Squeezing Jesus Out of the Church by James Petticrew

I’m coming back to the heart of worship
And it’s all about you,
It’s all about you, Jesus
I’m sorry, Lord, for the thing I’ve made it
When it’s all about you,
It’s all about you, Jesus

Some of you may have groaned when you read those words. Many congregations have sung that song to death for over a decade – but perhaps we did it because its words deeply resonated with a fundamental fact of our Christian walk and life as the Church: that the centrality and rule of Christ is something about which we need constant reminding.

I am a year back into pastoring, a year back into preaching regularly to a congregation, a year back into church leadership, a year back into trying to express God’s love to people. And a year on as I reflect on each of those areas and many others, I’m finding myself recalling Matt Redman’s words not as an expression of worship but all too often as a confession. I have come away from meetings, walked down from the pulpit on several occasions, and finished conversations thinking to myself:

I’m sorry, Lord, for the thing I’ve made it
When it’s all about you,
It’s all about you, Jesus

One the main lessons I’m relearning after being out of formal church leadership for a while is simply that church life so easily becomes about so many other things than Jesus, and as that happens our agendas, priorities, and busyness slowly squeeze Christ from the Body of Christ. When Christ is squeezed from the Body of Christ church becomes “all about” other things: budgets, people and their problems and feelings, my self-esteem as a pastor, the quality of weekly worship music, song choice – just about everything except Jesus. I’m not naive enough to claim that some of these things aren’t important in church life; but I am coming to realize that when church life is all about those things, it ceases to be the Church and doesn’t have much life in it. When Christ is squeezed from the Body of Christ by our own priorities and agenda as a congregation or through our busyness as leaders or disciples, what is left is little more than a corpse masquerading as a church.

While thinking about the way in which Jesus so easily gets sidelined in the church, I read these words from Paul:

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.” (Colossians 1:15-18)

It strikes me that Paul was writing to a church also in danger of squeezing out Jesus, not by the busyness of church life or the disordered priorities of the pastor but likely by some sort of early Gnostic teaching that sought to diminish Jesus. (I’ll leave the exact nature of the Colossian heresy for budding New Testament scholars looking for PHD topics.) Both Paul’s “Christological song” above and Matt Redman’s 90’s worship song both convey the same message in different ways: it’s all about you, Jesus. Paul writes a theological tour de force in Colossians 1, reminding us of Jesus’ divinity, creative power, resurrection, and headship of the Church; then, Paul sums up the implications of all this truth about Jesus by saying, “so that in everything he might have the supremacy.” 

Perhaps it’s the tendency to diminish and demote Jesus from the place he should have that was behind Christ’s complaint against the church at Ephesus in Revelation: “I hold this against you, that you do not love as you did at first.” (Revelation 5:4) This tendency within the Church to make things other than Jesus supreme seems to be in pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s aim when he wrote, “Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.”

In their book ReJesus, Michael Frost and Alan Hirschoffer a devastating critique of what Bonhoeffer called “Christianity without Christ,” the Body of Christ with Christ squeezed out:

We do not like gatherings [speaking of church services] of strangers who never meet or know each other outside of Sundays, who sit passively while virtual strangers preach and lead singing, who put up with second-rate pseudo-community under the guise of connection with each other, who live different lives from Monday to Saturday than they do on Sunday, whose sole expression of worship is pop-style praise and worship, who rarely laugh together, fight injustice together, eat together, pray together, raise each other’s children together, serve the poor together, or share Jesus with those who have not been set free.

But they don’t just offer criticism, they offer a journey to a remedy, claiming that the church needs to be “re-Jesused.” Simply put, “re-Jesusing” the Church is making church life and disciple life centered on Jesus again. To use Paul’s language, it means deliberately focusing on Jesus having center stage in our church life, not just giving lip service.  I think it means re-turning to Jesus again and again, making sure Jesus is the focus of our preaching, the model for our discipleship, the source of unity in our community, the inspiration for our worship, and the aim of our hearts. “Re-Jesusing” our Church life will surely mean choosing to live by his Spirit in every way, each day. It will mean being utterly committed to becoming like Christ in the desires of our hearts, in what we think and do.

I remember a significant afternoon during my year of Doctorate of Ministry studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. Dr Dennis Kinlaw came to speak to us, but he did more than speak. He shared his heart. He spoke about his then-new book, Let’s Start With Jesus. He made an impassioned plea that as pastors and disciples, in every facet of our life and ministry, we start with Jesus. As I embark on my second year at Westlake Church Nyon, that is my guiding principle. In whatever I do in the life of the church or my own discipleship, I am asking, “what does it mean to start with Jesus?” I want my life to be “re-Jesused,” I want our church to be “re-Jesused.”

What about you? In your life, in aspects of church life for which you bear responsibility, can you really say with Paul that, “Christ has the supremacy?” Has church life become about other things than Jesus?  Are you absorbed by budgets, people, your self-esteem as a pastor, the quality of weekly worship music, song choice – anything except Jesus? Has Jesus been squeezed out of the Body of Christ? Maybe we could allow “The Heart of Worship” to make a brief reappearance in our services, just to remind us that, “it’s all about you, Jesus.”