I met Christ in Colombia. I generally do not meet him in church. I really don't care if I never set foot in church again, though I probably will in the future when the pandemic is over and houses of public worship are open again. i don't know why I keep going back since clearly there is nothing in the services for me, except that occasionally I do have a sense of Christ being present, and there are people there I want to go on seeing. But it isn't so much the social aspect that keeps me returning, but the desire to publicly witness for Christ in the presence of other Christians. Otherwise, I could usually do without.
I said to a friend last night on Skype (he is a friend from church, actually) that it is well and good having this kind of benchmark experience as occurred to me in Colombia, but then there is the business of moving on and integrating the experience into the next stage of life. And I really haven't got a clue what any of this is going to mean should I return to church, because there I am not expecting to meet Christ but a bunch of older mostly white middle class folk who seem to treat it more like a social club than a place for outreach.
What is the difference between my circunstancias as they were in Colombia and the circunstancias of worshiping at church? Well, first of all, you will note that I wrote both times the Spanish word for circumstances. so that could give you a clue. And, no, that wasn't deliberate. I was thinking in Spanish. While in Colombia, I was living primarily in Spanish, which is not my mother tongue, though I do enjoy a high level of fluency in the language of Cervantes. So this already brought me out of my own personal normal. I was staying in the home of a friend I had made over Skype for the previous year and a half since meeting each other on Language Exchange. For both of us, we were making ourselves quite vulnerable, my new friend by offering me space to stay with him in his home, and me, by spending my time in the home of my new friend, in a foreign country while speaking and living in another language.
Going to church usually does not make people vulnerable. They are too used to being there, and generally the church is like a sacred curtain that covers a multitude of private and personal agendas. This is what makes people in church decidedly different from the poor and downtrodden that I met on the streets of Madrid Cundinamarca, Bogotá and Medellín. When you have nothing, or almost nothing, you are going to be very vulnerable, and very much at the mercy of others. This is where Christ really becomes present, because he became so very vulnerable for us and now he stands and suffers with the lonely, the unwanted and the poor. So I met him, our Crucified Lord, in the fathers and mothers begging while carrying their children in their arms, the Venezuelan refugee family begging on the street, and so many others. In church, people are generally well housed, well dressed, and their lives usually are very comfortable and affluent. Not all, but almost everyone there is pretty well-off. They have no real need of Jesus, except for their Sunday morning fix at the weekly eucharist. And when they go home? Who only knows how they live during the other seven days of the week, but my guess is that not very many of them really live in a way that would mark them as disciples of the Risen Saviour. Anglicans don't go in for that kind of fanaticism, you know.
It isn't so much what we believe, but why and how we believe it. It isn't really so much what we believe, but the way we live. If Christ is going to live through us then we first have to be willing to surrender and die. To become very poor, vulnerable, to sell and give up our lovely homes, possessions and investments, give to the poor and follow Jesus and trust him to take care of us and our needs as we generously give to others. What could be more simple as a formula for living the Christian life? So far, I have come across very few in church who are willing to do this, who are willing to give up their comfort, privilege and entitlement, if but for the gospel. And it is going to be much to their loss, for they will never know the true riches of Christ, the real joy and peace that comes with being simple servants, nor will the world ever really benefit from their witness and presence because their selfish greed, lame excuses, and self-satisfaction have left them perpetually spiritually barren. And this is why the Anglican Church of Canada is dying.
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