why the church doesn’t look like good news
ledger Christianity, guilty consciences, and the wonder of grace
Our world mostly operates according to the logic of measurement, comparison and competition. At work, we strive to get ahead, advance our careers, find the next challenge or position. At home, siblings contend for parental affection and spouses assert their needs over against one another. As the public square shrinks to the screen in our pockets, influencers vie for eyeballs; advertisers mine our browsing histories; memes and clickbait incessantly distract.
In this cultural environment, it’s hard to find a place to simply be: to be ourselves, to be accepted, to belong without needing to prove our credentials.
In my experience, much of the American church falls right into the competitive, market-driven way of being in the world. And many people I know in church have been deeply shaped by the need to prove themselves and demonstrate their value—to peers, to spiritual leaders, to God.
Throughout my years in ministry, I’ve encountered an almost incessant stream of people who have been formed by both these broader cultural forces, and a church that seems to reinforce them.
As a result, people walk through life with burdened consciences, joyless and anxious before God and others. That turns church into a place that is safe only for those who have cleaned up their act enough to get others’ approval. In other words, it keeps the church from resembling the good news we proclaim.
And that makes us look like a bunch of hypocrites.
ledger Christianity
This is one factor that contributes to what I’ll call “ledger Christianity.” Ledger Christianity is the idea that God is looking down on us from heaven, making meticulous records of all our actions, deeds, words, and thoughts, and calculating to see whether or not we measure up. Good deeds put us in the “black” or positive side of the divine account book; bad deeds put us in the “red” or on the negative side.
The Good Place very effectively illustrated this idea. The angelic/demonic Michael (Ted Danson) explains to recently deceased humans that they have arrived where they are (secular heaven?) because they did so many good things. Those good things were assigned a point value (tallied by the accounting department), and if the positive outweighs the negative, you end up in the Good Place. If, on the other hand, you get too many negative points, you go to the Bad Place where people are tortured forever.
You may not believe The Good Place is the way heaven and hell works. You can be a Christian who professes to believe in the goodness of God and His grace in Christ, but still live as though you were trying to accumulate afterlife points. Your confessional faith may say you are saved by grace through faith in Christ. But functionally, you deal with feelings of inadequacy, guilt and shame.
Before we beat ourselves up too much, it’s important to recognize the deeply human nature of this response to God. It takes time, grace, and the help of others in loving community to unlearn these ingrained habits. We are hard-wired to live according to the ledger. It even occurs in spiritual masters like Brother Lawrence.
living under God’s smile
As he was starting out in his spiritual life as a monk, Brother Lawrence “believed that in order to be saved, he would have to be punished.” He lived in 17th century France, a tumultuous time in which wars of religion were being fought across Europe. Neighbors were massacring each other simply because they were on the wrong side of the Protestant/Catholic divide. In that environment, where the most religious/spiritual people were wielding arms against one another over doctrinal differences, Brother Lawrence looked at his own imperfections and inadequacies and expected punishment where God was concerned.
But that’s not the way God dealt with him. As he pursued fellowship with God, Brother Lawrence didn’t experience divine wrath, punishment or disapproval. “[R]ather than punishing him, God gave him nothing but wholehearted satisfaction.” In fact, “his Christian walk had thus far been so pleasant and not filled with suffering as he had anticipated.” He even goes on to say that, “if we are truly devoted to doing God’s will, pain and pleasure won’t make any difference to us.”
I don’t know about you, but pain and pleasure do tend to make a difference to me. However, the good news of the gospel is that they don’t have to. Christ came to redeem, to set us free from slavery to sin and death and even the ups and downs of life in this world.
In Christ, we live not under the punishment or harshly critical gaze of the God of the Ledger. Rather, in Christ, we live under the smile of the Father. That is good news.
People may not believe that God is looking to punish them. But the traumas they’ve suffered and the ledger they live under make them slow to trust; reticent to be open; difficult to love.
In order to be agents of good news, we need to slow down, content ourselves with the small things, and be faithful. We need to slow down long enough to realize we don’t live under a ledger, but under the smile of God the Father. We need to stop busying ourselves with endless activity and receive the “wholehearted satisfaction” Brother Lawrence speaks of—a satisfaction that comes from loving and being known by God in Christ.
not knowing, but being known
We spend a lot of time knowing things in the Western Church (more on that here). To us, St. Paul says, “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Cor. 8:2). But that’s not all he says. He doesn’t just tell us we’re wrong, that we’re on the wrong side of the “ledger.” He goes on to invite us into the wonder of God’s grace: “But if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (1 Cor. 8:3).
Our knowledge of God isn’t nearly as important as His knowledge of us. Our knowledge is always partial; His is complete and total. Ours is imperfect and tainted by loss and the ledger; God’s knowledge of us is shot through with His love and delight in us.
One reason I am grateful for the sacramental tradition in Christianity is the way it makes me slow down, live in my body, and tangibly receive God’s grace through physical means. It reminds me that my life with God is not about my knowledge of Him. It’s about His knowledge of me. He knows me and scoops me up by grace into His very Being that IS love—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It’s hard to think my way toward believing God is smiling upon me; it doesn’t work terribly well. But when I receive Christ sacramentally in the bread and wine—when I touch His broken Body and taste His shed blood for me—I take His grace tangibly into myself. I am reminded that I am fully known and loved. And that stirs up in my heart a love for the God who first loved me.
What about you? Have you experienced ledger Christianity in your life? What has that done for/to you? I’d love to hear from you!
Thank you Jeff for these postings. So much to chew on. I’ve recently been thinking of how much emphasis we modern Christians place on church growth and making the attendance numbers a metric of a successful church. As I was reading your post I just realized that it’s driven so much by our “competitive market driven mentality” and how toxic this can be to a church. Thank you for sharing!!