Book Review: Real Church

Title: Real Church

Buy it

Author: Larry Crabb

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Date: 2009

ISBN: 978-0-7852-9827-4

Length: 155 pages of this book, 44 pages of notes, acknowledgments, ads, and a preview of author’s forthcoming book

Quote: “[H]appiness has more to do with being a good person than living in the middle of good circumstances.”

Of all books addressed to Christians who don’t attend church, so far as I’ve seen, this is the most respectful. That’s a lot of books, so it’s high praise for this one. In fact this is the only book addressed to Christians who don’t enjoy church meetings or attend them regularly that I can remember having liked.

Not that the right audience for the usual book of this type doesn’t exist. Certainly some of the “spiritual, not religious” type of people are really, rather blatantly, nonverbally saying “I don’t want to give up this or that practice that I know is sinful.” Certainly some people don’t go to church because, after the heavy drinking they did on Friday or Saturday night, they don’t want people to see how red their noses are, or even how black one’s eye is. Certainly some people don’t go to church because they can’t stand to wait that long between cigarettes. But also some people have a spiritual experience, which various traditions call things like “communion with God,” when they worship at home, and they find that getting snarled up in the merely human, merely social busy-ness at church interferes with that.

My part of the world has attracted quite a lot of people like that, over time. Some identify loosely with a denomination, some don’t. Historians have given us a special name: the Bible Christians. The books, sermons, and conversations addressed to addicts and clingers-to-sin merely tell us how clueless the people who offer them to us are. Larry Crabb, on the other hand, has an idea—a vision, if you like that word—of what we are trying to have at home, alone or with our families, and what we’d go back to church if any church ever had it.

He thinks a church can be a real community of people who really want to set aside all social climbing, worship God in church in the wholehearted self-forgetful way they might worship God at home, and practice radical Christianity until they actually come to resemble Jesus in their words and actions.

I would never say that that’s impossible. I would say that I’ve never seen it happen.

If I’d lived in the first century after Christ I might have seen it. The Bible gives us a few brief hints of what it was like. Many Christians were poor, and in several places rich Christians joined them in intentional communities that had “all things in common,” where the rich either sold or invested their wealth to feed, clothe, and lodge the poor. Some of the women who had known Jesus during His lifetime, a group that certainly included His Mother and the women disciples and probably included friends like the first “Saint” Priscilla, prayed and testified and “prophesied”—in other words they taught—and men listened. Jews, Greeks, Romans, Ethiopians, all kinds of people from all over the world whose center was Rome, maybe even Anglo-Saxons, set aside their prejudices and claimed one another as honorary family members. People, including open and notorious sinners, well-known thieves, lunatics, Mary Magdalene “out of whom went seven devils,” worked for and with one another, doing what they could to give everyone a chance to earn an honest living. The apostolic church was not about defying the Roman Pagan belief that every son owed his country military service, and every son who survived that and every daughter owed their parents as many grandchildren as early as possible, but it did support people who felt called to pacifism or celibacy.

People claimed to see a spiritual fire burning through those early Christians, at times—some of them actually claimed to see flames flickering about their heads. People who had seemed to be dead (though not buried) stood up and walked and went back to work. People who were drunk, drugged, or “possessed” by “spirits” of things like seizures and violent anger, sobered up and became fit to work. People who had never properly learned one another’s languages started talking to each other in those languages. Those little gatherings in Christians’ houses were agreed to be weird and wondrous things.

Such a church was inevitably persecuted. People distrusted those early Christians. They were breaking so many traditions that people had been taught were necessary, and having so much fun. So, first it was family members throwing dependent relatives out of their homes, then it was Jews chasing Jewish Christians out of town as heretics, and then the power and corruption of Imperial Rome got involved and the persecutions became Prozac Dementia fantasies come to life. And the Christians continued to live in holy joy, and died praying and singing. And, unfortunately, the ones who wanted to stay alive and become rich developed a tradition of going through the motions of a Christian worship service while their spirituality, if they had any, lay down and went to sleep.

We have not really evolved as far in two thousand years as some of us want to think. If there were a Real Christian Church today it would still be persecuted. The churches we know probably owe their survival to the fact that, even when the preachers are excellent teachers and some of the congregation become friends, they are spiritually asleep.

Where Crabb got his vision of a church awake, to what extent he’s been able to nudge his own congregation in that direction and to what extent he’s indulging in Wishful Thinking about it, I don’t know. What I can say is that he’s described it vividly enough to give readers the general idea.

“I’m not addicted to alcohol…I’m not addicted to pornography. I could be, but for whatever reason, I’m not. And I’m not addicted to cheerfulness. Several friends wish I were. So do I. Sometimes. But I am addicted to myself…I want to be part of a church where a pastor addicted to approval realizes he needs grace every bit as much as the elder caught in an affair.”

“I’ll guess that we [readers and Crabb]…have an interest in knowing what’s true…would like to become truly good people…value friendships…And…would like to do our part, big or little, in making this world a better place…If so…you want to learn more about spiritual theology. You may not have called it that, but your desire to know truth will lead you there.”

“A gathering becomes a church when people meet for one supreme purpose…to become like Jesus…they take on a challenge that will expose and confront every drop of self-centeredness in them. That’s the more [that people who “want something more” are looking for]. And that’s impossible—without the Spirit.”

I remember C.S. Lewis’s vision of a church as “a very forcing-bed of charity and humility,” a spiritual greenhouse where a man from a Low Church would cross himself so as not to offend someone from a High Church, and a man from a High Church would abstain from crossing himself so as not to offend someone from a Low Church, and although they might notice what they were doing and laugh about it they would not bicker about it. I visualize a church where, although it was agreed that active homosexuality is a sin, nobody thought it was in any way worse than divorce or adultery or fantasizing about divorce or adultery, and although Bible-based qualifications for jobs might exclude some people from those specific jobs, nobody felt inclined to cast the first stone at anybody. Whatever they’d done. That elder caught in that “affair” might be asked to resign from his position as an elder, but his friends would still be his friends, motivated to help him to avoid further sin rather than to reject him or embarrass his teenaged children…

Preach on, Brother Crabb, preach on. Maybe some reader will see it happen in this lifetime. I hope so.