sitting on the sidewalk with blood on their fingers and a Kleenex held to their nose, would you stop to help? And what kind of help would your, or could you offer? It’s not like I needed help. I had a travel pack of Kleenex, and that’s really all you need. But I was still curious what people would do.

Just when I thought no one would stop, a woman slowed down, and then walked up to me. I was looking at the concrete, so I couldn’t see her face. She asked what was wrong, and I said it was just a bloody nose, no big deal.

And then she did something interesting. She started praying. She prayed for my bloody nose to stop in Jesus’ name, for the Holy Spirit to stop my bleeding nose. I smiled, and kept staring at the sidewalk. She said Amen, and walked on.

I cocked my head to watch her go, pastel pink jacket and baby blue shoes. That was it. Just a prayer. No Kleenex, no words of encouragement, or well, anything. Just an odd, charismatic prayer. It’s not like a needed anything, so maybe it’s exactly what I needed. A bit of divine provision. But is this the kind of assistance elderly women often doll out to strangers? An odd prayer? It may have been fine for me, but I wonder how it would have suited another? Perhaps that’s asking too much, stretching too far, taking this out of context. And that is a bit unfair. But I can’t help but wonder.

At any rate, when I finished watching her go, I carefully eased the Kleenex away from my nose. The bleeding had stopped.

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.

I hated church when I was a kid. Slow, boring songs, some old guy talking for way too long, some quiet prayer, reading an antiquated text. I always sat in the pew watching the seconds tick by. I’d look up to the rafters and try to watch the individual fan blades go around. I remember one strange joke the pastor told when he started the service and I remember thinking about the joke for the next 20 minutes.

Church is a very odd thing. But what is it? We sit around and sing a few songs, we listen to some guy talk. What’s supposed to happen? Am I getting a spiritual shot in the arm? Am I supposed to be challenged? Are my eyes supposed to be opened to new issues?

Do people walk out of church changed? Are they supposed to walk out of church changed? Should church be active or passive? Should church be teaching me the foundational truths of God, or should church be putting legs on those foundational truths? Should I be learning how to care for the homeless, or that I need to care for the homeless. Or both? Is Sunday morning an appropriate time to talk about social change?

What if the pastor talked about loving our neighbors and then dedicated the last 20 minutes of the service to go out into the community and pick up trash. Would that be appropriate? It could be an act of worship. It’s certainly putting legs to our faith. But will the congregation feel coerced to pick up litter? And is that wrong? Do we have to feel comfortable all the time?

What if church was a very uncomfortable place? It seems like we go to great lengths to make everyone feel comfortable. We’re always very afraid of offending people. That’s kind of funny. I don’t think Jesus worried too much about offending anyone. I think he made people feel pretty uncomfortable. Maybe it’s good to irritate people in church, to really get under their skin and make them think.

I wonder what church would be like if we never knew what to expect. It seems like church is built on tradition and being able to expect the same things, and maybe there’s some value in that. I just think it’d be enlightening to walk into a church and be totally surprised by what happened within those doors.

So how do you be in the world and not of it? What does that mean? I have the feeling very few people in the church have any clue what this means. I don’t think it means you can check out from mainstream culture. I don’t think it’s a ticket to say hey, I live here, but I don’t interact with this sinful world. I think it means we’re supposed to be in the world, interacting with the world, but not stooping to the sin of the world. What’s the difference? One definition is content to reside in a ghetto of Christianity. They listen to Christian music, read Christian books, watch Christian movies. They turn to Christian alternatives to anything the secular world provides. It’s a way of being in the world, not of the world, a way that certainly keeps you safe from the sins of the world. It’s also a way of living that keeps you safe from ever having to love someone in the real world. I don’t quite understand the people who are so immersed in their Christian culture that they can’t relate to real people who live in the real world outside of the church. I was one of those people once. I related fairly well to people at school and I had a decent impact. People knew I was a Christian. And that’s about it. I rarely took the time to actually hang out with people from school and relate to them. Instead I hung up with my youth group friends. Perhaps that fortified my faith and allowed me to keep believing in God. Perhaps it also kept me from really relating to a lot of my school friends and being able to tell them what Christianity was all about. I think the church today is not nearly as effective as it could be simply because of this issue. Christians have chosen to not relate to the mainstream world and have thus removed their voice from society. I’m not saying the church isn’t effective right now. I’m a fine example of a bubble believing Christian. I practiced bubble Christianity for a number of years. Sometimes I wonder if God’s really in this bubble like we want to think. My impression is that he won’t fit in our bubble. He’s out there, and that’s where he expects us to be. Jesus ate with the tax collectors and sinners, not at the church potluck.

He also probably knows how to use paragraphs better than me.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that the religious holiday of Easter is so completely disconnected from the retail holiday of Easter? On one hand you’ve got candy, eggs, and bunnies, and on the other hand you’ve got an empty tomb and a resurrected Savior. There’s not a whole lot of connection. At least for Christmas you’ve got God’s gift to the world and a fat guy who gives gifts to all the world. It’s a slim connection, but it sort of makes sense. But rabbits and empty tombs really don’t relate.

And at Christmas you at least find nativity scenes in stores. They do actually acknowledge that Christmas is about more than Santa Claus. But at Easter they don’t sell little models of empty tombs. The stores really don’t acknowledge that part of Easter. Which means Easter is completely about dyeing eggs and eating candy. The mall and the grocery store close so we can stay home and find our hidden eggs. It’s really kind of weird.

It’s interesting that the church has become so irrelevant to our society today.

In my experience, turning the other cheek does not involve turning and kicking someone else’s other cheek.

Perhaps I was misinformed.

God has a plan. It’s not exactly what you want to hear when the plan calls for a death, or an accident, or a divorce. They’re thrilling words when you’re contemplating marriage or a new, higher paying job. But when it’s something negative, they’re not very comforting words.

We don’t like the idea of a God who might cause pain. And yet I think that’s the one thing we have the most difficulty explaining to the world. And it’s probably the one thing we most need to explain to the world. Life is full of pain. Our Sunday School answers just don’t cut it. Sometimes you have to cry out to God and pound your fists in the earth and let the tears stream down like rain. He’s a big God, he can handle it.

I wonder what would happen if the church was able to communicate that.

Why does a Christian subculture exist? Why are there Christian bookstores and Christian magazines and Christian books and Christian music and Christian concerts and Christian clubs and Christian coffee mugs? Perhaps so a good intentioned grandmother can buy her grandson something uplifting. Nice answer, but it doesn’t justify an entire subculture.

The only decent reason for the justification of the Christian subculture I’ve been able to come up with is because we’re trying to ensure that what we are filling our minds with is good, wholesome, and pure. The easiest way to do that seems to be substitute everything we like in the mainstream culture with a sanitized, Christian version. The only other justification is mere profit, and I’m sure that’s not the reason.

The sad thing is this desire for sanitized products shows only one thing: laziness. We’re too lazy to actually test and discern what is good for our own consumption, so we let others do it. We trust a certain record label or book publisher to tell us what is Christian, then we buy anything they put their stamp of approval. Funny that evangelical Protestants do this and at the same time most of them mock Catholics for their unswerving devotion to the divine word of the pope. Protestants have simply replaced the pope with a Christian adjective that can be applied to anything.

Safety, security, laziness, profit. These are the words that justify a Christian subculture. I don’t remember Jesus calling us to any of that.