Celebrate What You're Not
No band.
No projectors.
No yelling.
Just worship.
That's the sign in the hallway where most of our guests enter the church building. It's a way of telling people about Sunday worship by telling them what we're not.
What are you... not?
It used to be that all you needed to start a church was a Bible and a bowl of water. Now, you need a warehouse, projectors, screens, a band, strategic ferns, and a preacher with a three-legged stool.
Lake Hills Presbyterian Church has none of these. And that's OK.
(Full disclosure: we do have a projector and a portable screen that find occasional use in worship.)
The fastest route to irrelevance is bending over backwards to be relevant. The fastest way to be old-fashioned is racing to the latest fashion. A 50 year-old man can dress like his teenage son, but that doesn't make him young, or cool. It makes him a 50 year-old man in the clothes of his teenage son. Not cool.
Making people happy, making people like you, is exhausting. No one can keep up. This doesn't mean you throw out your adaptive skills. It means you sharpen your adaptation. It means you aim carefully at who you choose to be, and, by consequence, who you will not. Does this mean you don't care what other people think? Of course not. But caring what others think of you is different from living under the fear of missing out.
If a church's goal is attracting more members, it's missing the point. My view is that the purpose of the church is to live as a faithful community, serving God by making the world a more loving place. Can a church do that with a band, projectors, and angry voices? Of course it can. Many do. But it doesn't need to. Unless it chooses to. And then, it chooses not to do other things. And that's OK.
If the goal of your life is convincing people to like you, you're also missing the point. Because no matter how many "Likes" you get, there are always people who won't click with you. You can worry yourself to death about this, or you can focus your energy and send your gifts to their best use. But this means you'll also choose how you will not spend your energy. And that's OK.
Joshua 24:15 says, "Choose today whom you will serve." That's the part that often gets quoted. But it also says to choose whom you will not serve, what you won't do, whom you won't be. The choice of what you don't do makes you just as unique as what you choose to do. Celebrate what you're not.
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