Finding Church:
What If There Really Is Something More?
By Wayne Jacobsen
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
Wayne Jacobsen is an ordained minister who gave up organized church in favor of informal networks and conversations with Christian people he knows around the world. Along the way, he helped design and publish the blockbuster book The Shack (and describes in this current book the implosion of the close-knit team that collaborated on that success); and a few years later was terminated from his position as a congregational minister. Such bad experiences would push anybody to reconsider their life work!
This book is, frankly, a sustained attack on the organized congregation so familiar to many of us. We all know the problems of church life, and if you don’t, this book will remind you: ritual and routine, power and politics, more gossip than gospel, and the tapping down of renewal movements that call into question the way things are done in the church.
Yes, we all know this litany, and we all have asked the question Jacobsen uses for the subtitle of the book: isn’t there more to the Christian life than this? We think so, and occasionally we catch a glimpse of it—which leaves us wanting more.
But this “longing for more” is common to many institutions of modern society: marriage, for instance, and education and politics. Each of these and many more organized operations undermine our ideals with the realities of human activity. We pursue education and learning but know by experience that colleges and universities can be hard and hostile environments, full of petty grievances and turf battles. People want to love and be loved, but half of us who pour these hopes into the institution called marriage end up opting out—divorcing, calling it quits because the institution that purports to protect and sustain human love is forced to deal with the things that make it all so difficult, namely, us!!
We humans are the problem everywhere: we pursue self-interest; we lie, cheat, and steal; we make mistakes and blame others; we want attention and ignore others; we spend foolishly and speak rashly; the worst of who we are emerges just when we need the best. These are the things that compromise marriage, and church, and university, and indeed, human infrastructure everywhere. There are times we want to blow up political parties and civic groups and non-profits of every description.
Yes, we all know the problems.
But I am not sure Jacobsen has a solution. He proposes events rather than meetings, social gatherings to services of worship, informality to formality, spontaneity to structure, and personality to protocols. He thinks this type of on-the-fly fellowship will produce good people and righteous communities.
Actually, he writes very sparingly about communities: small towns and large cities, nations and states, world affairs. He seems oblivious to the role of human institutions, including congregations, is cultivating friendships, social norms, and organized efforts to right some wrongs and do justice. He never mentions the role of churches, synagogues, and mosques in organizing people for a common good: cleaning up after a hurricane, welcoming displaced refugees, or marching to repeal an unrighteous law.
Yes, I get tired of the same old stuff Sunday after Sunday…and I am the one who prepares it and leads it. I am sure I speak for many who long for more, who wish for something different, something deeper, something that diverts us from the routines that become so easy and too often so empty.
Jacobsen gives us no evidence that his version of church—the informal, unstructured, make-it-up-as-we-go strategy will work. Yes, his personality (probably a Myers-Briggs ENFP!) can make it flourish where he is and where he goes. But he offers nothing but anecdotes to make his case: no statistics whatsoever and no example of how his version of church life has survived generation to generation, culture to culture, century to century.
There is a reason for this: there is no evidence, no example, no illustration of how this might work…because it doesn’t work. Institutions emerge and flourish because they have demonstrated an amazing ability to carry us through time, across oceans, and over generations. Yes, organized, established churches have problems, but the solution Jacobsen offers is no solution at all. It is an attractive and occasional episode in the Christian journey—and we all need that from time to time—but it is not the lasting solution to our search for “something more”!!
Yes, I have amazing networks of fabulous and faithful people, and my occasional interaction with them does my soul good and keeps me on the right path. But I still get up each Sunday, unlock the church doors, straighten the chairs, distribute bulletins, and announce the opening hymn, looking out at people I have grown to love even knowing they are almost as hard to get along with as I am. Thanks be to God!!
