Busyness is booming. People are busy everywhere you look, even on your computer screen. Instead of time-saving devices, we want gadgets that do more and more right alongside us. Busyness has become business as usual, if not business itself. Family is left first thing in the morning, and individuals pursue interests and activities of their own as their chance to be balanced and accomplished. Businesses encourage busyness as a sign of progress and success.
What may be surprising is the extent to which churches have jumped onto the busy bandwagon. A variety of Bible studies, social activities, meetings, outreach, and other congregational activities can take over your calendar. What does their busyness mean? What does it say when a full weekly calendar becomes a primary focus within a congregation? Does it raise theological concerns?
Timeless
Historically, church has been a timeless place. In worshiping the eternal God, prayers were offered up morning and evening’sometimes hourly!’in the sanctuary and with every meal in the home. Infants grew into adulthood repeating the same psalms, hearing the same readings, and receiving the ageless gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation through God's holy word and his holy gifts, the sacraments. But times have changed. Just as activities often keep families outside the home, small groups, progressive dinners, and off-site programming take church-goers away from the sanctuary.
Congregations are moving toward divisions rather than family unity. Bible studies are increasingly divided by age, interest, and sometimes sex and marital status. Leading personalities use their personal interests and causes to pursue accomplishments, while administrators turn to busyness and business models to manage God's church.
Are congregations keeping up with the times, or have the times invaded the church? Fatherless pews reflect fatherless homes, and broken marriages reveal infidelity toward both neighbor and God. Individualism as independence is sovereign, rest elusive, and a quick bite replacing the family dinner, even when that family dinner is the Lord's Supper in our Father's house.
Congregations are experiencing society's shortcomings firsthand, particularly family problems’from superficial attention to splintering commitment. That is because the church is also a family, joined by the blood of Christ. Sadly, as children and siblings, we are giving up time together with our Father to seek our own personal interests and to choose who or what is worthy of space on our calendar.
Congregations admittedly need volunteers and leadership for various tasks and upkeep. But it is common now for members to sidestep shepherding Christ's flock and building maintenance in order to pursue personal preferences. Yet God has not given us the church for pursuing hobbies, nor as a chance to escape the house and children for a few extra hours. Just the opposite’in his word, God turns us to face the realities of a sinful heart and world. He turns us to our ongoing need for his gifts and salvation, and he turns us to our neighbors, who frankly may or may not be our favorite (or most interesting) causes.
Entire congregations can enter the rat race, albeit in a slightly different way. Congregations may try to entice new people with activities, only to have their resources spread so thin that members must take on more and more. A sense of urgency morphs the encouragement "Let us not grow weary of doing good" (Gal. 6:9) into a command to do your best every moment of every day, bearing in mind that you're "doing it for the church!"
Church Burnout
Church busyness is not without consequences. In a November 2014 blog post on Holy Soup, Thom Schultz wrote about "The Rise of the Dones," a growing phenomenon of long-time believers who leave active church lives to stay home entirely. Joining the "de-churched" in walking away from the institutions of church, the Dones are simply burned out from congregational activity. They have come to consider themselves better off with the Bible at home than with the burdens accompanying congregational life.
We should be bold to admit that there is great capacity within the body of Christ to tend to many needs. Good works are to be encouraged. A great many things can be done well, but only to a point. Matthew 25 warns us that there are those awaiting Christ who are in danger of burning out their lamps, and that they actively seek fuel for themselves from others! "Test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil" (1 Thess. 5:21-22 English Standard Version). We need to test the spirits of our congregations and leadership to be sure that congregations are adding’rather than borrowing or draining’oil for lamps of faith.
In the last several decades, many well-intentioned pastors and congregations have grasped the Field of Dreams motto, "If you build it, they will come." Staffs and congregations have been torn apart by struggle and debt. Neighboring congregations have felt the sting of stolen sheep, as members wandered from one congregation to another. Statistics measuring growth or loss rang out as a ticking clock, building urgency for congregations to accomplish more and do better, as busyness becomes a primary focus for the church business in general.
The motto's current encore seems to be: "If you offer it, they will come." Once again, an urge to grow stretches resources and schedules, leaving fewer family dinners together, pensioners paying the bills, and many members drifting from one interest to another before trying a congregation down the street. The congregation's operating model shifts with every business meeting, and instead of a permanent church family, a person's commitment is to a six-week course or volunteering for the next food drive in another three months.
God's Calendar
The realm of Christ is very different from this world. In so many areas of life, we must work, earn, and pay’the emphasis is on us and what we do. But within God's mercy, the family of God is centered on a heavenly Father who provides for all that we need and more, as well as his Son, who becomes "my brothers' keeper" (Gen. 4:9) by being our perfect sacrifice and bringing us into his family.
In the eternal church, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit free their calendar for us. They give us everything we need, setting aside time for us to worship and rest. Our Lord seeks, finds, and restores, giving forgiveness, new life, and renewal through the gospel. In the sanctuary of the church, we are largely passive, receiving his gifts and marveling at his generosity.
Yet earnest church-going people continue to ask, "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?" Exhausted members wonder, "Is our busyness the real foundation of the church?" How would your congregation reply? Jesus answered, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent" (John 6:28-29).
We must ask ourselves whether well-intentioned zeal is shifting the focus away from God and onto ourselves. Are church activities inhibiting rest in the Lord? Are programs, studies, and even small groups trying to save the church, or even the world, rather than trusting Christ to provide for his body?
The Good Portion
In Luke 10:38-42, Jesus addresses Martha who is distracted "with much serving." He doesn't say the meal doesn't need to be cooked or the dishes washed, but that doing too much is a distraction from the presence and word of God. Jesus says, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:41-42 ESV).
Busyness is different from service. Busyness is not how we love our neighbors as ourselves, nor is it usually best for those neighbors we are closest to. Although many activities start with good intentions and personal interests, busyness is due to anxiety and troubles about many things. Obviously, that is not the way we may want to think of our causes, programs, and weekly-activities-filled church. Besides, if we took away all that busyness, how would we know our life counts for Jesus? How would we know we were doing enough to fulfill our Father's will?
That is the crux of it. On one hand, we are driven and energized by interests and busyness’by our own activities and exertions’but on the other hand, we continually need our Savior! We need to escape judgment according to works and live in Christ's mercy! We are to live by faith and not by works of our hands. We need rest in the care of the One who provides, so that we do not grow weary in either faith or good works. Pressuring ourselves to the point of no longer resting in God is counterproductive. Our anxiety contributes nothing. It only hinders us from the good portion available to us: Christ present, speaking his word.
The church, as the bride of Christ and adopted children of the Father, is a blessing to the world because of the gifts she receives. She receives first, and only then she can share. In a beautiful paradox, she receives timeless gifts she constantly needs, turning again and again to her Beloved so that she might turn to her brothers, sisters, children, and neighbors to share with them the blessing of those gifts.
Rest in the Lord
Receiving is an underappreciated discipline in our culture. It is as vital as infants receiving their food, and as foundational as children receiving their education and growing responsibilities. In fact, all of us receive our entire lives, from guidance to our daily bread. Yet now many people do not want to receive rest’or a great many other blessings’so much as they want to seize or grab for it.
In the family of God, rest is not a vacation or a hiatus between terms. It is not a destination, escapism, or any other activity. Rest is something we receive, typically as we sit down with the rest of the family. The Divine Service is where the family of God gathers around a common meal to listen and speak with our Father. There we receive the unique gifts of his word along with sacraments. There Christians of all ages, able-bodied or infirm, weary or rested, are taken into the care of the Father and granted haven in his home.
We respond with psalms and prayers, songs and praise, but greater than our response are the blessings we receive as members of God's body, including unity in Christ's body. Joined by one Lord, one faith, and baptism, one God and Father of all (Eph. 4:5-6), we receive God's call’with actual words!’and his gifts. We rest from our own labors in thanks for the labors on our behalf.
Faith in someone else's work is an alternative to busyness! And an hour or so of Christian family togetherness in worship does not tie up your schedule so you must be away from your domestic family. Instead, it frees you to seek and grant forgiveness together. It serves as a present opportunity with your brothers and sisters in Christ to listen and receive God's gifts, united as the body of Christ, even with the faithful who have gone before us.
There is something precious and life-giving about the things we receive within the church home, within the sanctuary, where we gain wisdom, forgiveness, and experience from the Father. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the Divine Service’grounded in word and sacrament’is so powerful that it expresses itself in the home too, as people feed the hungry around the dinner table, clothe their little naked ones, and generally go about their days serving their neighbors.
God is at work in so many things that never get written into our schedules. In Christ, by his word and sacraments, timeless grace comes to us, his children, who frankly are running out of time. His final coming will cancel all scheduled activities left on the calendar. Thanks be to God that Christ's efforts more than make up for our failings!
We are blessed that we can do good without making busywork by sharing what we ourselves continually receive from the Giver of all good things. We may give according to his gifts, and we may work for God's kingdom, receiving his gifts and trusting his Son and Spirit to accomplish his will. As children of God, we are blessed to recognize there is much more at work in the church than what we do. In his divine mercy, no amount of busyness or imagined self-importance can undermine what Christ has done for us: earning our salvation, reconciling with the Father, and giving entrance into his eternal family. In the Divine Service, not only do we treasure time with our divine family, but we ourselves are treasured, remembered, and built up as the redeemed people of God.
