What Do You Want in a Church?

“Every day,” quipped Lenny Bruce. “people are straying from the church and going back to God.”

It was more than 50 years ago when the acerbic comedian made that observation, but there are indeed signs that “church-going” could become a thing of the past.

There are over 40 churches in Lakewood, but the great majority of Lakewood citizens—especially those between the ages of 18 and 35—are not there on Sunday morning. For many, church is a quaint but irrelevant anachronism to which you pay some homage on Christmas and Easter. Others, with a more bitter taste in their mouths, may think of church primarily as a place where you go to be reminded of your own personal wickedness and depravity. Still others may simply associate church with mornings of exquisite boredom, irrational beliefs and bad organ music.

Yet for many of us, church remains a bastion of community—not an “online” community, not a “virtual” community, but a real one that is one of the few remaining places where people gather intentionally to actually commune with each other: to pray, sing, worship, work, recreate, break bread together, serve others, study, think and meditate on matters of ultimate concern.

For Christians, of course, the charismatic life of Jesus of Nazareth is central: his heroic confrontation with authorities resulting in a brutal death and his transformation after death into a vital presence in the lives of his followers. Church is where we go to share a faith in the redemptive power of that life and to struggle with that faith and question it at times. In all these ways, we believe church is still, after 2000 years, a place that people can go to be transformed, and to be agents for the renewal and transformation of the world.

Led by our pastors, the members of Lakewood United Methodist Church (located at Summit and Detroit) have been thinking critically about how to make church more welcoming to everyone in our community. There is nothing especially sacred about church as we traditionally think of it: a building with stain-glass windows, pews lined up in straight rows, organ music and ancient hymns. And there are many in our community—singles, young couples, and families—from every strata and demographic who might welcome a new way to worship God.

Certainly all people—perhaps especially those who are not in church on Sunday—yearn to find a purpose beyond the daily round of working and partying, getting and spending, and would welcome a venue in which they could put their skills and passion in the service of something more than their own self-interest. We want church to have an impact on lives and to be a place where people can in turn have an impact on the community and the larger world. So in the coming months, we will be developing a new kind of church experience that we call “Impact.”

We ask you to seek us out at the upcoming Lakewood Arts Festival (where LUMC will have a booth) and we ask you to look for other special events related to “Impact” in the coming months. But this new worship experience is still very much a work in process and we want very keenly to know what people in the community—that is, you—think about it. We need to know what you want in church, and of equal importance, what you don’t want.

The struggle by Christians to define what is meant by church is not a new one. Two thousand years ago, James the brother of Jesus wrote a letter to one of the primitive Christian churches in Jerusalem scolding them for showing favoritism to the wealthy “pillars” of their society while shunning the poor and marginalized who walked through their doors. It seems the ever-human talent of turning any community into a club for “those of our kind,” is an old one. But in the Church we seek to create with “Impact,” there is no such thing as “our kind.”

If you seek a place to do justice, share kindness and love, and walk humbly with your God, you are one of us and we want to hear from you.So we invite you to write to us with answers to these three questions: Do you go to church? What needs do you have that a church could meet? What would be the ideal type of church?Send your answers to one or both of the following email addresses: lumcdm@earthlink.net or churchcomments@sbcglobal.net.