What Not Going to Church Taught Me About Church
This is a guest post from Ryan Johnston. Interested in contributing your voice to BeDeviant.com? Check out the details here.
“Unconform.” You’re right, it’s not a word…..yet.
Usually, the word should be nonconformity, but in the church it is the rare case that there is nonconformity. If anything, we have conformity.
Which is why we need to unconform.
The church seems to be all about conformity
- You can only go to church on a certain day, at a certain time.
- You have to worship God in a church-nowhere else.
- We’ll sing certain songs, the service will go in a certain order, and you better not mess up the order or God won’t love you anymore.
- You have to begin and end at a certain time, if you’re outside those boundaries then God won’t be present.
- I hope you’re dressed up, because God won’t accept those wearing t-shirts, shorts, flip-flops, or anything else that doesn’t conform to the dress code. And don’t ask what the dress code is, you’re just supposed to know.
Well, that sums up most churches I’ve been to anyway. And, I have to admit, it’s hard to not think that way when you’ve done it your whole life.
Is Church About Sunday Mornings or is it About Life Transformation?
Within the last year, my wife and I have started a fellowship group/house church (whatever you prefer to call it). At first, it was hard to do both the group and regular church-we all have kids and different schedules to work around. But, I’ve felt more and more at home in the house church than in regular church.
I used to think that I’d never not be in church on Sunday mornings. Now, I feel like I’d much rather be with those in our house church, mostly because I don’t feel like a robot and can simply be myself. And we’ve often met, God have mercy on us, on Sunday mornings (gasp!) because that’s when it worked best for all of us. Now, we’re slowly moving away from going to church at all and instead being the church.
Instead, we’ve realized that we’ve grown more in a few months with our house church, than we did in years in regular church. We have deeper relationships with people outside the church than we do with people we’ve been in regular church with. We’ve all realized that our children’s spiritual lives are our responsibility, not the Sunday School teacher’s.  Real change seems to be happening in peoples’ lives even though we’re not within the church walls.
And I’ve realized that we’ve been able to experience God deeply despite the fact that we’re not doing things the “prescribed†way. I’ve learned that, perhaps, we need to unconform ourselves so that we might be able to see things that were invisible to us when we conformed. Maybe God intends for us all to start unconforming ourselves. Shaking off the conformity that has been getting in the way, and instead pushing ourselves out of the mold we, and the church, have been put in.
Or, maybe it’s that God has been trying to pull us out of that mold that we made for ourselves. Maybe he’s the one unconforming us.
