The "Preference" Driven Church

We live in a fast paced society. Everything is fast and ready in an instant. We have instant food to eat while we are running out the door. And each day our lives are made up of a vast amount of choices. For instance, what or where will I eat today? Whom will I be eating with? Why type of food and then which restaurant that serves that type of food? All of these choices are driven by our preferences. We are a preference driven culture in a preference driven world and this is what is leading me to write this blog. I am becoming more and more worried that our society of preferences have become the chain that is driving decisions being made in churches. Think about it for just a moment.  There are churches of all types - traditional, modern, post-modern, ancient-modern, contemporary, liturgical, etc... Then all of these "styles" break down into denominations, and many times further into differing "theologies" of preferences. All the while, people are so caught up on focusing on these things and loosing sight of the purpose of the church. Now don't get me wrong, I do believe that all of these churches serve their purpose within the body, but I am growing concerned that the church is presenting a misleading nature of its own preferences; above the nature of Christ's desire for His church. For instance, look at how people "shop around" for a church? What are they looking for? Style? Traditions? Dress codes? I am tempted to ask the question... have we sold out to some kind of "secular-attraction" model that exists in our culture? Either way, our preferences should never interfere with our worship to God. We should always be driven by our privilege to worship and not our preferences of worship. Take for example the story of the Samaritan woman in John 4. She was so blinded by her cultural restrictions and preferences that she could not see the Son of God sitting right in front of her. She was blinded by her own wants and her own desires that she could not see the truth. Jesus' response to her was epic! He had this to say; 


“...believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

When our preferences drive our worship, plan and simple, it is idolatry. Why do you think so many people abandon the church? Ask anyone who has left the church, and I guarantee that there reasoning is along the lines of - they don't like a particular style; they can't worship in the same room with a particular person or persons; they dislike the way that the church is operated; they believe that they could do things better; they don't get anything out of it anymore; their kids don't like it; they don't feel like they need to go to church to be a Christian....etc. To me, these are all "preferences." How can we be called to "die" to our selfish nature and to "live" in Christ if we cannot get out of our own way! This is what it means when the Apostle Paul says, "For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." One truth and one fact remains...If you go to church for any other reason than Christ, you will leave the church for any other reason than Christ. Someone once asked the German Christian George Mueller the secret of his victorious Christian life. He replied: “There came a day when George Mueller died, utterly died! No longer did his own desires, preferences, and tastes come first. He knew that from then on Christ must be all in all.” What a statement. His desires and preferences no longer came first. Imagine a church full of individuals willing to give up their personal preferences and desires. How arrogant have we become as individuals to think that we know Christ's church better than the head of the church - Christ Himself? How arrogant have we become to deny Christ his passion by submitting to our own preferences above the work of the Kingdom? We are once again a culture of idolatry. A culture of preferences. We prefer to do this... prefer not to do that...would rather do this... instead of doing that... all the while ignoring our call to Christ.  

So what do we do? Remember that Christ died for His church and when we dismiss the church, I believe, in turn we are dismissing Christ. The problem is not of "Christ's Church," but instead the problem is us and our "preference driven" culture. It is not that we "can't" worship God in any situation, it is that we "won't." The church cannot let things like preferences continue to hold it down. We have made God into this little bit sized piece of gum that we can chew whenever we want and spit out whenever we don't need Him around. But the truth is that, God is bigger than our preferences. And our preferences, and everything that go along with them, died the day we became His child. A.W. Tozer once said, “One of the ingredients in worship is boundless confidence in the character of God. We cant’ worship these days because we do not have a high enough opinion of God. God has been reduced, modified, edited, changed and amended until He is not the God Isaiah saw high and lifted up but something else. Worship rises or falls in any church altogether depending upon the attitude we take toward, whether we see God big or whether we see Him little, and if there is one terrible disease in the church of Christ, it is that we do not see God as great as He is.”