Churches are not all the same (not sure why it took me so long to see).

Yesterday I had a chance for a long run. It was a bleak January day and none of my running partners were in town, so I had to go it alone. To spice things up I decided to take a route straight into the heart of the city and take pictures along the way. I love unique architecture, so I planned to snap pictures of churches as I went. At first I was thinking of just capturing those particularly unique structures like the Russian Orthodox Cathedral not far from my place or the Jewish Synagogue in Crown Heights. As I got started, I decided to go ahead and snap a pic of every house of worship I passed.  

It's important to note that I live in an historically low-income area, and the cost of living rises steadily with each neighborhood between our home and my destination, Lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center is. As I started snapping pictures of every church, I had to be quick because starting in my neighborhood and in the first several poorish neighborhoods I passed, there were more churches than I remembered.  Nearly every block has one actually.  They are barely noticeable because they are often in nondescript storefront lots you could easily miss except for their semi-legible, ostentatious names, like one I saw, “Holy Spirit Church of God in Jesus of the Apostolic Faith.” Somehow they managed to get the entire trinity and their denominational name all into the name of their congregation. 

As I made my way on to some trendy neighborhoods and across the Brooklyn Bridge, the shift in churches was striking. The little store front churches were gone.  Instead, there were museum quality cathedrals, and not just old buildings. I ran past the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox project that was just recently finished. With a price tag of $80 Million, it is a pristine structure that looks like it was made almost entirely of white marble. What a difference the price of real estate makes! Or is it the worshiping practices of the high income people living there? Other than the obvious architectural contrast between poor neighborhoods and rich, I noticed a shift in the theme too.  Those low-budget ghetto churches had words like hope, deliverance, faith and grace placed prominently in their name or their tag line. The cathedrals in Manhattan were much more austere and the overall message seemed different.  The low-budget churches spoke of a much-needed Deliverer.  The churches in Manhattan look more like monuments, symbols of the culture, ethnicity, or social class that built them. Outside one cathedral, I saw a description of their core values that sounded a lot like the core values of that culture. Nice stuff, just not divine stuff.   

Is there a parallel in our lives?  Is our religion essentially a monument of our cultural identity? Is it the label we have given ourselves, the script we wrote to tell our story in a noble light?  Could it be that the script of the Bible is a bit different?  Maybe the Bible is about our need for grace, our need for divine intervention, rather than a virtual trophy case for the achievements of our culture. 

I am not sure why this disparity within the religion of Christianity bothers me so much. It is not new. Jesus encountered it as much as anyone. It was the deeply religious people of God who were His fiercest crtics. Maybe Fredrick Douglas was just seeing what Jesus saw.

“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of “stealing the livery of the court of heaven to, serve the devil in.”

Maybe I am being harsh, but I do think we do well to pause once in a while and take Jesus warning to heart, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 7:21)