There Sure are a Lot of Churches (1 Corinthians 9:16-23)

The last time that my wife, Sidney, and I got to truly go church shopping was, when we moved to Atlanta 12.5 years ago. We knew that we wanted to attend a contemporary service, but even with that limitation, what we experienced varied wildly. We went to a large, prosperous, urban church that had retrofitted their multipurpose space to house their more modern service. I remember that the room felt full. The band felt well funded. The worship leader wore giant headphones, and no one spoke us after the service. Next, we went to a small in town congregation that only had a contemporary service. During that one, grown people spontaneously danced through the aisle waving streamers, and the sermon centered on the modern reality of faith healing. Finally, we went to a new church start in a shopping center made up almost exclusively of people in their 20s and 30s and decorated with reclaimed doors and windows and a street art church sign. They took Communion every Sunday. The services lasted 90 minutes, and the preacher always wore Chuck Taylors. The craziest part of this variety is that they were all United Methodist Churches.

There’s an even wider variance if you just consider the churches within a 10-ish mile radius from me here in Southeast Houston. 10 miles to my north and west sits Joel Osteen’s 45,000 member former basketball stadium of a megachurch. More due north, you encounter three different strains of cathedral, Catholic, Episcopal, and Orthodox as well as one of the highest church United Methodist Churches out there. Dotted throughout this range, we’ve got all of the “Firsts,” First United Methodist (where my Grandparent met), Houston’s First Baptist (where I held hands with a girl while watching Jars of Clay sing “Flood”), First Presbyterian (where my son goes to Scouts and choir), and First Christian. Moving closer to home, on our block, in addition to Servants of Christ, we are neighbors to the Catholics and Pentecostals across the street, as well as a small but historic Episcopal Church down the road and the Evangelicals, Mormons, and Nazarenes up the road.  For a community organizing project, I’m about to do a survey to figure out all the churches in our immediate area, and I won’t be surprised to find dozens just in our small corner of Southeast Houston. I recently endured a pastors’ meeting, where a person with a vested interest in creating more churches, boldly stated into a microphone, “Houston sure needs more churches!” Really? For a world of theoretical religious decline, we have a huge crop of incredibly different houses of worship.

We can read this with dismay as a sign of disunity in the Body of Christ, but I choose the opposite tack. Yes, we do not get along as well as we should or collaborate as often as we should. Also, we get really good at gatekeeping who counts as a true Heaven bound Christian and who are the hellbent heretics deceiving their flocks. However, the reality of different ways of doing and being church, to me, speaks to what Paul gets at with his self description here in 1 Corinthians. In the  second paragraph of the text, starting with verse 19, Paul lays out all the different ways that he’s had to live in the world in order to reach people. Jew, Gentile, rich, poor, weak, strong are all different enough that Paul has to approach them differently. “I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” (1 Corinthians 9:22b-23 NRSV) To know that we belong, we need to be able to envision ourselves in that place. Each group will have their own pathways to finding God, so Paul walked down those paths with each of them in their own way. It’s solid, empathetic evangelism.

Our friends, the Corinthians, needed to hear these words in particular. They deeply loved the concept that there existed a singular correct way to connect with God and that they had found it. God gave them the truest gift, speaking in tongues, and anyone without their gift and their knowledge didn’t belong in the same way. Paul writes 1 Corinthians as a corrective to this instinct. He talks about different kinds of gifts, different kinds of love, and here, in chapter 9, his need to approach different people in different ways.

The fundamental nature of humanity hasn’t changed much in 2,000 years. We both still need God to speak to us in a wide variety of ways and maintain the tendency to think that the way that we’ve found is either the best or the only way. Some folks truly find God amongst incense, the chanting of ancient languages, and a bearded priest in swirling robes. Others need the energy of a rock concert and a perpetually upbeat man to show them the nature of God’s love. Still more need the imtimacy of a smaller, closer knit community carrying forward decades or century old traditions to plug into the rhythm of the divine. Selfishly, I hope that there are folks out there who want to experience the breadth of God in a plucky, multicultural church with way too much building for their own good. The diversity of the church doesn’t have to mean the disunity of the church. It can merely indicate that God has the power to speak to a huge array of people in ways that they can each connect with.

Sidney and I ended up settling at the storefront church with the hipsters, reclaimed doors, and graffiti sign. This probably isn’t a shocking revelation. What was then called Oakhurst and is now called Eastside UMC still means a lot to me. It’s the first place, in my life as a Christian, that I saw a place where I could actually, naturally fit. So much of my journey in the church feels like cramming myself into a place that either doesn’t quite want me or can’t quite contain me. At Eastside, I finally found a thing that felt immediately like a church home. I didn’t know, prior to that, just to what degree that God and God’s church has the power to be all things to all people.

When we understand that, we can believe that a church home exists for all of us. It’s either already out there, or we may have to take the man’s advice and make it happen. God can stretch, and because of that, we can stretch too.