What Church Practices Are REALLY Teaching - Jake Doberenz

In this solo episode of the Christianity Without Compromise podcast, host Jake Doberenz argues that even unspoken parts of a church gathering impact what we believe and how we behave.

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Everything we do at church is theological. Not just the sermon or the songs, but the very structure, tone, design, and people involved. Everything teaches us something about what we believe about people, what we believe about God.

During college, I was indeed a Bible major. That was my primary area of study. I took classes in the different texts of the Bible and church history and ministry and theology.

…But I also minored in Communication Studies. And in Communication Studies, I learned, well, how to communicate. Diving into things like communication theory and communicating in different contexts, from organizations to families to even romantic prospects. I learned the ways in which human beings can effectively or ineffectively transmit one idea to another.

I primarily thought that my education in communication would influence the ways I communicate the Bible, how I talk about the Bible, how I relate theology to different people in different contexts.

And to be sure, I have used it in that way. But Communication Studies also taught me something else: It taught me that everything communicates. Communication is more than just words. Communication can, of course, be written text, and things like body language—the ways in which we communicate with our posture or tone.

Everything communicates some kind of message.

Even sometimes inanimate things communicate something about the people that curate it or something about the space that you're in. So, for instance, during that college time of my life, I had a dorm where I had a poster of the Avengers on my wall. That, of course, communicates something. That communicates that I, the owner of the poster, liked the Avengers. Something non-physical, something without words, could communicate something. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

So what we're exploring here today is how communication can happen beyond just words. This profoundly impacts even the way we receive theology in our own church contexts.

Our churches—both the building, the space, the services, everything that we do at them and centered around them—all of that communicates something. Because they're specifically religious, churches communicate something, typically, very theological. We are shaped by our churches into what to believe. Yeah, we have mission statements and we hear sermons and we sing songs, but beyond mere words, we are told exactly what to believe just based on the rhythms and practices and design of the churches we step into.

Formation Through Practice

James K.A. Smith is a Christian philosopher who has written a lot of things, but I want to draw mostly from his book Desiring the Kingdom, which is really related to some of the subjects that we're dealing with today. He writes,

“We are what we love and our love is shaped… by liturgical practices.”

Smith argues that humans are not primarily thinking things (homo sapiens), but we are loving beings. To highlight this new aspect, he coins this term homo liturgicus. That is, we are fundamentally shaped, not by what we think, not by what's in our head, but by what we love, what we desire. And our loves are formed through rituals and practices, not just through hearing teaching or being educated.

We learn from the body first. So the moves we put our body through, the rhythms of our life—all of that seriously impacts exactly what we desire and ultimately what we think and even the shape of our soul.

That means that the liturgies that we go through, whether at church or in the secular world, are formative. They teach us something. They communicate something, just as my Avengers poster did in college.

Smith calls all the structures, the symbols, the music, the rhythms of worship—all of that which shapes us through our body—embodied pedagogy.

In other words, our bodies take this knowledge and act it out. They shape our own desires and behaviors and everything because we have gone through these rhythms and have these different inputs put into our body. It includes, of course, things like sermons, but it's far more than just strict, here's “what we believe” theological teaching. Everything is theology.

You know, back to my Communication Studies days, one of the guys that comes up a lot is Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan had a famous phrase. He originally called it “the medium is the massage” but later in pop culture tweaked it to become “the medium is the message.” What he argues is that the container of where communication takes place is profoundly formative in how the message gets out there. Thus, whether a message is played through the radio or the TV or through the town crier, the message is subtly shaped just because the medium—the way it's communicated—is different.

How we communicate matters just as much as what we say.

And that aligns up nicely with Smith’s ideas.

Let's look at some examples. Smith opens Desiring the Kingdom with examples of how a mall trains us towards the values of consumerism. It acts like a secular cathedral. He talks about how it uses sight, smell, and sound to get us used to the idea of buying as the value. He even goes as far as to say that big-named anchor stores kind of serve as like a “holy of holies,” the ultimate place you want to go, the anchor of the whole thing.

Now, these malls never have a message that says, consumerism is good, buy all the stuff. But the symbols and rituals put us through this process. We are suddenly learning over time, hey, yeah, this is a value. We need to buy, we need to buy, because I need that thing that that poster tells us that I need.

Another great example is modern schools. Many modern schools, public and private, often train kids primarily to just be good workers in the workforce. You know, they teach you to sit at a desk all day, preparing you for a time when most people will probably sit at a desk all day. They train you to fit the answer that is prescribed. And you're valued if you get that one right, if you produce that high-quality work. Your value—you're literally graded based on how right you are about things. All the disruption and self-expression is punished. Things like that shape us.

And in one very specific example, my high school that I attended growing up had painted above one of the halls the phrase, “What did you do to prepare for college today?” Well, that is pretty explicitly shaping us to believe that college is the only option! What did you do to get to that point? That's the main thing. Don't care about trade school, any of that. Get to college. That’s a message that shapes us to something.

So again, malls, schools, whatever, are examples of places that intentionally and sometimes unintentionally communicate a message. They give us values. They prepare us for something, and they shape who we are—even into the core of our very being.

All Churches Have Liturgy

The term “liturgy” is, of course, a church term. Now, some of us might associate it more with the so-called high church structures like Catholics or Anglicans that have very orderly, specific worship. You know, they celebrate these holy days and have a strict adherence to a church calendar. There are certain sets of Scriptures they read on certain days, and their buildings are also often designed with reverence, and they're gaudy and specifically ornate because much of that is left over from a time when people were illiterate and needed the building itself to communicate the message that the church wanted them to get.

But there is no such thing as churches with liturgy and then those without. There is no non-liturgical church. The churches we call liturgical are just more upfront about the things they are intending to form us into as they form us into Christ. These utilize often deeply old practices that have several traditions built around them, but they're all trying to shape us in their own way.

Modern churches, though, are not different just because their practices and rituals aren't really old. Even when they rebel against the highly liturgical environments, they are still implementing practices and rituals to ensure that their values are passed along to the congregation members. They may repeat certain words in each service, they probably have worship formats that kind of follow the same patterns each week. There are ways that their buildings look to communicate certain things about their values and maybe how relevant they are.

All churches have liturgy. Every church has rituals and practices that shape people, whether unintentionally or not.

Different Types of Church Liturgies

So then, if all churches do have this liturgy, it does really matter what kind of people we're becoming through these liturgies. What indeed are these liturgies communicating? Sometimes, sadly, the unintentional practices are communicating things that either the church doesn't want or the church shouldn't want. They're shaping people into things that are not Christ-like.

Sometimes our words and actions in a church can lead to some really toxic situations. See, for instance, past episodes of Christianity Without Compromise, like the episode with David Ruybalid, who's an expert on church abuse. And I also recommend former guest of the show, Scott McKnight, who has an excellent book, A Church Called Tov, also for your consideration—to think about the ways that some of these liturgies really get off track and create toxic environments.

How Church Culture Can Turn Leaders Into Idols - David Ruybalid

But let's give some specific examples of both the harmful and the not-so-harmful, the good and the bad, of how the different things that churches do shape us and tell us what we should love and value.

• The concert-style worship with the lights and the smoke, the real big production, the real show of it—what that pretty much communicates is that God is accessible only through spectacle. Worship is passive consumption. It's pretty much just entertainment, even if you sing along to the songs. That's where God can be found—somewhere in the smoke and the $60,000 lights or whatever.

• Or look at the situation of having the communion table in the center of the room. That may show that the church values unity and equality, as all of us are around the table, participating in worship, sharing in Jesus' meal.

• We can also look at a church that has events and gatherings that are really primarily geared towards couples and families. What does that show us? Yeah, it shows us that singleness is second class. Marriage is the ultimate spiritual status we should obtain to. I recommend last week's episode with Kate Boyd, as she broke down some of the reasons the church is supposed to be intergenerational and is supposed to appeal to more than just people that are married with children.

Left Out of the Family-Centered Church - Kate Boyd

• Or what if we see at a church children and teens playing some kind of meaningful role in the church? Maybe they're praying, they're reading Scripture, they're leading or participating in worship up on stage. Well, that, of course, shows us that everyone is a part of the body of Christ now. It's not just a later thing. They're not just the future church. They're the church of the now.

• What if you only always have one pastor up on stage giving the message, and he always uses, you know, one translation, one lens, one theological thinking, always quotes the same kind of guys? Well, it might make you believe that there's a right tradition and everything else is lesser—not as correct or not as God-ordained or something. But the flip side would be going to a church where other voices, other traditions, and specifically global voices are included. That tells you that the church values ancient, diverse, and beautifully broad.

• Just us in whatever context don't have a monopoly on all the truth. There's a lot of truth out there that other Christians have stumbled upon. You could have leaders that never model repentance, which tells you that maturity is all about perfection and grace is for others.

• If we only see men on stage, well, that tells us that it seems like men are the only ones that can carry God's message.

• And if our church talks about giving and offering and how you need to tithe more than they do about the Lord's Supper, then we might associate money with church more than, you know, gathering around the body and blood of Jesus.

• If the cameras are always on the worship pastor and nobody else, well, it might make you think there's one important guy on the stage and no one else matters.

• If your church has pictures of a white Jesus, well, that communicates that Jesus was white. And he wasn't, FYI.

• If the pastor has a special robe or special podium or even a special parking spot, it might just tell you that they are a higher class. They're something special and extraordinary and better than the rest of us.

The ways we do church—our rhythms, designs, musicals, rituals, assumptions—all of that forms our theology. Whether intentional or not, every choice teaches people about God, themselves, the church. So let's be intentional.

The Church Audit

So I want to invite us to reflect today. This isn't about nitpicking. It's about learning to see with fresh eyes. The goal isn't to tear down for the sake of deconstruction, but reconstructing our churches into something better. So let's audit our own church's worship service just as an example of this.

First, let's imagine we are brand new to our church. Or we might actually bring somebody who hasn't been to our church to get that outsider perspective. Let's ask critical questions about the experience of somebody who isn't used to things the way we are used to them. What do we take for granted that actually is a neon sign saying something opposite of how we want people to believe and behave? Let’s ask questions like:

• What would you say matters most to this church?

• Who seems to have value, and who's invisible?

• What do the rituals reinforce or neglect?

• What emotions does the space evoke? Awe? Exclusion? Individual pride?

• Is there more of a focus on God above or on ourselves here below? Or is there some middle ground between worship and formation of us as individuals?

• What are the soapboxes and often-repeated teachings that your church seems to hold most dear? Do those align with what Jesus really valued?

• What theological beliefs would they absorb just by sitting in worship, watching the whole thing?

Friends, it takes imagination, humility, and curiosity to see what we've gotten so used to. It might take an outsider to tap us on the shoulder and point at the things that we love and show us whether or not they are actually forming us to love the kinds of things that God wants us to love.

Does your message from the pulpit align with the whole way that you do church? From the moment somebody walks into the foyer, to when they go into the sanctuary, to when they leave, we need to audit our spaces to ensure that they are communicating all the right things.

We need to ensure that we're not communicating cultural messages like individualism or harmful theologies like all of us are just useless worms and God is the greatest thing and we are just so lucky that God stepped down to hang out with us worms for a little bit.

Everything we do in the church communicates something. Is it communicating something good or something bad?

Some Considerations

Now, if our church practices shape us, we have to get two things straight.

One, we have to agree on what we are supposed to be shaped to. That’s a complex answer! However, I've argued before that the reason we gather is primarily for three things: One, you have worship of God. Two, care for others. And three, correction of behavior and doctrine, or the teaching of new behavior and doctrine if there's somebody who's not familiar with those teachings. That's like the internal purpose of the church, but it primes us for external purposes too.

I think the external purpose of the church is to: One, be an example to the world through our different behavior. Two, to quite explicitly preach the gospel to the world—to tell them the message of Jesus. And three, it's to, in some way or form, transform the world so that it looks a little bit more like the now-and-not-yet kingdom of God.

So, essentially, in my understanding of Scripture, the church gets our own lives on track to follow Jesus, and then we, in turn, go out and help get other people's lives on track. There's kind of a two-fold mission of the church: internal and external.

So if all of that's the purpose of the church, we need to be shaped to the kind of people that can be examples to the world, that know how to preach the gospel, that know how to make the world a better place.

And that starts by thinking of the internal needs of the church: Are our behaviors and thoughts and actions and words shaped to be more like Jesus, or is it going to be more like what the world wants or what so-and-so pastor wants? Those "What Would Jesus Do" bracelets are still a pretty good message. That hasn't changed even though it's been several years since that bracelet was popular. That's still a good metric. If we know who Jesus is and what kind of life Jesus wants us to live, we will know what we should be shaped into. The church helps point us to Jesus so that we can point other people to Jesus.

Okay, but the second thing that we need to acknowledge is that there is considerable complexity for how certain rituals form us.

Earlier, I commented on certain things you might see at church and what I believed they were communicating. In truth, not everything is so black and white. Some practices are debated—and with good reason. We could easily go back and forth all day long about what it means for certain practices to exist in our church, what actually they're communicating.

And one great example of this is communion/Lord’s Supper/Eucharist frequency. Some traditions practice it weekly, but then others argue that makes it become too routine. It's not special enough if you're taking that cracker and grape juice every week.

Other traditions do it very rarely—maybe once a quarter or once a month or something. But then the weekly communion people can argue that, well, that just makes it too forgotten. It makes it not special. It’s now no longer a central aspect of what it means to gather in the church.

So, what's the right view here? What do those practices actually communicate?

Because the same practice—weekly communion—to some might signal a sacred and special part of life in the church, and then the other side can say, no, the weekly nature dilutes its meaning.

And in times like this, my recommendation is to obviously go to Scripture. Is there an example? Do we have some situations here where we can go look at a practice? Also, look at church history. What is history telling us about how this practice developed and what the thinking behind it was? And finally, just what fruit is being presented here? What good fruits are coming out of these practices, if any? Is it truly shaping us to be like Christ, or is it shaping us to be something else?

In my opinion, don't do something just because it's tradition. Establish what essential truth it is communicating. What fruit in me does it produce? Does it allow me to love the things that God loves? So always ask what best, as far as you can tell, forms people with Christ-like love, hope, humility, unity. That’s how we navigate these gray areas.

Now, I'll be honest with the communion thing. I am very pro-weekly communion because I do see that practice established in Scripture and in the early church, but I also see profound value in centering the whole church around this practice, around this shared meal. And personally, I think it is the most unifying thing we can do. The more often we do it, the more often we share in something billions of Christians around the world are doing and have done—a shared meal that we are all partaking in as we all proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

That's one example of how we can approach these complicated matters and try to deduce, okay, how does this actually form who we are?

Conclusion

Alright friends, again, everything is theology. Our church practices form people. They do. We cannot deny that. Everything we do—where we point the camera, how long the service is, what happens more often in the service than something else, the things we do every Sunday and the things we do once a quarter—all of that communicates what is valuable, what you should love, what you should pay attention to.

It all matters.

From the moment we walk into a church, either on a Sunday morning or any other kind of gathering centered around the church, we are being communicated theological truths. And far too many of us, especially in the Western world, have just consigned ourselves to letting that theology be communicated to us without critically asking, is this a good theology?

And then we go out in our lives and we teach others false doctrines. We go out in our lives and do not show the fruits of the Spirit. We go out into our lives and fail to actually look like Jesus. And I'm quite comfortable putting a lot of the blame on our churches—on our culture in these churches—through all the unintentional little practices and rituals that have piled up that do not point us to the person of Jesus Christ.

I’m fed up!

But the last thing I want to do is leave you with the impression that it's just the responsibility of the clergy and the pastors and the priests and the church staff to make sure the church shapes people right. Because it's not. It's each one of our responsibilities to check in to see how the church shapes and forms us.

My friend Spencer Shaw, who was actually the first guest ever on this podcast, wrote in his book, Cultivating Culture:

A church can only be as successful in its role in God's story as the church culture it creates. And a church can only create a Spirit-Empowered culture by every single member buying in and actively cultivating a Christ-centered Spirit-Empowered culture.

Cultivating a Church's Culture - Spencer Shaw

That's right. We all have a role to play. We can shape the rituals and practices which form the culture, no matter if we are laypeople or clergy. And the rituals and practices can only lead to certain harmful results if we let them—if we do not stop to critically examine how we are being formed. So, in what ways you can, change the rituals and practices so they can form us into the right kind of people.

Our mission is to be a church that embraces the power of the Spirit, the salvation of Jesus, and the Lordship of God in heaven. And to do that, we need to make sure that it’s not just our sermons and worship songs and church leaders who are teaching the right things—although that's important.

We also need to critically examine everything else in our church—from our sermon format, to what kind of events your church seems to value and put on, to the signs that are around your church, to who is pictured and seems to be included in your particular church family.

All of that matters.

All of that shapes us into something.

And my prayer today is that what we are shaped into is somebody that looks a lot closer to Jesus Christ than we were before. And that we are not shaped into the values of the rest of the world, the values of other religions and traditions, or just whatever the particular guy in charge thinks is pretty neat. Do not let us unintentionally be formed away from Christ.

So pay attention, ask questions, and be intentional about your rituals and practices.

Because our church is shaping us. Everything is theology. And it's time we take a very hard look at what is being communicated in every single thing that our church does.

See Also:

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Follow this show and Jake Doberenz’s writings at jakedoberenz.substack.com.

Christianity Without Compromise is a part of the KFM Broadcasting network.