July in Chicago—hot and muggy. Thankfully, the conference was confined to an air-conditioned hotel on Michigan Avenue. During the conference, I studied my new business colleague as he spoke with potential customers. Sometimes he was all business; other times folksy with his sentences laced with profanity. He adjusted his style depending upon his audience.
As the day of meetings ended, he invited me to dinner at his private men’s club. After walking several blocks from the hotel to his club, I reluctantly put my sport coat back on, re-fastened the top button of my shirt, cinched up my tie, and followed my friend through the heavy glass doors.
It was a scene from a 1940’s movie. There was the great foyer with polished wood paneling and the wide staircase leading to the second-floor dining room. The maître d’ greeted my friend as Mister Johns, and then led us to our table near the windows, with an expansive view of the lake.
I fell into a well-padded red leather chair as the waiter arrived, also greeting my friend by name. And my friend—who was he? His tone and style changed again. He had taken on his club persona. Serious, yet cordial, a bit aloof, with that look of superiority I’d seen on faces of some college professors. Not at all like the bulldog businessman I knew outside his club.
Speaking of clubs, many years earlier, when my wife and I were engaged, we both liked the idea of getting married in the local Presbyterian church. So we started attending, at least for the final few months before our wedding. My wife had attended a Presbyterian church when she was a little girl, so unlike me, she knew what to expect.
They had their own language with big words I didn’t understand, like sanctification, justification, and righteousness. They adhered to a seemingly sacred routine, with those on the inside flawlessly following each step of the dance—standing, singing, and repeating phases, all on queue. I was like a dancer with my feet stuck in the mud. I felt lost and very much an outsider. After the wedding, we didn’t go back, to that church anyway.
Yet during those handful of Sundays before our wedding, Christianity felt like a club—the Jesus Club, where many of the club members spoke that “churchy” language. Much of it sounded meaningless to me, as if they were reading from a script.
Like my multi-persona business colleague, later in life when I started to regularly attend church, I, too, was tempted to take on a dual personality, putting on my church club persona whenever I walked through those church doors. Perhaps the temptation to adopt such a persona is prompted by the exclusive club atmosphere that pervades some churches, with their club dress code, language, and implied policy of acceptable behavior.
A Barna Group study from 2015 shows my sense of a Jesus club isn’t unique: In a survey of young adults, 44% say, “The church seems too much like an exclusive club.” 1
I added exclusive club to my list of perceptions of Christianity. But is that how Jesus wants His Church to be perceived?
- From an article by the Barna Group, “What Millennials Want When They Visit Church,” 3/3/15, https://www.barna.org/barna-update/millennials/711-what-millennials-want-when-they-visit-church#.VS5biZN51f0
(Excerpt from “Beneath the Graffiti: A De-churched Christian’s Search for Christianity.”)
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Graffiti-churched-Christians-Christianity-ebook/dp/B0DK7VD71B
But, where manmade Christianity inflicts wounds, true Christianity, Jesus’ Christianity, heals wounds. So if I were to try and comfort the person who wrote that post, I’d encourage them to leave their painful experience in the past, turn to God and Jesus and their words in the Bible, and pray.
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