Church like processed food?

I walked into a supermarket recently, having just finished a long run. I was heading home and in a rush to get out for another engagement later that day. So I grabbed a premade sandwich fajita wrap. I should have realised that anything that has is made with ‘fresh’ ingredients but has a shelf life longer than the existence of some small animals isn’t a good sign! But it looked wonderful and delightfully enticing, it was so well packaged, and, truth be told it actually tasted, initially, really good.

It wasn’t until later in the evening that I realised it hadn’t done much for me. My appetite was not satiated, my stomach felt a bit off and, as I discovered later despite the nutritional promises on the front, it actually had added very little to me and when I take into account what may have been unhelpfully added to it to make it last and taste good was probably a net loss to my body as a whole.

I am always trying to get pictures and images to hold up and show what things are like in our time and with the church the one I have landed on at the moment is a bit like a processed food meal.

I wonder if we as churches have become a bit processed…

Where we look attractive and fancy from the outside and the programmes and things we do are neatly packaged ready to be consumed effortlessly. We are very easy to grab off the shelf and come at quite a cheap price.

Some of this stuff is great, but if we look a bit deeper…

Are we all a bit cookie cut where one size fits no one? And perhaps it is possible despite all the packaging promising nutritious nourishment the reality is that what we consume is not that healthy and actually adds nothing to us. Are our senses being deadened to what our souls really need because we have been filled on a diet of processed food with little nutritional value but addictive hits that make us yearn for it more and more?

I began to think that as I was leading a church, though the things we did were nice, well presented and delivered well, they weren’t really offering much to people. And actually if we have the courage to step away from the momentary hit of sugars and additives we find there isn’t much substance to it all.

Where might there be the need for a return to gourmet food? Where labours of love and preparation are hall marks of what we do. Where we off deep care, but in the same way we don’t simply feed our kids whenever we want we have the guts to offer our congregations what they need too.

It made me ask today, what am I consuming? What is the diet of my soul? Simply things that placate and give me a hit, or things to chew on, think through and improve my diet?