Between a Church and a Hard Place by Andrew Park

Author:Andrew Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

I certainly don’t need to be an eyewitness to everything I hold true. As an adolescent, I would say, if asked, that I believed in a supreme being, and I think I truly did. Not God necessarily, just some nebulous cosmic force that didn’t require much further explanation. More than anything else, I think it was an attempt to deflect a question that made me deeply uncomfortable. Now it’s a question I can’t seem to escape. We took a family trip recently to see an old friend who was a minister of a congregation on the coast, and on Sunday morning we all went to hear him preach. The church dated to 1830; in back lay an ancient cemetery with gargantuan oaks garbed in heavy robes of brittle gray moss. In the sanctuary, sunlight streamed in through the large windows. We found an empty pew on the left, opened the low door, and slid in. When the organ began to play the processional, we all stood, my son climbing onto the seat to get a better look. We made eye contact and he smiled self-consciously. I leaned in so we could hear each other.

—What’s up?

—I wish God was alive.

I fumbled for a lame response, along the lines of “How do you know He’s not?” or “Maybe He is,” or “Well, some people believe . . .” and he immediately slumped his shoulders and grinned to let me know that was not what he meant.

—I wish God was here.

It has become common for Christians to argue that the complexity of life could only be the handiwork of a divine creator who made the world as it is. But the very same people who make this argument are quick to tell us not to expect to ever see with much clarity the contours of the intelligent designer’s divinity. For every phenomenon that they chalk up to His intervention—the wonder of human reproduction, for example—there’s another—the heartbreak of bearing a child with autism or Down syndrome—that is said to be beyond our keenest insight. “The Lord works in mysterious ways” and “It’s God’s will” and “Ours is not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” For someone trained to think critically and question everything, that wisdom is impossible to accept.

One day, my friend Cotton mentions to me that a friend of his attends a church and the pastor is a hologram. I do some research and identify the virtual preacher as Andy Stanley, head of the 16,000-member North Point Community Church in the suburbs of Atlanta. Each week, his sermon is recorded for viewing the following week by a congregation downtown. The $250,000 high-definition projection system makes it look like he’s right there in the room.

Curious to know more about Stanley, I dig up video of one of the sermons on the Internet. The title was “Belief in God: It’s Personal,” the first of a four-part series, accompanied by slick graphics, aimed at non-Christians. Now, if there ever was a style of religion that I would go out of my way to avoid—big, modern, high-tech—this was it.

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