When the Church Can't Meet Your Needs

Let’s not talk about what a difficult year this has been. Instead, let’s recall how difficult life and choices often were before we hit pandemics and political issues. Our trials and challenges serve to amplify our discomfort and can be an impetus for personal change, and in that way, both the pandemic and the politics have been useful.

What if the church no longer meets your needs? For many Christians in America, this is a valid and timely question. You and I both know the variables that lead to believing the church can’t be what it needs to be anymore, so, in order to shed light on a path forward, I’ve identified four points on which to reflect.

Reflections for When the Church Can’t Meet Your Needs

1. Identify your needs.

   Are your perceived needs something that are truly needed for spiritual growth, health, clarity, or rest?

   It is an auspicious practice to identify and clarify what our actual needs may be. Keep in mind that what you may need in this season is potentially not a necessity for your spouse, children, or others with whom you are in a close relationship. If 30 years of marriage have taught me anything, it’s that my needs are rarely in sync with those in my close circle and that sometimes I extend myself for them and at other times, they have extended themselves for me.

2. Ask yourself honest questions.

   Are my perceived needs really just preferences or desires? For example, a basic human need is readily accessible and healthy food, while a preference or desire is grilled chicken and a chocolate shake.

   Can these needs be met by the people in your life? The people in your church? Our deep inner needs aren't met by people. God often uses people as a conduit to providing what we need, but people are not the ultimate provisioner. Are we expecting people to do what only God can?

   The truth is, Jesus Christ is the place to start. The gospel meets the felt need. God himself ultimately satisfies the longing. If we’re just missing what we have always had in our western churches (i.e., cultural church paradigms as opposed to worship however God provides it for us), then we’re really longing for grilled chicken and chocolate shakes, not readily accessible and healthy food.

3. Provide yourself with honest answers.

   So, of course, it follows that if I'm looking to my church to meet my needs, I will not get the answers to my questions. If I'm expecting Jesus to meet my needs instead, I will find a path to deep, lasting change and fulfillment. That line of thinking leads to perhaps a more complex conundrum with which we must wrestle: Do I believe that “my God shall supply all my needs according to his riches in glory?”

   The Philippian church was encouraged to understand that their way of doing church wasn’t the answer, their church people weren’t the answer, their orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and theology weren’t the answer. Only God—God alone—would meet their needs. Certainly, Paul knew this personally as he wrote his letter to that church from a prison cell.

4. Be pliable.

   What if God means to meet our needs in ways we never could have anticipated?

   If you've been a follower of Jesus Christ for any amount of significant time, you might assume I'm being ironic. Because it's true, isn't it? Just remove the question mark: God means to meet our needs in ways we never could have anticipated. And then go ask anyone who has ever had to “do church” in a way that doesn’t look like America.

   Pliability as it relates to church choices and life may mean you’re being led away from what you’ve always known to be church. And what if that change means you are about to find out what the fullness of following Jesus really looks like?

My story of church life and culture may be different from yours in setting, characters, arc, and plot. I did the math recently and realized that the church I’ve been a part of for the past decade is the 17th church I’ve been involved in over the course of my life. 17th! That exposure to many different church norms might be very different from your experience.

Still, there is some reason you have had to drop your expectations for church, and it can no longer meet your needs at this time. Christian, this is more than okay. It is acceptable and right and may be exactly what God has for you in this moment. Can you identify your real need and allow God to do his work?

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Why 2020 and 2021 Matter for You and the Rest of the World

Someone wise once told me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I bet someone wise once told you that, too. Therein lies the conundrum that has been my writing life in the year 2020: I just haven’t had a whole lot of anything nice to say.

That’s not the whole truth, though, because my brain houses more introductory paragraphs than I can reasonably catalog. The truth has more to do with the fact that what I have to say—nice or otherwise—seems insignificant. Boy, aren’t you just dying to hear what I have to say now?

For the most part, my observations of this year and this spiritual path and of life in general are being written by other, shinier authors. People with broader audiences and lovelier platforms. I actually began writing a new book several years ago that I was absolutely certain God had whispered in my ear only to have it rejected by my previous publisher. They probably knew then what I did not yet: a big-name gal with books in her wake debuted a big-name book on the exact same topic a few months after I submitted mine to the publishing house.

I wonder, then, in a world filled with platforms for the taking, why it matters what I have to say.

This is false, actually. This line of thinking that tells me my voice doesn’t matter because it only reaches a few who want to hear it is the product of a country and culture that produces industries that revere the words of some and ignore the words of others, simply because there is a bottom line to keep an eye on. And it’s false.

It’s false because some of the well-known people we listen to aren’t saying anything new. It’s false because we think they have more important things to say because they are attractive and trendy or loud and powerful. It’s false because it ignores the call that God has whispered into the ears of those who may only have one person who cares what they say. That one person matters, as does the passion and drive God has given to the author.

Turns out, I do have something nice to say, and maybe you’re the one who needs to hear it today. You matter. Your call, your passion, your skills, your strengths, your talents—it all matters.

History is stacked with the stories of those who lived and died in obscurity, only to have their works resurrected and revered for centuries well beyond their own lifetimes. We who love books and words would be bereft without the prose of Emily Dickinson, but of the nearly 1800 poems she wrote, fewer than a dozen were actually published during her lifetime. We can hardly say her writing didn’t matter.

Henry David Thoreau, Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe . . . their works were profound and larger than life, but they weren’t deemed significant enough to make a mark during their own lifetimes. Stories like these always make me pause and consider the weight of my own words. Who might stand to gain if I open my mouth or get the introductory paragraphs out of my brain and into the world?

Who might need to hear your words or music, your passion to help the disenfranchised, your soothing compassion, your comforting or innovative cooking, your brilliant brainstorming, your splashes of color and form?

What we are called to matters in years of despair and years of celebration. Maybe just one ear will hear our truths, but we cannot say that the one ear doesn’t matter.

Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. Matthew 10:31

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If I Did Not Have the Hope of Heaven, I Could Not Go On One More Day

The skeptic in me says, “Hope of heaven? Yeah, you hope.”

Last Sunday our son Nate and his wife Jayne canceled dinner with us because he had a migraine. Or maybe the flu.

On Monday he went to the doctor and was given migraine meds.

On Tuesday he went to urgent care, who told him to go straight to the ER. They did a CT and sent him home.

On Wednesday morning he returned to the ER. The doctor casually inquired, “So, how long have you had this tumor?”

On Wednesday afternoon he was flown to UC SanFrancisco with a definitive diagnosis of a brain tumor. He couldn’t see anymore. His vitals were so wonky, he was struggling to even keep his eyes open.

On Thursday his family filled the Neuro ICU and prayed and hoped and wished and cried.

On Friday he had surgery. They pulled that nasty tumor right through his nose.

On Saturday and Sunday he was cared for and given an eye patch and reminded how to stand up and walk, and on Monday—this afternoon—he was home.

We’re all feeling a little sucker-punched. We’ve got your standard panic attacks, stress eating, and anger. Everything hurts.

Hope of heaven.

Yeah. Because we’ve been this road once, twice, three, four times before already. It’s a bad family joke when you’re wondering which Fletcher kid is next.

We’ve weathered a deadly virus and permanent brain damage, a car accident in which I ran over a child, a ruptured appendix and sepsis, and crippling mental illness. And those are just our children. In the past three years, we’ve had our own cancer scare and tumor removal and wept for two precious family members fighting their particular cancer battles.

It’s rough, folks. I’m sick of sitting in ICU waiting rooms. I give up.

Hope of heaven.

I woke up one night in a hotel room in San Francisco last week and heard the words of a John Mark McMillan song we sing sometimes at church:

I could lay my head in Sheol
I could make my bed at the bottom of the darkness deep
Oh but there is not a place I could escape you
Your heart won't stop coming after me

I felt as if my head was lain in Sheol. In hell. I felt hopeless. That last line, though, is the truth of the gospel and the hope that flickers a tiny, tiny atom of light: His heart won’t stop coming after me.

I decide to rest there. It’s all I have.

Some days my theology is rock-solid but most days it isn’t. Most days I’m a skeptic and I question the Bible and I push the cute Christian sayings off the cliff and I cover my ears and chant, “LA LA LA LA LA!” I stamp my foot and put my hands on my hips and square off with God. And still, his heart won’t stop coming after me. His heart. I can sit here in my skepticism and still understand that he loves me.

It’s all I have, folks. The hope of heaven.

If we’re being honest, it’s all any of us have. We just have to ask him to help us believe it. If we can’t, then what hope is there?

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