Donald Miller, perhaps best known for writing the book Blue Like Jazz, has stirred up the Evangelical internet this week with a blog post detailing why he rarely goes to church.
Let me say, I appreciate his honesty and enjoy his thinking, which is often out loud and causes worthwhile discussions. He provokes—and that’s what good writers do.
Miller writes that hearing sermons and singing songs is not how he connects with God. He says this causes church services to be difficult for him. He doesn’t go often because, he says, “It’s not how I learn.”
So how does Miller find intimacy with God? He continues:
The answer came to me recently and it was a freeing revelation. I connect with God by working. I literally feel an intimacy with God when I build my company. I know it sounds crazy, but I believe God gave me my mission and my team and I feel closest to him when I’ve got my hand on the plow.
A few years ago, I was at a similar place. I had been the interim pastor at a church of 9,000 members. I loved the church, the people were great, but I just showed up on Sunday and preached. I lacked community with them.
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Since I retired and am now crisscrossing the country in our RV, we attend a lot of different church services. I have to say most of them are awfully boring, poorly structured and lack passion in the preaching. So when we miss church, it’s no big deal for us.
The article is a reminder that the membership decline of the PCUSA is not just conservatives abandoning a liberal church. It is also members dying (median age of PCUSA members is 61; for US population, 37). And it is members who are sitting next to you in the pews one Sunday, but just decide to stay home the next Sunday, and the next. Many of those people simply decide they’d rather do something else on Sunday mornings: sleep in, or go bicycling, or drink coffee and work crossword puzzles, or go to brunch, or work in the yard. And there are one or two thousand more of those people every single week.