A Handful of Reasons to Join a Church [despite the exodus] - Sharad Yadav

S harad Yadav is Lead Pastor of Bread & Wine church in Portland, OR.

As I try to remember why the hell I do this for a living, here is a handful of reasons, dear friends, to consider joining a church:

1. To join a church is to commit to a social circle you do not get to choose and can therefore show you whether your spirituality is bullshit or not

2. Joining a church is a way of practicing - among a small group of people over a significant period of time - what you’d like the world to be like

3. To join a church is to live in rebellion against the neoliberal and capitalist forces which are brainwashing you into making your consumer desire the center of the world, reducing all your experiences of the world (including all the people in it) to instruments and resources.

4. Joining a church is to organize your life around a time to confess your limitations, culpability and imperfections together with other people so that you can get used to receiving divine forgiveness and hope in response to your honesty.

5. To join a church is to resist all traditional loyalties to state, party, culture, family or affinity in an act of loyalty to a group that transcends all natural categories

6. Joining a church organizes your financial priorities around supporting an inclusive community for vulnerable people . . . that you actually have to live with.

7. To join a church is to cultivate an environment unlike your home, work, or play where your life is not measured according to any other purpose or goal than to discover and enjoy your own humanity.

8. Joining a church is a way of maintaining healthy skepticism about human knowledge and capacities in the language of divine mystery.

9. To join a church is to cultivate an imagination for how your unique talents and creative potential can be offered on purpose for love instead of money

10. Joining a church is a life lesson in how to deal with assholes without retaliating, dehumanizing or running away (in the desperate hope of not becoming an a$$hole).

Comments

[Danny Klopovic]

How does one match this vision with the reality of ecclesial homelessness due to the very real harms that such communities can and do inflict on marginalised people? It is one thing to have to learn how to live with arseholes and quite another to live with abusers.

[Jerome C Chandler]

Great stuff! I will have to quote you in a few posts!