I had an opportunity to go into a time machine. I visited a world before self-service gas stations were introduced. Attendants greeted me and made conversation. They cleaned my windows and offered to take the garbage from inside my vehicle. It was a world before online banking where people still went to tellers to make transactions. Sitting, waiting to be served, I would talk with other customers and often see someone I knew. It was a world before self-check-out machines came to grocery stores. The cashiers would ask about my family and talk about their day. Everything seemed to take a little more time, but there was much more human interaction. I felt known. I felt like I was part of a community. I felt more human.

It wasn’t actually a time machine that I had gone in, but it felt like one. I had just gotten on a plane to visit Japan for the first time. While there was much that was more modern and technologically advanced than Canada, valuing community and relationships highly, Japan resisted many of the kinds of more independent innovations that I described above. Change is inevitable, however, particularly when it’s driven by efficiencies and cost savings, and Japan today looks more like Canada in those respects than when I first visited. Why am I mentioning all of this? Because these changes impact the way that we view our faith and we’re all more vulnerable as a result. Let me explain.

When we decided that it would be cheaper to pump our own gas than have someone do it for us, the calculation was that it was gas that we needed, and the people involved were just a wasted expense. The same value judgment went into ATM machines and self-serve kiosks. And cashiers and tellers know that they’re competing with machines for their jobs now, so they’re assessed for robotic efficiency, not warmth or conversation.

What happens when we take those values to our faith? We assume that “the truth” is what we need and that human interaction is a wasted expense. We download sermons instead of going to church. We listen to our own worship music instead of singing with God’s people. When we do attend a worship service, we try to make the experience as quick and efficient as possible: preferably, last one in; first one out. Even time spent in Bible reading and prayer, if there is any, is focused on an efficient search for what we want (e.g., practical life tips, relief from religious guilt, stuff that we need) instead of a personal interaction with a living God. And in the process, we hollow out the essence of the Christian life and replace it with a shell. And we wonder why it doesn’t work.

Notice, by contrast, that whenever the Bible talks about growth it inevitably points to other people. It assumes community. It drives us to fellowship. In Colossians 3:12, for example, when Paul urges Christians to display compassion, kindness, and humility, he won’t let people do so in an abstract, individualistic sense. He says, instead, “as God’s chosen ones.” He wants us to think about ourselves in relationship to God and to His people. We need to be connected to the family of God. Then, he follows that up with some “one anothers” as he often does: “bearing with one another … forgiving each other” (Colossians 3:13). Are you getting close enough to other people in the church that you need to put up with the things about them that rub you the wrong way? Do you stick it out in fellowship when it’s hard or do you tend to walk away? From forgiveness he turns to love saying, “And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Colossians 3:14). But he’s not just telling us to love our kids or our spouses. We’re to love our brothers and sisters in the church. We know that because in the next verse he reminds us that “you were called in one body” (Colossians 3:15) and tells us that we’re supposed to be “teaching and admonishing one another” (Colossians 3:16).

It’s only natural that we would be tempted to see church through the same lens that we see gas stations, banks, and grocery stores. We’re all busy people and we assume that the more efficient we can make our lives the better. Besides, the less interaction we have with people the more effort it takes for us to engage in it. But God has designed us for relationships, and we can’t follow Jesus without joining His people. When we reduce the church to a sermon and treat God like an ATM machine, it’s not Christianity anymore. And the hope is that as we do invest in fellowship and make time for people, we’ll enjoy the strength and help that God intends to give. We’ll enjoy the Christian life as God designed it. We’ll see that the time invested in people was worth the investment.

In awe of Him,

Paul