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Tyndale University presents a series of recorded chapel services from Tyndale's very own faculty and guest speakers.
Well for this morning's chapel, and continuation of our session on preaching to a changing world, I want to begin with a story. And the story begins by letting you know that I am 55 years old. Turn to your neighbour and say he doesn't look 55 and respond, and also with your spirit. Yes, I am 55 years old. There's a phrase in the US "Black don't crack", I'm going to teach you a new one. "Asian don't raisin", we age, we age well. But when I turned 50 years old, I made a determination that this is the decade I'm going to get into physical shape. This is the decade I'm going to exercise and get healthy. I made that same promise when I turned 40. It didn't happen. So this was really the decade that I was going to get physically fit. So I'm an academic researcher, and I did what academic researchers do, I gotta research this topic. So I use the academic researchers number one tool, you might have heard of it. It's called Google. So I go on Google, and I type in "What's the best way to keep fit?" And the answer pops up. CrossFit. Have you heard of this? CrossFit, the exercise system, I haven't done it. But apparently, according to Google, it's a great exercise system. So CrossFit, I found out, uses a philosophy called muscle confusion. And as soon as I saw that, I said, that's the program for me, because I've been doing muscle confusion my entire life, which means that I don't go to the gym for months. And when I go to the gym, my muscles are really confused, why we are there, they get really angry and hard. So that's how I figured out how I was going to do muscle confusion. Now, as I began to explore CrossFit, which I never did, my daughter now works for Orange Theory. So she's trying to get me into Orange Theory to try to lose weight. And we actually ended up climbing Kilimanjaro together a few years ago, and that actually did get me into an exercise regimen. But as I was thinking about this, I was thinking, Okay, if there is a pathway to physical fitness, and that pathway to physical fitness, requires confusion, in other words, a disruption, that growth and change doesn't happen unless you have a discomfort or dissatisfaction with the status quo. And that, that disruption and dissatisfaction leads you to change.
Richard Sennett, NYU Professor put it this way, without a disturbed sense of ourselves, why would any of us ever change? And to me that felt like, oh, that's what discipleship is. Discipleship is a disturbed sense of ourselves. Now, we might feel comfortable and safe in the church. But there should be times when the church makes us feel discomfort, so that we want to change, or we need to change. And as I was kind of thinking through this, I was at that time working on my commentary in the book of Lamentations, and realized that the spiritual health that we can actually come to, because of a disturbed sense of ourselves, because of discomfort or disruption, wasn't happening in the church, and that our spiritual lack of spiritual disruption and discomfort was actually making us complacent, and it was not caused, a good place for spiritual growth. And one of the ways that, again, was I was noticing this working on my book was the fact that we were not good, or that there was a profound absence of the spiritual practice of lament. Lament, as a spiritual practice was conspicuously absent in our church. I first noticed this, when I note when I thought about worship life in the church, and there was a Old Testament professor in Western seminary, where the name of Denise Hopkins and she's a expert in Old Testament poetic literature. And she, at a Methodist seminary, she was looking at the more liturgical traditions in North America. So she was looking at the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church, Methodist Church, churches that are oftentimes guided by particular text, book of prayer, etc, book of worship, that says, "On this day you should preach from this text. You should read this Psalm and maybe even sing this hymn." And what she discovered in her research is that these liturgical traditions which said "Read this lament Psalm on the Sunday", when it came time to read the lament Psalms, many of the North American churches would say, No, that's too sad. And they would replace that lament Psalm, or lament passage, or lament hymn with a happier song, or a happier him. And she was finding that this was a pattern of behavior in the liturgical tradition, again, guided by liturgy, they still, when it came time to lament, would skip it.
There was another study done by Greg Pemberton, and he was looking at those who were doing worship through kind of the traditional hymns. And he especially looked at the Baptist and Presbyterian traditions of worship that focused on the hymnals. And he noted that in the Baptist and Presbyterian hymnals 85%, 80 to 85% of the hymns in the hymnals are hymns of celebration and triumph. And only about 15% of the hymns were hymns of lament, and suffering. Now compare that to Scripture. We know that the psalms are a reflection of the worship life of Israel. And we find in the 150 Psalms, that 60%, give or take, are psalms of celebration and victory and triumph. But 40% of the psalms are psalms of suffering, and lament. So compare that 60/40 mix to the 85/15 mix. Now, but that, by the way, is what's in the hymnals. It doesn't mean that you're what you sing on Sunday. That's just what's in the hymnals, it's already disproportional. So I decided to do a study on CCLI. Some of you know what CCLI it stands for Christian copyright licensing Incorporated, it's good to know that God's music is incorporated. So CCLI, what they do is they actually keep track of songs that are not printed in hymnals, but songs that you project on the screen like we did today. So oftentimes, when you do that, at a church or a Christian gathering, there's a little number that you're supposed to put at the at the bottom CCLI number, and there's like six digits that you put on it. And actually, when you do that in church, and you have that license, you're supposed to actually email or something, you call in, and you let them know we sang these songs on Sunday. Why do they do this? Why do you need to keep an accurate record of the songs that are songs, because through the licensing, every time you say one of these songs, an angel gets his wings, and somebody gets like a quarter of a penny. So that's what happens with CCLI licensing. So actually, they have to keep a very accurate record of the songs that are sung using the CCLI license. So every year in August, they publish the top 100 most popular contemporary Christian worship songs that are sung all over North America. So I went through that list several years ago, and I went through every lyric of every song of that, no I made my TA, read every lyric, that's what TAs are for, okay. I made my TA read, I checked his work, I he went through every lyric of every song, and I asked him, so what percentage of the top 100 contemporary Christian worship songs would qualify as a lament song? So how many of you say, just like in the Bible, that 40% of our top 100 songs are songs of lament? 40 contemporary? How about 25% of our top 100 content? How about about 20% of, do I hear 15% Do I here 10%? Well, yeah, somewhere between five and 10, out of the, depends on the categories of lament I use, and I try to be as generous as possible. The song goes, "I cry out", hallelujah, a lament song! The rest of it is I cry out for joy, I still have to count it. This is so pathetic.
So about five to 10, out of the top 100 most popular contemporary Christian worship songs, are what we will call songs of lament, which means that 90 to 95% of the songs that we sing in our content, in a church are songs of victory, and triumph. So what does that do, when you practice that all the time? Now think about, for example, even the sermon series, right? How many of you have heard an entire sermon series on the book of Lamentation? Not that one, one positive verse in the entire book of Lamentations? Yes, you've all heard that one. But have we heard an entire sermon series on the book of Lamentations? That's about right, zero out of 100 people or so? That's about right, which is why I wrote a book on Lamentation because I, you know, it's the academic dream to spend five years in a book and sell zero copies. So you have this book of the Bible, and the genre of Christian scripture, that is oftentimes ignored, and very much so in the Western Church, we ignore lament. And again, the question is, what happens to a community? What happens to a church? What happens in a family of believers, when we ignore this entire category of a spiritual discipline?
Brueggemann argues that what happens is that we lose our sense of God's justice, because we don't understand there is injustice. Lament is the spiritual practice that brings attention to injustice. Lament is the snapshot of a broken social reality, of how broken the world is. And you realize you can't do anything about this. So you turn to God and say, God, we need your justice to come in to this place of injustice. Our sense of longing for God's justice gets lost, because we don't lament the reality of injustice in the world. And this is goes back to what we said in our earlier session. Lament, therefore, is the appropriate counter narrative, to the dominant narrative of triumphalism, exceptionalism, and the kind of narratives that push us towards a particular way of doing church, but not embracing the full breadth of what God is doing in the church. Lament is the counter narrative that we desperately need. Let me let me say a few words about counter narrative. We talked about the power of narratives in our first session. So think of the narratives in this way. I'm a city kid, I've lived in cities all my life, but I have heard that if you go to the farm, they have these huge tractor trailers. And I've seen them in pictures. And they're larger than people, right, these huge tractor trailer tires are massive. So think of a tractor trailer tire, just the tire, it's emptied out, and it's at the top of a hill, and you are in the middle of the hill. And at the bottom of the hill, is your pet, your pet cat, your pet dog, and you see the tire rolling down the hill. And your initial instinct is you've got to stop that tire from harming your pet. So you the individual, the heroic individual, the great individual preacher, the sing, and you going to single handedly stop that tire from from crushing your pet, and you stand there as, I will, aah. And then you get rolled over, and it goes on and then hurt your pet. So you as the individual can't stop it. So you said, Wait, I gotta do try another way I know, I'm going to try this way, I'm going to jump into the system of the tire. And I'm going to stop the tire by working in the system, I'm going to reverse the system, and you get in the tire and you're you're fighting and fighting, but the momentum of the tire is so strong, you get caught up in the system. And in fact, you end up adding more weight to the system. And now the tires moving even faster down that hill. So we've tried the individual transformation, we've tried it, maybe even a social structural transformation. How do you stop that narrative from becoming the dominant narrative and crushing everything in sight, you create a counter momentum, you create a counter narrative. And in the creation of the counter narrative, you are challenging the existing dysfunctional narrative, and again, that is what Lamentations is calling us to do, to cry out as a counter narrative to the existing narrative.
So I want us to take a look at the book of Lamentations, and we'll set up the historical context of Lamentations as it is explained in the first three verses of the book of Lamentations. Chapter one, verse one, "How deserted lies the city, once so full of people, how like a widow is she who once was great among the nations, she who was Queen among the provinces, has now become a slave." So you might recognize the historical context of why Lamentations was written. Most of you know the story. In the early stages of Israel's history, under two great kings, David and Solomon, Israel becomes a superpower. David is a great military leader, and expands the borders and boundaries of Israel. Solomon is a great economic leader, and he's able to increase the wealth of Israel. But after David and Solomon follows very, a number of of kings, who drift away, who are disobedient, does not obey the laws of Yahweh, begin to follow other idols, the kingdom is split, and this generation after generation of idolatry and disobedience, and sinfulness, and God needs to bring judgment upon Israel. And that judgment, of course, is the destruction of the northern kingdom, the southern kingdom, and eventually, the capital city of Jerusalem. And that's what's being described here, the city of Jerusalem, once so full of people, the place where there was this magnificent temple and beautiful palace and people from all over would come and marvel at the city of Jerusalem with its structures and buildings and walls. And it was once great among the nation's Queen among the provinces, but because of their idolatry and disobedience, they are now deserted like a widow and has now become a slave. So bitterly she weeps at night tears are on her cheeks. Among all her lovers, there is no one to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her, they have become her enemies.
This once great nation is now a fallen and broken nation, broken people. And after affliction and harsh labour, Judah has gone into exile. And as many of you know, exile would have been the ultimate punishment for the people of God. You talk about all the other things that happen. Exile is the final ultimate punishment for the people of God. She dwells among the nations, she finds no resting place, all who pursue her have taken her in the midst of her distress. What we see here is the end of in their minds the end of the story for this great nation of Israel. They've lost their leaders, all the literate and all the young men like Daniel and his friends are all taken away into exile into Babylon. The only ones left in Jerusalem are the widows, the orphans, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and the sick, and they're not capable of rebuilding the city to this once great height. So this is the moment, and one could argue this is absolutely the lowest moment in Israel's history. They've lost everything, their identity, their homeland, their leaders, everything that made them that unique, all of those things were taken away. And it is in to this context that Lamentations is the word that is spoken. Because in this context, there are several responses. But I want to focus on three things that Israel could have done or God's people could have done in this context. One, run away and hide and give up. And second, well, we lost so let's just do what the, those who defeated us do, we’ll give in. So give up, are give in, or lament, those are the three choices that are before the people of God, run away and hide, give up, adapt the ways of those that have conquered us, give in, or offer a lament, and trust in Yahweh sovereignty. To that first question, Should we give up? Should we run away and hide? Jeremiah writes to the exiles in chapter 29. This is what the Lord Almighty God of Israel says, “To all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses, settle down, plant gardens and eat what they produce, marry, and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters, and increase the number there do not decrease. And this is the kicker, also seek the peace, the shalom, and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile, pray to the Lord for it. Because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” The key phrase there of course, is seek the peace. And almost every other time in Scripture, you see the phrase, seek the peace, and a city is attached to it, it seek the peace of Jerusalem. That's obvious. Jerusalem, David’s city, the capital of the Promised Land, God's heavenly city, the city of God's peace, of course, you seek the peace of Jerusalem. This is one of the very rare occasions where it says, what, not seek the peace of the city of Jerusalem, but seek the peace of the city to which I have carried you into exile, which would be Babylon. And think of the craziness of saying seek the peace of Babylon. Again, Jerusalem, David's city, the capital of the Promised Land, all the good things that are associated with the city of Jerusalem, the temple of Yahweh, all those things, but now you want us to seek the peace of Babylon. Babylon is Hollywood and Las Vegas and the worst parts of Toronto, oh, I'm sorry, the worst parts of Vancouver, all rolled into one. That's Babylon. And you want us to seek the peace, not of Jerusalem but of Babylon. It wouldn't make sense to the people of God.
So what's what's Jeremiah saying, You're always saying to the Prophet, Jeremiah, you can be and you are in the absolute worst place imaginable. You are in the pit of, the mouth pit of hell. That's Babylon, according to the people of God, you're in the absolute worst place where you think God doesn't actually extend that far out into Babylon. And even in that worst, most awful place that you can imagine, God still says, you are still my people, I am still your God, and you still seek Me and you still seek my Shalom. You are never allowed to give up no matter what those circumstances might be. Not the people of God. You can be the people of God in Jerusalem, but you are also the people of God in Babylon.
Unfortunately, this has not been the history of the Church throughout the church's history, and I want to focus on a particular moment in US church history. But you'll see this in kind of other settings as well. In US church history, there was this narrative very early on that urban centers were great places. In fact, there was this idea that was in the US called, cities like Boston, these are cities set on a hill. Have you heard that phrase? It was actually said by one of the first governors of Massachusetts. He comes from the, from the Europe to across the, the ocean, and he sees at the Massachusetts Bay looks over what will become the great city of Boston. And he says I envision a city set on a hill, which is what, a new Jerusalem a new Zion in the new world. And that was a positive perception or anticipation of what the cities of North America could be. Now, I spend many years in Boston, and Boston takes that very seriously. There is actually a major road that bisects the entire city of Boston. It's called Beacon Street. One of the major neighborhoods, key neighborhoods, wealthiest neighborhoods actually, is called Beacon Hill. So there's this kind of self perception sure that the cities especially on the East, East Coast of the United States, they're going to be “city set on a hill” with a gospel message will radiate out and be a light to the entire world. And so there was an idea or assumption New Jerusalem, new Zion, for the cities on the East Coast. However, that narrative changes over several hundred years. That was the dominant narrative in the 17th 18th. And about halfway through the 19th century. And then what happens in the 19th and 20th century is massive changes occur in these cities. So up until that time, they were centers for white Anglo Saxon Protestants, there were German Lutheran churches, and there were Scottish Presbyterian churches, and British Anglican churches. So the white Anglo Saxon Protestants were the dominant people group in these urban centers. And the belief was, the gospel will go forth out of these urban centers. However, the cities began to change at a certain point, and a new wave of immigration occurs. That wave of immigration is not white Anglo Saxon Protestant, it's not Northern European or Western European. It's Southern European, and you're getting Greek Orthodox, and Italian Catholics, and it's Eastern European, and you're getting Slavic and Russian Jews. And all of a sudden, these urban centers that were supposed to be a city set on a hill, new Jerusalem with a light of the Gospel goes out. They're no longer considered Jerusalem. They are Babylon. They are Babylon. And I remember watching this movie Gangs of New York. And, you know, I write about race quite often. And somebody told me, Oh, you got to see this movie. It's about a race war in New York. Cool. I gotta read about this. So I watched this movie, and it stars Daniel Day Lewis, the whitest guy in Hollywood, and Leonardo DiCaprio, the second whitest guy in Hollywood, and they're beefing with each other. I'm like, What is this? This is not a race war.
But it turns out that the old European immigration was opposed to the new European immigration, that the Western and Northern Europeans didn't like the influx of southern and eastern Europeans. And so there was this perception, our cities are changing. It's no longer the city set on a hill, the New Jerusalem, new Zion, but it is now the Babylon. You see some of this in the language that's being used by historians. In the feverish imagination of antebellum anti Catholic, Catholic literary provocateurs, city neighborhoods appeared as caves of rum and Romanism. That's so descriptive. Rum and Romanism. There, they don't drink good, you know, Western whiskey. They're drinking exotic rum. They're not good Protestants. They're Catholics. So they were mysterious and forbidding, a threat to democracy, Protestantism, and virtue alike. And that begins a whole new way of depicting the city as the vicious destroyer of the common good of family life, and individual character, and so that the cities were no longer Jerusalem, the cities were now Babylons. This was also happening because of another form of migration in the United States called the Great Migration. And it wasn't just immigration from Europe that was changing, there was more of an internal migration. And that was the movement post world, post Civil War of African Americans from the deep south, to the northern and Midwestern cities. So you start getting those who lived in plantations and Carolina, moving up to Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and those who were living in the deep south in Alabama, Mississippi, going up the Mississippi River to places like Chicago, and Cleveland, and Detroit. And all of a sudden, again, these cities that had been dominated by white Anglo Saxon Protestants, you start getting neighbourhoods, that overnight, change from all white to almost all black. And that, again, feeds into the narrative, hey, the city is no longer safe for us. The city's too different.
Now the irony, of course, is that the group that's moving from the South to the North is the most Christianized group ever, African American churches. So it's believed that about 80% of the African American community converts officially they were Christians on a plantation, but they joined churches and become officially Christians. Once there's Emancipation Proclamation within the general generation, the Mississippi Delta, African American Christian community gets to about 80 to 85% African American Christians, within one generation. That's the group that moves up to these northern cities like Detroit and Chicago, and then that's the group that start the very first mega churches in North America.
People think, oh, it's Hybels and, and Saddleback. No, no, that's really, really much later in the history. Oh, no, it might have been Aimee Semple McPherson. No, no. Also, much later, the first mega churches in North America were African American churches of 1000s and 2000, and 3000s. In these Urban's centers in Detroit, and Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia. So you're beginning to see the city's beginning to change, migration and immigration is changing what the city looks like. And so the narrative of the city also begins to change. Does that sound familiar?
Because the City of Toronto was a great place, and it was safe when it was mostly European Americans. But now you've got refugees moving in. Now you've got communities of immigrants moving in. And instead of seeing that as the move of God, people began to see that as well, so cities aren't Jerusalem anymore. They're Babylons. Now in the US, what happened was, it actually led to some significant changes in the church life that was reflected in the architecture of churches in the United States. So in 1945, right after World War 2, $26 million was spent on church buildings in the entire US new buildings. Now, if you see some of the budgets of churches now, that's one church that would spend $26 million on one church voting now, again, to scale, but 15 years later, that number shoots up to $1 billion. So in 15 years, you see a $974 million increase in spending on new churches, a 38.5% times against 3,850% increase over 15 years. Whatever those numbers are, it's astronomical, how much change there was, and how many new church buildings were going up.
Now, the question is, what was happening, what was happening was that white Protestants were leaving urban centers and moving to the suburbs, and starting and building new church buildings in the suburbs, right after World War Two. And one of the things I noticed was the architecture of many of the church buildings that were built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So I saw this, now this is one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen. I've never seen this style of architecture before. What I've seen more often, our, our architecture looks like this, buildings built in the 60s 70s and 80s. The slanted roof, a little bit of an arch on the side is kind of buttressing that you can see pretty common form of architecture in North America. This is not real, this is more European style. This is more North American style of architecture. And again, if you see a building like this, a century like this, probably built in the 60s 70s and 80s. Now I was in the late 70s, my church built a sanctuary that look like this, about nine years old. And I walk into that building on a January day. And I'm thinking, this is the stupidest thing I have you ever seen? Whose stupid idea was it to build the building that looks like this? I'm nine years old. And I'm smart enough to know, this is a really bad idea. Why? Because I was living on the East Coast in a cold weather City, it’s the middle of January. And so what that means is that the heat is on, but where's the heating vents on the floor? And where does the heat go in a building that looks like that? Right up into the rafters. And you literally have the frozen chosen in the pews, and all that warm air up in the rafters. And then you have to build ceiling fans to push the warm air down. And then charismatics can't worship with you because they keep hitting their hands on the ceiling fan. So you've created a architecture that doesn't make any sense. As a nine year old, I knew this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I'm thinking whose idea was it to build a church like this, the senior pastor gets up and says it was my idea to build a church building to look like this. And he says, if you turn this church building upside down, what do you see? He says, you're looking at the bottom of a boat. You're looking at the hull of the ship. And where in the Bible do you read about a really big ship? What is it about a really big ship? And he said, Well, it's Noah's Ark. Now, think about the message the church sends to the world, when you declare yourself to be Noah's Ark. We don't care about what's going on out there. Yeah, that can be destroyed and and judged and flooded and, and you know, they deserve it. As long as we are safe. In Noah's Ark. We don't care about what's going on. We just want to be safe in Noah's Ark. So let the world have their evil secular colleges, whatever Christian colleges let the world have their evil secular schools, we'll have our Christian schools, the world has their evil secular T shirts will have Christian T shirts, evil secular art, Christian art, evil, secular music, not so good, mediocre Christian music. So we'll have a Christianized version in this little ark that we’ll be safe and comfortable with we don't really care about the world that is out there. And so we sent a message that we were going to run away and hide. We were going to run away and hide.
An interesting thing happens though, at that trend is cresting, another trend begins to emerge that reflects the next phase of this, which is not to run away and hide, but to give in to the systems and structures around us, not to give up but to give in, not to look down and say we've lost, but to look around and say, How can we better fit in? And in Jeremiah 29, verses eight through nine, this is the challenge that comes up. This is what the Lord says, The God of Israel says, “Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have, they’re prophesying lies to you in my name, I have not sent them” says the Lord. So in this case, you see, they're actually very intentional using the word divans. Divination was a specifically Babylonian practice, and the Babylonian practice of divination and the idolatry of the Babylonians. That's the temptation for God's people in exile. And Jeremiah says, “Do not give in to the temptation to do what the people around you are doing, which is idolatry and divination”. So what was it about idolatry, idolatry works as a temptation, because it works. Idolatry is like a vending machine. You go up to a vending machine, you put in your Loonie, you put in your three loonies, and you punch a number, and you get exactly what you asked for. Right? If you punched in the number for Diet Coke, a Diet Coke better come out. If it's Mountain Dew, you call the 800 number and say, hey, I want my Mountain Dew, I get really upset, I put the three loonies in there, I didn't get what I wanted, because vending machines have a certain set of rules. And that's exactly how idolatry works. You go to an aisle and say, I want good crops this year, I want a male, you know, child this year, and you and the priest says, well give the following sacrifices, etc. And you will get that. So idolatry in its logic actually makes sense. And that's the temptation to give in to the logic of idolatry, because idolatry operates like a vending machine. But God most definitely does not operate like a vending machine.
See, if God were a vending machine, then we would be praising God every single moment of our lives, because we would ask for a new car, and we would get it and we would jump up and down for praise. We would ask for more people in the church, we would get it and we would jump up and down for praise. So idolatry moves us towards this assumption that everything is going to work out exactly the way we want it to do. Unfortunately, that's not how Yahweh worship works. Idolatry worship works, you give praise for what get because you got something exactly you wanted. Worship of Yahweh is, sometimes it doesn't quite work out that way. That again, is more lament than it is the celebration and triumph and victory.
So in many cases, what you began to see is the mainstreaming of the church in North America. Instead of seeing ourselves as Noah's Ark, which has some level of dysfunction, we began to see ourselves as part of the culture in almost extremely dysfunctional ways. And we began to adapt, even in the architecture, of churches that look like centres for entertainment. I was at a church in the south in Virginia, and the associate pastor has given me the tour of the church. And I'm walking in and is the visitor center, and there's a waterfall on, there's like fake trees growing up into the ceiling. And I'm looking around and say, Wait, there's the there's the little coffee shop, there's the little record store and record store, shows how old I am. There's a little, you know, places where they sell CDs and T shirts, and there's a place a little kid's playground is it. I think I'm at a mall, I feel like I'm at a mall. And at the end of that hallway, it is the auditorium where the entertainment venue exist. And so we began to build our churches or sanctuaries, or architecture began to reflect being of the world. And so the the picture there on your right is, is actually a photo from a church catalog, Church Furniture catalog. And all that's missing is the popcorn tray and the little drinks and the little button that moves the seat back and forth. But our form of architecture, felt more like entertainment venues, than maybe felt like houses of worship. And in that case, we didn't give up, we gave in, and we adapted the patterns of the world.
This is actually an interesting byproduct of this. And this is a theory in sociology called homophily. And homophily basically means birds of a feather flock together and going through all the kinds of the sociological jargon here. It basically means that when people get together, it is easier to get people that are like you or similar to you, to join you. And that it's it makes perfect sociological sense. But what that did is that the church adopted the secular principle. It's used in marketing, it's used in you know, selling products. But the church adopted the secular principle and called it the homogenous unit principle. That said, we will grow more if we just hang out with people like ourselves. And in fact, some of the church growth books, visibly said, here's our target audience, this person is the person we want in our church. And it was a white man in his 40s, with khaki pants and a golf club in one hand, and a cell phone in another hand and an a polo shirt. And that's it. That's the person we want. Because of the homophily principle, if we want to grow a church, birds of a feather flock together, we will grow a church if we just get people that are like us. So what the church did was bought into a sociological marketing principle, in order to grow the church. We looked around and said, Okay, we need to grow the church, what are we going to do, the methodology became, let's use what secular marketing is doing well. Homophily birds of a feather flock together. And what that led to in the US is extreme, extreme segregation.
This is the work of Michael Emerson, who defines a multi ethnic congregation of 80% of one group, and 20% of another very generous statistics, in my opinion. But what he points out is that if you look at those numbers, that the number of multi ethnic churches is absolutely horrendous. So the first study that he does it, I know the print is small, we're trying to get these PowerPoints to you, is he looked at the average public schools and how diverse they were, and found that they had a diversity index of .48, which the higher this case, the higher the number, the more diverse you are. Then he looked at congregations, and found a congregation had a diversity index of .08, meaning that local schools were six times more diverse than congregations. So you will go into a neighborhood and you walk into the local elementary school, and you'll find extraordinary diversity, 48% diversity, but you walk to the church that is two blocks away, and you'll find complete lack of diversity. And so this is what Michael was kind of pointing out. And also pointing out that if you look at the most segregated cities in America, the local church was more segregated than even the most segregated cities in America.
In fact, what he pointed out, with the level of segregation in the United States in the church, conservative Protestant was so high, that it had only been achieved one other time in US history, in the deep south during Jim Crow laws, when it was mandated by law, that there will be segregation. And a monthly principle actually led to the point where there was this level of hyper segregation, because we chose to follow the patterns of the world that said, just hang out with people that are comfortable. If you really want to market a church, market a church to this group, and then you'll grow your church. In other words, we celebrated the victory and triumph of society, rather than lamenting alongside the heart of God, we chose the easy path of homophily, rather than embracing the difficult path of learning from each other's stories, and the challenges of learning from each other story. We do not have the option of running away and hiding, and giving up, we do not have the option of giving in and adapting the patterns of those who are the, the society around us. But instead, our response is lament, to enter into places of suffering, to hear each other's story of suffering.
I'll close with illustration, about a few years ago, I, I do a lot of conferences. When I went from pastor to professor, something like I went through some kind of genetic phase where the extroverted side of me completely got erased. From my mind, I don't know what happened. But something happened. As soon as I put on that doctoral robe, the extroverted side of me, just got wrenched out on me. And so I'm like almost an extreme introvert these days. And that shows when I go to conference, when I was a pastor, I go to conferences, I wanted to meet everybody shake hands with everybody, get everybody's numbers. Now I just want to go somewhere and cry and hide. So that's my thing of conferences. I was at this pretty major conference and, and I just wanted to find someplace to hide. And the reason I wanted to run away was, I had been a pastor and I had planted a multi ethnic church, I planted an urban church, and I planted a justice oriented church. And that was kind of popular at a certain point. And people come up to me and ask me questions about and I just got sick of the questions. Because there the wrong question. There was, how did you do it? What's your secret? How did you make this happen? And they were looking for the magic formula, the vending machine idea that was going to help them grow their church, so that I can be a successful multi ethnic, urban church planter too. So I can write the books as well. And so what I would say is okay, here's the secret to growing a healthy and maybe a vibrant, multi ethnic, urban church. Stop coming to these conferences. That's why I never got invited back to these places. You spend $500 on your airfare. You spend $500 for two nights at the Hyatt. And you'll spend $500 for registration. And then another $500 for food and incidentals and, and all the books that tell you how to do the right formula to grow your church. So you spent $2,000, to be pretty much told what you should already know. You don't need to go to an evangelism conference to learn to be nice to people. That's not something you should have to pay $2,000 for, you shouldn't go to a conference that says, you know, have clean bathrooms, yet you don't need to pay $2,000 to learn that, save your money. Here's the secret to a healthy growing, and, and a spiritually vibrant church.
A praying mom. Praying grandmothers and mothers in the church. That's the secret. My mom passed away a couple years ago. She was 88. When she was in her 60s, she showed me the condition of her knees. We all have one knee cap on each knee. She had five kneecaps on each knee. As a single mom, working two jobs in inner city Baltimore, one thing she gave as a gift to her children was the gift of prayer. So she knelt before God, on a hardwood floor for decades. And when you do that, your knees can't take that kind of pressure. So they cracked open so that when she knelt, her knees would conform to the shape of the floor so she could pray longer. And when I think about going to these conferences, where the voices, always the successful, 29 year old, who is able to grow the church from this to that by, you know, telling funny stories in church and being a good preacher, and trying new things, and all that other stuff that we think makes the church grow. And I say at the end of the day, if you don't honour the praying mothers and the grandmothers, and the single moms, and the immigrant families, those are the ones who are the spiritual bedrock of the church you want to be a part of. That's the lament that the church needs.
Gracious God have mercy on us. For we have sought to be a part of the world. When actually you have called us to lament for the world, and lament on behalf of the broken in our world. We ask Lord, for Your Grace, for your forgiveness, and the tough call to be those who lament not just those who celebrate, but those who lament alongside those who also suffer. We ask this in your name, amen.