Lost In The Matrix
Why The Black Church Looks Nothing Like Christ
Inside The Matrix
I am constantly perplexed by how mean we are. My goodness,
Church Folk are some nasty people. And many of our churches are
unfriendly places of servitude and obligation, of fearsome
obeisance to their respective king of their respective donut
shop. They are dank, drab, dull, rundown places, typically older
buildings in some level of disrepair while lavishing the
pastor-donut king with accolades and briefcases full of cash on
his anniversary. The dynamics of these places are so
antithetical to the ministry and personal example of Jesus
Christ that I can hardly qualify them as churches. Even scarier,
no one seems to notice. This is likely because most people at
most of these Matrix churches are simply drunk with it—with the
Matrix. They’re not Christians, they are Church Folk.
Christians, you see, worship Christ. Church Folks’ main
investment is the church—the literal institution and their
little clique/social club.
These places typically exist in some insular time warp where it
is perpetually 1965 and function more like Elks clubs or,
perhaps, witches’ covens than the way churches were intended to
function. Most Church Folk do not even realize how out of joint
their worship experience is because they do not know the bible.
Unbiblical concepts and behavior seem reasonable to them, and my
preaching seems extreme and ultra-conservative. Rolling your
eyes and sucking your teeth seems reasonable. Tearing someone
down behind their back seems reasonable. Scheming to get that
position at church or, worse, to freeze somebody else out of it
seems reasonable. Cussing, drugs, alcohol—reasonable. Sexual
impurity of all kinds—reasonable. Because you don’t know the
bible. Or, even sadder, you don’t believe the bible.
A
lot of that is because the bible, the orderly self-revelation of
God, has not been modeled for us well by our own pastors. Many of
our pastors do not behave much like Christ, demonstrate mostly
arrogance and haughtiness and very little if any love. Many of
our pastors are only doing what they’ve seen done—the
disciplinary patriarch who rarely smiles, who’s always ready to
judge and rebuke, who breathes fire from the pulpit. While there
are examples of Christ rebuking, those are exceptions and not the
rule. For the most part, the record records a gentle Man, a kind
Person, Who taught in colorful metaphor and Who won people over
with love. This kind of person is rare among black pastors, who
are more often authority figures, high and lifted up and
unknowable to their own flock. A flock that finds behaving in
un-Christ-like ways to be reasonable behavior.
Welcome to The Matrix. A place that seems real, that seems
reasonable, but is in fact a lie. And we need to call this
behavior what it is—a lie. Antithetical and antichrist. When
you, a Christian, behave this way, you crucify Christ anew
[Hebrews 6:6]. You are, literally, practicing witchcraft—which
is rebellion against God.
Self-deception is what the Matrix is about. It’s the games
Church Folk play with one another, the church becoming a social
club and evolving into the mess it largely is today.
The Matrix Church
The church, the Body of Christ, should look like Jesus.
Regardless of your denomination or your cultural persuasion, just
walking through your door, I should be overcome by the sweet
perfume of God’s love.
The
Matrix church is not evangelical. Evangelism plays but a small
role and usually exists as a tiny, underfunded auxiliary among
dozens of other more useless “ministries” among the church. The
focus of The Matrix church is mostly about The Big Show. Sunday
morning is The Big Show, a kind of weekly cabaret/minstrel High
School Musical, geared mostly toward the most important moment
of the service—the offering. The offering is frequently the most
vital part of our morning worship experience, most especially
since so many of our tiny, run-down, fractured churches are
struggling to keep the doors open. Far too many of our churches
are in bondage to finances, to utilities, to capital
improvements. We need that offering, and the amount of that
offering is typically affected by the quality of The Big Show:
the music, the preaching. The offering is also affected by the
weather, with some pastors insisting on having church services
even in inclement weather, risking the lives of his flock by
demanding they make a dangerous journey to the church so he can
get their money. This guy is stuck in The Matrix.
In the Matrix church, money is the main focus, the main goal.
Rather than show love, the Matrix church most often shows
suspicion. In practice, it tends to show contempt for the very
values Christ taught, relying instead on a cutthroat hierarchy
of overseers, people usually more invested in obtaining power
than in sharing love. We’ve so embedded this wrong, unbiblical
practice into our cultural DNA, that anyone pointing out how
biblically out-of-bounds our practice is is usually ostracized
as a kook or a radical.
The Matrix Pastor
A pastor who does not preach Jesus Christ does not know Jesus
Christ. It’s just that simple. In our tradition, the pastor’s
Sunday message is most often an oblique life lesson in Christian
conduct or goals, mentioning Christ only tangentially and
usually with either an awkward segue into the invitation to
discipleship or no segue at all—just an abrupt end and then the
music starts playing. The invitation itself is often drowned out
by spirited music and rejoicing, so much so that the
articulation of God’s promise is frequently lost to the chaos of
the moment, with the seeker having little or no clue what
salvation actually is or how to obtain it. Even worse, many of
our churches humiliate seekers by forcing them to sit in chairs
facing the congregation. I mean, what moron thought that
up? Those chairs serve as a kind of Repentance Repellent,
discouraging seekers from coming forward.
Pastor:
your preaching must move people to action. If all you’re doing
is entertaining people with your polished oratory, you are lost
in self-deception. You are in serial denial about your own
purpose. You are stuck in The Matrix. The church experience
where Jesus Christ is, at best, a talk show guest, is, by
definition, antichrist. The empirical role of preaching is to
save those who are lost. Many of our preachers just assume we’ve
all heard it before because they’ve heard it before. Many of our
preachers feel that Sunday’s message should be more about
building Christian character and teaching moral conduct. Christ
is pushed aside in favor of clever sermon titles and combustible
performances. But, at the end of the day, a great many souls
will be lost on account of these men having taken their eyes off
the ball: the point of preaching is to bring souls to Jesus
Christ, a name which is, far too often, mentioned mainly in
passing in our Sunday morning tradition.
The Matrix First
Lady
The main focus of worship in the Matrix church is the pastor,
followed by The First Lady, who is usually a vain, mean-spirited
bundle of insecurity who often wields more power and influence
than the pastor himself. In The Matrix church, the Matrix First
Lady typically exemplifies none of the personal qualities of
Christ and few, if any, of the fruits of the Holy Spirit
[Galatians 5], yet she remains a person held in high esteem by
the church, who lavish her with praise and expensive gifts
because they either don’t know any better (sad) or they’re
afraid of her (even sadder).
Such persons in highly visible positions of leadership who
behave and sound nothing whatsoever like Christ clearly have no
relationship with God. Yet we retain these people, by virtue of
some written or unwritten contract, placing legalism over
Christian duty. Believing what we chose to believe, seeing what
we choose to see. Beloved, these mean-spirited, nasty people are
lost. And you are just deceiving yourself, living in The Matrix.
A great many of our “First” ladies are, in fact depressed. She
wears it on her face, but we see what we choose to see. We
choose to keep our noses out of pastor’s private life, even at
the expense of this woman who is clearly suffering right before
our eyes. A woman so mean, so vain, with a scowl perpetually on
her face and a hair-trigger temper—beloved, that’s a cry for
help. This is a person who is drowning. And we routinely turn
our eyes from her. We claim to love her, but we let her drown.
She is, just as likely, carrying an enormous burden, likely from
her husband. From whatever dirt he’s got going on. He seems
fine, but she’s this nasty heifer taking heads off—wake up,
folks. That’s a cry for help. There’s something wrong, and
either the pastor can’t see it himself or doesn’t care. Or,
she’s acting out her depression, her loneliness, her weariness
from carrying the weight of her husband’s sin in some twisted
sense of Christian duty. She’s lost in The Matrix. And, when we
ignore this soap opera playing out right in front of us, we
become lost in it, too.
Likewise, if the pastor’s children are thugs, drug addicts or
thieves, if his daughter is shacked up or knocked up—it is
reasonable to assume there are problems with your pastor’s
spiritual walk. At the very least, it is reasonable to relieve
him of his duties so he can biblically get his house in order,
as a pastor who can’t run his own house must not be the head of
a church [Titus 6]. Yet we routinely turn a blind eye and deaf
ear to this mess, like “conservative” politician Sarah Palin
spinning her teen daughter’s pregnancy into some kind of Mommy
Of The Year award—complete hypocrisy, most especially from the
right wing Christian conservatives. It’s The Matrix—seeing what
we want to see. A woman who clearly has problems under her own
roof should not be running for high elected office any more than
a pastor whose wife is depressed, whose son is locked up and
whose daughter is knocked up should be pastoring a church. It’s
nonsense. It’s ridiculous. But there are, I assure you, people
reading these words who are allowing such men to lead them.
These people, and their pastors as well, are lost in The Matrix.
Matrix Music
We also worship the music “ministry,” which, in The Matrix
church, isn’t a ministry so much as a street gang: an ego-driven
band of thugs who knife each other as they grab at power and
cling to power by any means necessary. In the Matrix church, the
music “ministry” is, typically, the auxiliary that looks the
least like Christ. Like the Matrix church itself, it is usually
led by the best performer—regardless of his spiritual walk or
lack thereof.
The Matrix In
Black And White
I am not advocating, “be More White,” which is all many of my
black brothers and sisters hear when I try and discuss this. I
am, however, advocating more love. More love will bring us
closer to God and God closer to us, which will, in turn,
increase our faith. Faith will open our eyes and convict us of
stupid behavior—all that eye-rolling and teeth sucking. The Holy
Spirit will open our eyes to see how phony our worship
experience is, how egregiously antichrist our conduct is. We
will begin to see this world for what it is—
—and escape The Matrix.
Christopher J. Priest
18 January 2009
editor@praisenet.org
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