I stood in my congregation’s cemetery yesterday and watched as an old man, weighing perhaps no more than one hundred pounds soaking wet — he’s battling cancer, finished filling the grave of the dearly departed. Wheezing from the effort, he dusted the mud off his pants and then quickly left to go package food at the church’s mission center. Mike was just one of a dozen or so volunteers who gave up the better part of their Thursday to get the dead guy where he needed to go and the living he left behind where they needed to be. None of them knew the deceased, a pastor who died after a century of living.
I thought of Mike later in the afternoon when the twitters pushed a promotion into my feed for the new Discover Plus documentary series, Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed. The trailer promised that the three-part account will expose the dark underbelly of the global megachurch made even more famous by celebrity congregants like Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, and Kevin Durant. After Willow Creek, Ravi Zacharias, and the many disciples who toured the Capitol on January 6, it seems only a slight exaggeration to say that you could form an entire denomination with phony, grifting church leaders. Even the Oscar-nominated film, Nightmare Alley, draws an unsubtle analogy from carnival mentalists to gospel preachers.
But no one is producing a documentary tell-all about the guy who volunteers to dig a grave for a stranger or the ladies who made lunch, gratis, for the hundred or so mourners in attendance. Just as serial killer programs give us an outsized fear of our fellow humans, the stories of glittering, grifting churches and the celebrity pastors who are really white-washed tombs obscure the everyday grace going on in ordinary churches.
Just last Sunday, for instance, I pointed out in my sermon that God’s speech to the exiles in Isaiah shifts suddenly to the second person singular, you. To make the point, I called out names from the pews. For example, “God says, “I love you, Janet.” After five or six names, I heard the homeless man in the front pew, tears in his voice, say, “Don’t forget me. Randy.” Even more remarkable, Randy was sharing a pew with a man who makes a six-figure salary several times over. Tell me where else in America that happens? Truly, I’d be curious to know.
Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed teases a story as familiar as it is addicting, abuses of powers and absences of accountability. And of course, sex. It remains an untested hypothesis whether or not we’d be as interested in these stories if they didn’t also involve sex. Hillsong has it in spades, from a pastor’s low-riding pants to ordinary infidelity, harassment, and coverups. Discovery’s forthcoming series arrives on the heels of the wildly popular podcast series by Christianity Today that documented, in investigative detail, the hypocrisy and cult-like habits of Mark Driscoll’s ministry at Seattle’s once-mega church, Mars Hill. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill at times felt like ecclesial torture porn, yet I admit I listened to Mark Driscoll receiving at least this measure of comeuppance with no small degree of schadenfreude. Nonetheless, I wonder if the zeal with which we consume these tales of the Church’s failures and fraud betrays an altogether different but still alarming impoverishment.
Contrasting a theology of glory with a theology of the cross, Gerhard Forde writes that a theology of glory’s “superficial optimism [about our ability to be good and holy] breeds ultimate despair.” There’s certainly an air of despair (it’s all a grift; it’s all meaningless) that attends the popular fascination with stories like Hillsong or Mars Hill. If Forde is correct, then such despair is the offspring of an assumption about Christianity that is itself a lie. Christianity (as Christians will remind themselves on Ash Wednesday — a lesson we’re constantly forgetting) is not about good people getting better but bad people coping with their failures to be good.
While it’s likely true that “Christianity suffers more casualties from faux faith than honest doubt,” it’s also true that Christianity’s own distinctive teachings on original sin and the bondage of the will actually encourages us to assume that our own faith is faux a good bit of the time, often for reasons that are a mystery to us. The great critic of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach, insisted that when humans speak of God they’re merely speaking of themselves in a loud voice, to which the great theologian of the Church, Karl Barth, replied, “Ja.” The Church keeps alive the knowledge that holiness is a gift not an achievement and therefore, Christians never advance past the title, simultaneous-saint-and-sinner. The cynicism of projects like Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed sees the sheen of power and success and expects to find “a nice slab on top, worms underneath.” Such a cynicism is not native to the world. It’s a creation of the gospel.
The critique so many bring to bear today against Christianity is itself a Christian critique. The story of Christians failing is a story first told by Christians. What’s remarkable about the Old Testament is its character as a kind of ruthless diary of Israel’s own unfaithfulness. The New Testament is no different in this regard. Not only is Christ’s church built on a fool named “Rock” who tried walking on water, the apostles showed no inclination to expunge their spotty record from scripture. They denied him. They betrayed him. They abandoned him. Later, Paul attempted to kill them, the same Paul who confesses to the church in Rome, “The one thing I want to do, I do not do; the one thing I do not want to do, I do.”
It’s this realistic pessimism about our ability to be good and holy — a frankness that Luther called a theology of the cross — that frees us for the opposite of despair.
I remember a few years ago I went to the hospital to visit a pain in the ass parishioner who had only recently passed around a petition to have me ousted by the bishop. I walked into his room, only to discover a lay leader (who liked the parishioner even less than me) helping the man hold his Johnson so that he could pee into his bed pan. Only the gospel, the news of our collective culpability and God’s ridiculous refusal to cancel us, could produce such an act of humility. No Discovery Plus series will ever capture such a moment on film, but it’s not because such moments are rare. I’ve been a pastor a little over twenty years and I have enough grace sightings to fill all the Sundays for as many years. I think of such moments not only when I see trailers for shows like Hillsong but also when the Apostles’ Creed asks me every Sunday, improbably but not without firsthand eyewitness evidence, to believe in the Church.
The outrage that follows every story of clergy abuse is surely holy, and the indignation from which Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed profits is proper. Still, as Francis Spufford puts it in his book, Unapologetic, if we’re waiting for the Church to clean up its act and be nothing but good, do nothing but good, we’re going to be waiting forever. I know this to be true because the Bible tells me so.
So we don’t wait because, Spufford writes:
We don’t, in fact, believe the church is precious because it is good or does good or because it may do good in the future. We care about its behavior, but we don’t really believe that its muddled and sometimes awful record is the only truth about it. We believe that the church is precious because it embodies something that the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up in general and our sins of complicity in particular cannot destroy. Something which already exists now, despite our every failure, and which consequently always has existed for Christians, right through all the dark centuries when slavery and tyranny governed the world, and the church too … For us, you see, the church is not just another institution. It’s a failing but never quite failed attempt, by limited people, to perpetuate the unlimited generosity of God in the world.
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