By Augustus Henry (PhD.)
Thomas Rainer wrote that a country club is a place of exclusion, where people with predetermined status are welcomed, separating them from the rest of society. To join in some cases, the prospective member must be inducted by an existing member and or must meet a preset status. The sporting, entertainment and recreational activities are perks and benefits those members enjoy but are privileges other members of the community can only imagine.
In those places, members believe that the club is here to serve me and cater for my pleasure and leisure. They say, I pay the dues, so I decide what happens here. I am a well-established member in this community and have influence with what happens here. I am here to be served, not to serve.
Tragically, Rainer was not referring to a country club when he wrote that. He was referring to The Church. This is what transpires when members turn the purpose of church on its head.
There are two fallacies that manufacture the church into a country club:
1, Looking for a church where my needs will be met before anything else.
Jesus said, for even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). The bible also said, …he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness (Philippians 2:7).
The Greek definition of service or servant: [You] promote, benefit, or be useful or beneficial to [another].
Still, to understand the full magnitude of Jesus’s descent into servitude, we have to consider his status at the announcement of his birth.
Matt. 1: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). Matthew 2: Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” He was so exalted that God did not use earthly objects to announce his birth. It means that if his birth was published today, angels would be posted in his video feed on Facebook, and the picture of his star would be posted on Instagram. The Bible says that he placed himself lower than angels, and yet, we as sinful human beings seek to be first in church. The creator and owner of the cattle on a thousand hills, became first and foremost a servant, but some of us who own a Toyota Camry, $700 bank account, a house owned by the bank, believe we are first among the saints in God’s house.
However we may feel, we have been saved to serve. The greatest among you shall be your servant, Jesus said. In today’s church, we expect to receive instead of give. We expect to have rights instead of responsibilities. We require entitlements over sacrifice. We see our tithe as membership dues, for which we expect a return, and not a charitable unconditional gift to God. The reason why the church is often transformed into clubhouse mode, is because everybody there is better than everybody else.
2, Everyone else is a hypocrite, not me.
We can always find a sin in somebody else that is worse than our own.
I knew a church sister who thought she owned the church. She always touted her thirty years of membership. She influenced the choice of pastor for that congregation. When she complained about the length of the pastor’s sermon, he shortened it. She once said that a particular pastor was “too country for a down-town church.” But would you know it, the whole time, she had two children out-of-wedlock, sleeping around with multiple different men, and enticing some of the young men of the church into the snares of her bed. But, she was better than everyone else in church.
If you ask most people, both those who avoid church and those who are churched, what group of people are the biggest obstacles in church, they would point to hypocrites.
Here is the thing: which one of us is not or have not been a hypocrite? If you are not one today, could you have been one in the past? The reason I believe that most people dislike hypocrites, is because when they look in the mirror, that is who they see.
I gave a homeless person a ride this week. After I dropped him off, I immediately thought that he had given me Covid. So, I lowered all my windows, sanitized my car in order to get rid of the contamination that he left in my car. But as I thought about it, I realized that this man is on the street by himself and is less likely to contract the virus than I who had interacted with 1300 students, plus 100 staff members that very day. Somehow, the hypocrite in me showed up even when I was trying to do something good.
The clubhouse mentality must remain in the clubhouse. If you ever listen to well-off people talking about each other, it would be amazing the things you will hear. They denigrate, insult or belittle each other behind their backs while smiling in their face. That is often what occurs in country clubs. The question is what would you hear when you listen to church members talk about each other?
In conclusion, the bible records a story about Jesus’s rescue of a prostitute. In a culture where the act of prostitution incurred a gruesome death penalty – stoning the culprit to death, Jesus defended that harlot from what she was about to face. The people who brought her to him were the well-esteemed religious and business officials. In Jesus’s response, he invited anyone in the prestigious crowd to cast the first stone. But they all disappeared without pelting a single pebble. The inference here is that none in that crowd was above reproach.
That anecdote connects both fallacies mentioned in this sermon: the people who thought themselves to be first in the society were the same ones with hidden sin.
I challenged you today to find the most sinful person you know and imagine a way to serve that individual. If that individual is not you, then stone him!
Who among you is without sin? Cast the first stone.