There’s a sizeable segment of our population who seem to be self-absorbed, living from experience to experience and seeking pleasure as their highest goal. These people don’t come to church, though some of them used to.
John Drane describes his conversations with people in this group in The McDonaldization of the Church. “They all brought the same message, which was not only simple and stark, but alarming anc challenging.” Drane calls them hedonists, but that may be a misleading name. The point is not so much their pursuit of pleasure as it is the covering up of pain. These are people who “find that the realities of life are just too painful to deal with head on. Others are disillusioned with the breakdown of a prior belief system. . . They can cope only by escaping from it all, and are likely to spend every spare moment in activities that will anesthetize them from the pain.”
We can hardly minimize the gulf between this sub-group and almost any American church. Hedonists are likely to be “wasted” all weekend and completely incapable of rousing themselves for a Sunday morning event. Further, church programs represent a social order and set of values that is stultifying to these party-goers. Church-goers, for their part, are disinclined to associate with those whose contempt for godly values, and whose self-destructive behavior, violate everything that Christians stand for. It’s a stalemate.
What would have to change in the church, and what would have to change within these perpetual party-ers, for them to become followers of Jesus? My first observation is that the church would have to take a closer look at Jesus’ outreach to those on the margins. How could Jesus remain true to who he was while befriending people whose attitudes and lifestyle were antithetical to everything Jesus taught? If we can figure that out, then the follow-up question is whether the followers of Jesus are willing to follow Jesus to those whose outrageous behavior pushes every button.
Secondly, Drane thinks that Christians might reach some of these disaffected souls with an “embodied spirituality, which can understand play as worship, and see God’s kingdom as a party.” This would require a huge transformation from the way most western Christians experience and express their faith, and likely it will be those who have themselves come from the margins who will lead the way in exploring what this might look like. Here is the challenge to the church: if it is true that “everybody loves a party,” then Christians of all stripes ought to be at home with a joyful, embodied integration of life and faith.
And how might God open the way for the perpetual party-goers to move toward the gospel? Drane found that after a period of time, some of these people grow weary of living a series of disconnected experiences. He quotes a character in Douglas Copeland’s Generation X: “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.” The search for a thread of meaning just might be used by God to open some of these people to the Story that is the heart of our faith. May we be ready, with that Story in our minds and hearts, when we encounter those who desperately need to hear it.
