Do Christians Live an Extremely Dull and Boring Life?

I was driving home from work on a Friday afternoon. I had collected some bread and cakes from the bakers shop and delivered them to the local Salvation Army. As I drove the car through Sheffield City Centre, I recalled a conversation I had had in the school classroom 40 years before. My friend had been talking about going to church. I went to church more often than he did. Did I not think that I lived an extremely dull and boring life? I imagined saying to my friend, what do you do with your life, what do you do that is so exciting thst this seems boring by comparison?

What makes church boring for so many people? It's easy to associate Christianity with the negatives. I remember one church I attended as a student where every sermon was about the evils of smoking and drinking. People know what the church is against, they don't always understand what it's for. Sometimes it's easier for the church to give people some strict rules to live by than it is to lead them into a more balanced Christian maturity. Christianity is not just a religion of confessing your sins to God, asking for forgiveness, and then trying hard not to walk on the cracks between the paving stones. It's a renewed mind and a transformed life. The Bible says we will not remain like the people around us in the world but we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can understand God's will and offer ourselves in service to God. Romans 12:1,2. We need to be born again of the Spirit of God. John 3:1-8.

One other reason that church is boring is that you are learning about something that you have never actually experienced. When I was at school we learned to read music by memorising musical scales. We did not play any musical instruments. I failed the exam completely. When I was older, I learned to read music by playing the electronic keyboard. This was a useful thing. I could look at the music from a hymn I'd sung in the city hall 20 years ago and play a tune I couldn't remember. To understand musical notes, you need to hear them. You need to play them on a musical instrument. It is even better if you are playing music you really enjoy. A musician needs to find their own personal soul music. I always found it easier to play rock music on an old acoustic guitar than to play chords. The rock music I listened to when I was a teenager is my soul music. So you need God's Holy Spirit to be in your heart and soul before you can really worship God in church.

How boring is church, even for a believer? I enjoyed going to Church of England mass, especially at the church in Jarrow which is on the ruins of the Venerable Bede's ancient monastery, but preferred to go once a month as the service is word for word the same. It is boring if you recite the same prayers every week. The modern evangelical church has a service which consists of hymns and sermon. As the I Think Biblically YouTube channel pointed out, the experience of a modern church service is the same as watching it on television. If the main thing that draws people into a church is an interesting preacher, the church has an existential problem. The number of sermons available to watch online is considerably greater than it was 20 years ago. The quality of the sermons is improving. Some church websites are equivalent to an American Bible college where you pay thousands of pounds to watch 20 videos on each of 20 subjects. The covid lockdown reminded the church of technology it didn't know it had. The American preacher Greg Fritz is what the Americans call a Bible conference speaker. He has never been a church pastor but makes a living by preaching at big conference meetings where thousands of Christians gather. He said that churches weren't holding these big meetings anymore - speaking several years after the covid crisis - but that record numbers of people were visiting his website.

I have been a Christian for 40 years. The church is about half the size it was 40 years ago. Looking at the sizes of our congregations and the ages of the people in them, the next 40 years will be even worse. Churches will be forced to sack their pastors and sell their buildings - most churches will. It is simply a matter of finance. This will lead to a house church movement and a church more like it was in Biblical times. A small group allows people to be more involved in praying for each other, in making friends with each other and in taking turns to lead a Bible discussion group. This is a much less passive experience than sitting in your seat listening to a sermon and joining in with a hymn. Some Christians in ordinary churches can be very friendly but it's difficult to be friendly when we're all expected to be sat quietly listening to someone at the front. Some Christians want to participate but it's difficult to do any more than join in with the hymns if you have a conference hall full of thousands of people, a preacher, a worship team and a telephone number people ring if they want prayer. Some Christians are naturally friendly and servant hearted but are frustrated by a system that seems to make it almost impossible to befriend or help anyone. Others become consumers. An American pastor of a rapidly growing church, Alan Hirst, felt that he had created the ultimate consumer product and that people who left his  church had difficulty settling anywhere else. He later founded an organisation that tried to restore church to its original meaning. 

What does the Bible say about church? The early church was very personal and very interactive. Speaking to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Ephesians 5:18-21. At that time there were no hymn books. Spiritual songs would have to be made up, what some Christians call singing in the Spirit. They must have shared very personal words from God that would build up the people around them. Each person discovers their own ministry, whether they are a Bible teacher or a church elder. Speaking the truth, we build one another up. We become mature Christians. Ephesians 4:11-16. American pastor Tom Wadsworth was trying to find people in his church who could be church elders. This was very difficult. They had sat passively listening to sermons for 20 years and never grown as Christians.

We have made communion services mysterious. In Biblical times, communion was an ordinary meal. It was more like a church pot luck or a bring and share tea. Bread and wine were ordinary food. We've got little wafers and little plastic cups. It would be like Jesus bringing the disciples a big bag of chips and saying, 'Take and eat, this is my body. As the potatoes were chopped up and fried for you, so my body will be chopped up and fried for you.' He would then take some tomato sauce and they would pour it on to the chips. 'As the tomato sauce is poured out for you, so my blood is poured out for you.' To some Christians this would seem heretical but it's far closer to how the last supper happened than a modern communion service. The verses, 'For I received from the Lord what I passed on to you, that on the night that he was betrayed Jesus broke the bread and gave thanks' are often repeated in a church communion service without considering the context of the passage, that if one got drunk and one had nothing to eat, they were obviously having a meal together, or the cultural context, that bread and wine were ordinary food. (1Corinthians 11:17-34.)