Sunday service

I find church services boring.

There. I've said it.

I struggle to engage with our normative church experience- the Sunday service. I find it hard to engage or even to stay awake often. This is as much my fault and my health issue than it is an inherent problem with the service format. It doesn't matter how great the sermon or music is for me. I still struggle with the university lecture style format, where we all attend church as though it is an event, we sit and listen to someone talking to us, we sing songs led from the front, and then we leave- only to return for the same next week.

Church services don't often engage or excite me. Which is a problem because it is the main expression of church and Christianity that seems to be prevalent. I don't find the event to be a passion strirring thing. More often that not, I find them formulaic and can't shake the feeling of being a consumer, going to attend an event once a week that has little impact on my life.

This may be an appropriate time to insert a disclaimer. This is just my opinion and experience. Many people find church services extremely emotive and helpful. Many people don't. These are just my thoughts and honest feelings. And in truth, often I feel like this is what we've got, and this is what I need to work with. I need to mould myself and try and engage. That's my usual mindset every week - and it is not to say that I don't ever hear truth or experience any inspiration from a sermon or a song.

But if I am honest, I really crave something different- something exciting and engaging and inspiring, something that is radical and life-changing, where we really come together to laugh and cry and serve as a community. Not an auditorium where we hear a lecture and sing some songs and have some coffee and then go about our everyday business. I want my soul to be alive and awake to God and my neighbour.

Then truth is, the church in UK is haemorrhaging men, young people, and Christians. If you look at the bigger picture, it is in decline. So I think services are worth looking at if they are clearly not drawing people in to a God who we believe should be inherently attractive to people.

When I was in Bristol, I was part of a pioneering house church type movement. In my opinion we didn't do a great job and it didn't really work in the end. There was too much bitterness and hurt in the leadership, and not enough resources and energy to keep us afloat while we were trying to pour ourselves out for the poor. But if I am honest with myself I often wish I was back there doing something new about church. Daring to envision and dream and engage in a different way, trying to reach out from the subculture that we are so stuck and numbed by, and which is so alienating for many.

Every Sunday we tried to do something called "Sunday Service". It was a little polemically named but the main idea was that we would gather together every Sunday to corporately serve someone in need - offering our cleaning and painting services to a struggling family, for instance. I loved this idea but I wished at the time that we had had some spiritual care and input as well, to keep us going. But I still love the idea. I think it could work alongside the many elements of church that it was missing.  We could change ourselves and change the world.

Psychologists have talked for a while about people's tendency to stick with the status quo and not to go for change.  (Of course there's some evidence to the contrary as well which suggests that people like change rather than the status quo - so maybe no one really has a clue!) I think the truth is that change in the church will never come from the people inside it who are perfectly happy and comfortable with the way things are. Why change something if you're happy with it?

But there are so many people for whom it is not enough. People inside and outside the church who believe that there are different ways for us to come together as a community to worship God.

I guess the  challenge is to believe that our voices will be heard.