On liking Jesus and building the church

A church sign I passed today has up what I would guess is the title of this coming Sunday’s sermon: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” Of course, I know that isn’t original, but comes from Dan Kimball’s book of the same title, but it got me thinking. Taken purely as a cultural observation, that would seem to be hard to argue—there are indeed a great many people who like Jesus but don’t like his church at all, and there are certainly churches out there that make it easy to understand why. No question, the American church needs to do a better job in a number of ways at living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, starting with actually being committed to living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, instead of all the other junk we so often get on about instead.

But stop a minute. If we were truly a Christ-centered gospel-driven Spirit-actuated community of committed believers who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, would that mean that “they,” whoever “they” are, would like the church and we would all feel nicely validated? The thing about Kimball’s title, which our neighboring church pastor borrowed for his sermon, is that most people don’t seem to take it or offer it as merely an observation, but rather as a criticism—that if we just did this church thing right, whatever “right” is supposed to look like, that “they” would like us. The underlying assumption here is, I think, that it’s perfectly reasonable that the world around us should like Jesus, and that if we were just more like Jesus, the world would like us too, our churches would grow, and we would be more “successful.”

It’s a widespread assumption, in part because it’s a very comfortable one for an American church that, by and large, still hasn’t realized that Christendom is dead, has been given its eulogy, and is now feeling the thumps of the gravediggers’ shovels; but there are voices that demur. Above all, there is this one:

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. . . . Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”

—Luke 6:22-23, 26 (ESV)

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”

—John 15:18-21 (ESV)

“The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.
And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.
But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember
that I told them to you.”

—John 16:2b-4 (ESV)

Of course, if “they” hate you, maybe they hate you because you’re shining the light of the gospel into the darkness of their hearts, and maybe they hate you because you’re a jerk; that phrase “on account of the Son of Man” is not one we can interpret however we please. But there’s a very important question here: if people outside the church like Jesus, is that actually an opportunity, or a sign they don’t really know him? As Jared Wilson has memorably pointed out, there are a great many counterfeit Jesuses floating around our culture, all of them very likeable; just pick your favorite and go with it. The real Jesus, by contrast, ticked so many people off so badly, he ended up crucified. To the extent that people like Jesus but not the church, it may just be that both halves of that statement are unfortunate.

The bottom line here is that the American church is, with very few exceptions, deeply culturally embedded, and its self-understanding is incorrigibly capitalist and consumerist; even those congregations which don’t consciously operate in terms of “market share” and “customer satisfaction” still think of themselves in these sorts of customer-response categories. There is the pervasive subliminal assumption that we can and should measure success by whether or not our customers are happy, whether or not they come back, and whether or not they draw in new customers. Of course we want them to like us—if they don’t, we’ll go out of business, and that would be failure, and is to be avoided if at all possible. And of course they like Jesus—after all, we like Jesus, and he wouldn’t have built such a big and successful brand if he weren’t likeable, would he?

It’s a hard thing to change this sort of mindset. It has to start, I believe, with the recognition that often, the main reason we like Jesus is that we’ve picked out the parts of him that we find congenial and are working determinedly to ignore the rest; we aren’t letting him confront the idolatries of our hearts, or the cultural idolatries in which we’re enmeshed, or the areas in which we indulge sin in our lives as a comfortable old friend. I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, commenting on Jesus’ command to us to love our enemies, that the greatest of all the enemies Jesus calls us to love is God—that if we truly take him seriously as Lord and God, he will often seem like an enemy to us as he challenges, rebukes, corrects and disciplines us, working to prune away the diseased, rotten, and overgrown areas in our souls . . . and as he prunes us, he calls us to the incomprehensible spiritual discipline of loving and praising him for the pain and suffering he’s causing us.

Our message to the world is not supposed to be, and cannot be with any integrity, “Come to Jesus and get what you want”; sometimes it seems like it’s just the opposite. We worship a Lord who traded success for failure, a home for homelessness, a good job for unemployment, social approval for the scorn of the elites, and ultimately life for death—how on earth can we present him accurately to a world to which none of this makes any sense at all and expect them to applaud? If you want success in the world’s eyes, according to its categories (building, attendance, budget, media profile, etc.), the very idea is nuts; clearly, you can’t grow a church that way. And indeed, you can’t. But then, you can’t grow anything that’s truly a church any way, and neither can I, and neither can anyone else. Only God can, and this is how he is pleased to do it.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that,
as it is written,
“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

—1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (ESV)

If our goal is to get people to like Jesus and like us, we’ve gotten both halves of it wrong. That is not the rock on which he said he would build his church, but the shifting sand against which he warned. We can’t judge what we’re doing based on results, because we can’t assume that the results we want are the ones Jesus wants to produce in us. All we can do is proclaim the gospel of grace and seek to live by grace in a manner according to the holiness of God—and if the world looks at that and tells us we’re crazy, and that maybe they don’t like Jesus either, well, results aren’t our business, they’re God’s. Ours is to be faithful and let him take care of the rest.