Lectionary Reflection for Transfiguration C on 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

THE GROWTH OF CONSUMER CHURCH

“People come to church to be happy!”

I was surprised to hear that these words had come from a staff member who had worked for the church for many years. She was responding to a challenging sermon preached by one of the ministers in the church where I served and was clearly upset by it. My immediate thought on hearing about her statement was, “We don’t come to church to be happy. We come to be changed.”

When I first began working as a Methodist minister, the church growth movement was just hitting its stride. Borrowing from corporate marketing wisdom, authors and conference speakers urged church leaders to identify their “target market” and the “felt needs” of those they wanted to reach. We were taught to split our communities up into their various demographic categories and provide worship experiences that were specifically targeted to each group. But what they didn’t tell us was that the more we treated our congregation members like customers, the more they would approach worship as consumers.

As mega-churches exploded, and their pastors were hailed as the model of church leadership, the Gospel morphed from a challenge to be changed to a promise of paradise which included both health, wealth, and happiness now, and eternal bliss after death. All that was needed to ensure a life of God-given happiness was to pray a simple “sinner’s prayer”. The only transformation that was required, was to make a mental shift and believe the concepts and doctrines of the church.

Yes, certain ‘sinful’ behaviours had to be renounced publicly (even if they were often retained in private) but essentially, once the prayer had been prayed and commitment to the church had been secured, faith development was ignored and even discouraged. Questions, spiritual experimentation, and explorations of alternative belief systems were all frowned upon. Worship became about “glorifying God”—particularly in well-produced, “culturally relevant” music. Christians no longer needed to repent, take up their crosses, and follow Jesus’ call to love. Rather those who claimed the name of Christ were to see themselves as special, chosen, and set apart from their “unsaved” neighbours. The primary act of faith was to preserve Christian privilege and resist—violently if needed—the onslaught of a “world” that was increasingly defined as permissive, deceived, and evil.

IT’S NOT ABOUT (JUST) HAPPINESS

If this is how we understand and experience faith, then it makes perfect sense to suggest that the purpose of going to church is to get an injection of happiness to carry us through the week. But there is nothing in the Bible to support this view of faith. For Jesus and the biblical writers, it was never about being happy. While contemporary translations use the word ‘happy’ in the Beatitudes (instead of the traditional ‘blessed’) Jesus clearly was not talking about feeling good—a personal, individual feeling of pleasure.¹ Rather, in the biblical sense, happiness is identified as the ongoing experience of “growth, integrity, and well-being (flourishing and contentment).”²

The Beatitudes are not a set of guidelines for attaining happiness, but a description of what true happiness or blessedness looks like in God’s reign. And the way into God’s reign, according to Jesus, is to repent (Mark 1:15)—to change our hearts and lives as the Common English Bible puts it. When faith becomes fixated on shallow, personal happiness, it resists anything that might cause discomfort, shame, or struggle. This means that self-examination, repentance, and transformation get thrown out and rigid adherence to the unchanging doctrines of an unchanging God becomes the order of the day. But such faith is neither biblical nor Christlike. If we take Jesus’ message and mission seriously, the fundamental purpose of all spirituality is to transform us.

TRANSFIGURATION

This Sunday in the Church Calendar celebrates the transfiguration of Jesus. Last week I wrote an article that explores the transfiguration event in detail, so I won’t repeat that here. Rather I will highlight just two aspects of Luke’s transfiguration narrative. The first is that the transfiguration was a significant turning point for Jesus and his disciples. This was the moment when Jesus set his sights on Jerusalem knowing that he would be executed. It was also the moment when the disciples began to recognise who Jesus was—when they saw the fullness of his divine glory. Secondly, the voice of God instructed the disciples to listen to Jesus, which means not just to hear his words, but to take note of what they saw, heard, and witnessed in Jesus and to learn from it for their own lives.