Soapbox #2: Fear of Intimacy and a Relentlessly Personal God

I can't figure out how to start this post. I guess it comes from the fact that it resides in deep inside and I don't want it to smell like a fart when it does come out. Let's just get to it.

Here is the conflict as I see it: The capital "C" Church has done a great job separating ourselves from the world as it pertains to the consumption of alcohol, smoking of any tobacco product, and dressing conservatively. I read an article recently promoting a book discussing how a truly Christian family MUST home school their children in order to avoid the evils of being swallowed by worldliness. These are just a couple of great ways that we have physically separated ourselves from an unregenerate world.

Where it starts to get tricky is the areas where we slowly have let the more corrosive elements in over the last two generations or so. In my opinion it is the massive breakdown of truly close and intimate relationships that have stagnated the growth of our Church. These last two generations of the population have dealt with a glut of divorces, dysfunction, and day care (no alliteration intended). Which has caused a base level mistrust and immediate defense to those around us. We have carried all these walls and defense mechanisms our whole life and forgotten to drop them off at the door step of the church once we got saved. Partly because we didn't know that we had them as they have been ingrained nearly from birth.

So now we have the biggest, coolest, most relevant churches replete with tattoos and coffee bars that have the loneliest people an incredibly affluent society has ever known. For so long the family structure has been intact and the churches response (which I believe was excellent) was to offer programs to already fully functioning families. They acted as a catalyst to give strong families even more tools and continue to make them stronger. It was a wonderful system that served this country very well for a number of decades. However a completely intact family structure can no longer be the assumption as all the statistics and overcrowded rehab programs can attest.

We, then, are faced with a breakdown at a base level that aside from the Bible I do not believe there is a manual for. It is an intimacy that was meant to be nurtured from birth by sacrificing parents, an involved community, and a growing relationship with God himself. Instead we were met with divorce, substance abuse, sitcoms, and a new term called "latchkey kid". It was these failings that caused us not to trust out of survival so that we would no longer get hurt. The problem was that we still needed intimacy but didn't know it and surely would not risk again for it.

Now we have a serious percentage of the population that cannot be intimate because they were never taught, the best solutions so far are casual sex and myspace. And we have a church that is used to offering programs as solutions. I have a feeling it is like the oil industry looking at electric cars, it is possible and will be necessary in the future but lets not deal with it now. My assertion for the subject avoidance is this: Intimacy is not something that is programmable, it doesn't fit it a pie graph or a vision statement, and most of all it is not something that is mass marketable. Once you hold intimacy with God and others as paramount then it is no longer about massive crowds and big results. It is about pouring yourself out before God and digging in with others. This is simply something that one person cannot do with 100, 50, 20, or even 10 other people. Jesus had twelve, he hung out with three, and one he called beloved.

It is time to reprogram our methods into heartbeats and to forsake our strategies for the sake of the people. Let us endeavor to know God personally and maybe for the first time allow Him to know us, even the nasty bits.

So I guess that all I am really saying is that man is sinful and in need of God for restoration, pretty original huh? Hey let's think up a three point action plan to help combat the lack of intimacy in the American church, and when that becomes successful we can write a book and start a small group study guide.