What’s the point of religion? To make us behave? To make us better people? To give
religious leaders power? Some would say that religion, and Christianity in
particular, is all about where we go when we die. The primary purpose of Jesus, they would say, is to give us
a way to get into heaven and to avoid going to hell. For them, the church’s main motivation to invite
others to be Christians is to save them from eternal punishment and instead
provide a path to an utopian disembodied afterlife.
Recently, I took part in a pastor’s network about
church growth. For many churches,
particularly small ones, growth is a controversial topic. Some people don’t want their church to
grow. They want it to stay small
so that they know everyone and feel comfortable. Some people want their church to stay small so they can have
power and control over others, especially the pastor. During one of our sessions, we explored the reasons why a
church must grow. For one thing,
it was Jesus’ command for the church to grow, to go and make more
disciples. For another, the
biblical record about the early church is one of growth and the biblical
authors continually celebrate that growth in writings such as the Book of Acts.
As many of you know, I am a firm proponent of
growing churches, especially this one.
My rationale for this comes principally from those reasons I just
mentioned, as well as a few others that I’ll get to later. However, some of my colleagues in this
network had other motivations that I did share with them. Like many of the Christians I mentioned
earlier, they believed the primary reason to grow the church is to save people
- specifically to save them from hell.
Providing people an escape from this horrible fate is the main reason
they believe Jesus came and why it is so important for churches to preach the
gospel to the world.
I would argue that such an outlook comes very close
to claiming that the church is really saving people from is God - an angry
wrathful God, or at the very least, from that God’s harsh eternal
verdicts. Is that really the Good
News we are proclaiming? Is that
the Good News Jesus proclaimed?
Taking it a step further, many Christians also
believe that in order to be a real Christian, you must believe in a literal
hell as a place with literal fire - otherwise God will send you there. Conversely, it seems that the only
people who believe in hell are the ones who are sure they are not going
there. I’ve yet to meet someone
who claims, “I believe in hell and I’m sure that is where I will spend
eternity.” The fact that for many
people, hell always functions only as the fate of others, should clue us in
that we may need to rethink our beliefs and attitudes about it.