Church Fatigue, Part 1

Have you ever felt like you were experiencing church fatigue? Same old stuff, week in and week out. As you start to feel weary of going to church and even begin to think of other things to do on Sundays, you get that feeling inside, “Oh no, I am beginning to backslide!”  But are you really?

Jennifer Tylor captures the inner struggle we face when we begin to experience “church fatigue.”   Read her words carefully. Do you find yourself in her experience?

I have a confession to make. 

I’m tired of going to church.

After 34 years of weekly attendance I’m bored, bored with long sermons and the two uptempo/one slow song liturgy of our megachurch worship. I’m bored with gymnatoriums and rambling communion meditations and the tasteless cardboard bread pellets that follow. I’m bored with announcement times for ladies luncheons and small groups and choir sign-ups. I’m bored with the same cliched phrases in the same spoken prayers offered at the same routine times.

I’m bored.

I know all the reasons to attend church services. But honestly, most Sundays at noon I think about other ways I could have spent the morning. Reading the New York Times with a pot of coffee, or hiking through the woods, or enjoying restorative sleep, or putzing around my kitchen trying a new recipe—these all seem more fun, productive, and restful than spending several hours at church.

It’s not about being entertained. As Brett McCracken wrote in his great Wall Street Journal article last week, 70% of adults 18-22 aren’t leaving church because it’s not “cool” enough.

“As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don’t want cool as much as we want real,” he writes. “If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it’s easy or trendy or popular. It’s because Jesus himself is appealing and what he says rings true.”

So I’m not looking for a slicker sermon series or a faux-hawked worship leader or designer coffee in the back lobby. And for those of you who are my parents (hi guys!), I’m not pulling an Anne Rice and rejecting the Church universal or leaving the faith. I’m not even having a crisis of faith.

I’m just bored.

Because I also believe you make a commitment to one local church and invest in community with those believers long-term, I’m not going to start shopping for a new church. Besides, all those churches would also have long sermons and rambling prayers and worship leaders in skinny jeans. That’s the problem.

I also believe the writer of Hebrews was wise when he cautioned, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another.” I just don’t find weekly church attendance that encouraging anymore. In addition to its predictability, I have plenty of friends who also attend church each weekend and then get drunk, live with their boyfriends, or swear the air blue. In the south, church attendance is traditional. It is a habit, and one that doesn’t in itself produce life change.

So I’m sincerely unsure of the solution. Church, with two songs/greeting/awkward handshakes/one song/communion/offering/sermon/two songs/dismissal, is how our culture does Christianity. And I’m ready for something else.

Jennifer Is Not Alone

What Jennifer is describing is church fatigue. You and I will be surprised as to how many others feel the same way. We’re simply bored with the status quo.  It is as if each service contains very little thought put it into it. Very little thought and very little prayer.  There is a restlessness because of the predictability, the traditions and the liturgical routines. 

You look around and most of the people are there, but are not there. They sit, stand, sing, with little to no emotions, almost robotic. There seems to be a lack of righteousness and real change taking place in those who attend Sunday services. This is because the Sunday services are not designed to change anyone. It is designed to hold you there – captive if you will, only to release you while they tally up the numbers and submit them to the denominational headquarters.  

Church services seem to be more concerned with images than with real authenticity. I am certain that the people there are like me – craving for something more dynamic, more real and effective. We want to see, hear and experience JESUS!  He is anything but boring and routine.  But all we get are the same old kinds of trappings that create within us “church fatigue.”

Of course, people will say that we are nothing more than whinny victims of our consumer culture. And of course, who has never heard the old line that, “No church is perfect,” so the idea is that we ought to plough on regardless of the way we feel.

But seriously, Jennifer is speaking on behalf of many, many voices and hearts that’s becoming a growing minority.  There is this growing feeling that we are missing out on something valuable and needful from our church experience. The people in the church are getting restless and no one in leadership seems to notice or care.

End of Part 1