Jesus Watches Your Church Ad

Michael Spencer May 5th, 2008

Ever have a mystical experience? Mystical experiences aren’t exactly my strong point, but the Spirit has managed to get a few past my defenses over the years.

Once I was staying in the hospital with my mom. Mom was 82 and had just had a serious stroke. I stayed in the room with her for a week because she was really a mess, and as far as family went, I was it.

It was in the early hours of the morning, and mom had been awake, fighting the nurses, talking out of her head and refusing to sleep or cooperate at all. She didn’t realize what was going on, of course. Months later she wouldn’t believe me when I told her about nights like that.

So there is my 82 year old, sick, delirious, difficult mom, and on the television in the room there comes an ad for a generic megachurch.

Now generic megachurches are a hobby of mine, so I paid attention.The problem was the sound was down, and I couldn’t hear the narration. All I could do was look at the images that generic megachurch was putting out there in their ad.

There were lots of shiny, happy, healthy, smiling young people and couples, with their shiny, happy, smiling children, leading their smiley, happy suburban lives, all enhanced by their happy, exciting participation in the weekly services at generic megachurch.

Even the senior adults in generic megachurch’s ad were kind of shiney, happy and healthy, seventy going on forty sort of senior adults.

I looked over at mom: disheveled, distraught, pitiful. Not a pretty picture. Completely messed up at the moment and needing help to get through the night.

I looked at generic megachurch’s “people:” perfect.

Mystical experience arrived. Jesus- who seems to not need the volume control on the television- interrupted the program and engaged me in conversation.

“Michael, are you watching this little show?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Good. Which is more like the church: the ad or your mom?”

“Is this essay or multiple choice?”

“Essay.”

“I’d say that the church would like to think it’s like the shiny, happy people in the ad. That’s typical of what most of the church wants to say to the world: Come to our church and your life will be great like this ad.”

“Exactly. to be honest, those images of the shiny happy people make me want to vomit. They aren’t really human. They are what humans want to believe they are really like. The rich young ruler is a good example. He wanted the great life now and for God to make it even better with eternal life. When I told him that his disease of mammon addiction was desperate and needed the radical cure of following me, he walked away. That’s exactly what these success images would do if they were real people and I confronted them with going to the poor, the ugly and the undesirable.”

“You know, Jesus, when we miss it, we don’t just miss it by an inch do we? We go for a mile or more.”

“Most of the time. I think if you read my messages to the church in Revelation 2-3 (translation of your choice, but I use the original greek), you’d see that the church thinks it looks like those images of health and success, but with my super-real super-truth vision, I can see that the success and beauty obsessed church is really much like your mom there: pathetic, sick and needing me to care for her every need.”

“We just don’t want to admit that we always need you completely. We never get to the point where you’re just the icing on the cake. You’re always the doctor, the medicine and the cure that requires someone to die for us. You, of course. We want to be happy and well, but we’re always sick and pathetic.”

“You’re getting it, Michael. That’s why the church should be a place for the old and the ugly, the fat and the forgotten, the overlooked and the obscure. The sinful and the just plain confused. The church isn’t a modeling agency. It’s a hospital for very sick people. The difference between the hospital and the country club is what we’ve got here. If you’ll pay attention.”

Mystical experience over.

That one has stayed with me. We want to believe we’re one thing, and we are quite another. We want shiny happy pastors, pictures, people and programs. What we need to do is say, “We’re all the prodigal. In the mud, on his needs, in his pathetic condition, and the God of Jesus always shows us the God who runs out to meet us and love us as the messes that we are.”

Even when we’re at the party, and we’ve cleaned up a bit, we’re still the prodigal. We’re still mom. We’re never the lies and illusions we want to believe.

Our beauty is in the eye of the eternal beholder, and always will be.

Michael Spencer is the popular blogger, podcaster, and self-described post-evangelical also known as, The Internet Monk. Don't miss his next appearance on Steve Brown Etc. this Friday as we discuss, how gays and lesbians hear evangelicals.

Michael has been blogging since 2000. He has a master's degree in Theology, is currently a campus minister living in a Christian community in southeastern Kentucky, and has been a teacher in churches and schools for more than 30 years.

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