We are not a mega-church

Prompted by reading a newspaper article on how “church is cool”…

We are not a mega-church. In fact, yesterday there were probably less than a dozen of us at Liturgy. Of course, if one includes the angels and saints who are present at every Liturgy, then “mega” becomes a definite understatement.

We do not “move with the times.” In fact, we are pretty insistent about guarding “the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.” Yes, some peripheral things do change over time (i.e. centuries), but we tend to agree with whoever it was who said that whoever marries the spirit of the age will soon be widowed.

We are not “seeker-friendly.” Yes, we do welcome seekers – and we are all seekers. But we welcome them with an invitation to stand through long services, to fast, to confess their sins, to repent. To put aside their own ideas and to learn the way of humility. We tend to resonate with Saint Benedict when he said that candidates should be tested to see whether they truly seek God, for we are aware that what we all-too-often seek is not God but the propping up of our own egos and that what we need is not entertainment but the purification of our hearts.

We do not do power-point. We worship with our bodies. We sing with our voices and not with accompaniment, we feel hunger – as I said, we fast -, we smell and see incense, we light candles, we recite prayers, we prostrate, we kiss. We kiss the Book of the Gospels, the Cross, the priest’s hand, and one another. And we kiss icons which are in a sense also “one another” – the presence of the Lord, the Mother of God and the saints among us. And you cannot, you absolutely cannot, kiss a power point screen.

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David Dickens Says:

February 6, 2012 at 5:52 pm

Yes. As they say, “more of this.”

Fr. David Abernethy, C.O. Says:

February 6, 2012 at 7:54 pm

Dear Macrina,

This is a bit edgy for you; not that I take umbrage with anything you wrote but there must have been something about that article beside the obvious trite title that set you off. It would be interesting to see a link to the article to which you are responding.

Macrina Walker Says:

February 7, 2012 at 2:21 pm
Thank you for the gentle rebuke, Father David – or, if not a rebuke, at least a query…

The article is here but it is in Afrikaans (and, rather strangely, the photo is very different from the printed version). It was not a bad article as such, in fact it was actually quite a sympathetic report of a religious phenomenon, and sympathetic religious reporting is becoming increasingly rare around here. My reaction was not so much to the report as to the phenomenon which I seem to have been encountering increasingly recently. (Although I was rather surprised to discover that the Dutch Reformed Churches here, or at least some of them, are all into mega-churches). And I suppose that I was reacting out of that frustration, perhaps unwisely. There are serious issues involved that I have thought of writing on, but never seem to get to, but this was decidedly unpolished and written out of frustration.

It was also, perhaps interestingly, the first time I ever posted anything from my cell-phone – partly because I wanted to try and see if that worked and partly because I was thinking these thoughts but knew that I wouldn’t get to doing a “proper post” on the computer. I mention that because I have been thinking recently about the differences between blogging and Facebook, having ventured rather tentatively onto Facebook but becoming rather hesitant about it despite some real benefits. I said recently that whereas blogging can be a valuable spiritual discipline, Facebook lends itself too easily to dissipation and rash reactions. And thinking about your question, I realise that that is what I was doing with this post as well, and that perhaps sending it from my phone was not entirely unrelated to that. Of course there are all sorts of issues around social media here, but I should probably have been paying more attention to guarding my thoughts, or, failing that, to guarding my blog from negativity.

Having said that, I would sometimes just like to rant, and my reasons for abstaining from doing so are not always that pure. I am a sinner and very far from hesychia….