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God’s shoulds and shouldn’ts can’t be improved upon. If God says don’t, then don’t. If God says do, then do.

The problem in our church and many I’ve seen is that the dos and don’ts are extra-biblical. Do be at every service. Don’t be late. Don’t watch much TV. Don’t listen to music with a beat. Do sacrifice again for another building program. Do march against same sex marriage. Don’t fellowship with people who aren’t Baptists. etc.

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Our church is very small, well under 100 people. Our pastor is the only one who gets paid, & what he is paid would be considered “peanuts” or even an unlivable wage by most in America. If he were to have a full-time job outside the church, instead of being paid, he would have to give up much or most of the ministry he does for people. (And we do give generously to missions, other ministries, etc.)

I remember reading a while back that the majority of churches in America are actually quite small, & don’t resemble the larger, mega-church-type models much at all.

And the last paragraph about the “lay person”. Pastor W emphasizes that we are each ministers, too, & that we need to be using our God-given gifts for His glory & to help others. And that’s what we do. It’s a beautiful thing.

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There’s a fine line between walking in obedience when we don’t feel like it, & being legalistic. We don’t want to reduce our religion to a set of rules, & yet there are certain practices (reading one’s Bible, praying, going to church regularly) which are Christian principles we should aim to live by.

As far as other duties, such as witnessing or helping in a ministry, I believe that if we are truly seeking God & seeking to please Him, we will sense the leading of His Holy Spirit when it is time to talk to someone (or keep quiet) or what ministry to be involved in.

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Or, is it that the “church” can’t get its focus off of the bottom-line financial priorities? Buildings, salaried staff, other performers? Is it that the falsely created “lay” person isn’t given a place to exercise (his) (to the exclusion of hers) own sanctification?

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As a teenager that was the only way I knew to be motivated. I didn’t like praying, didn’t like doing quiet time, didn’t like witnessing – but knew I should do those things. So I’d hear sermons or read books that made me feel bad enough to start trying to do that. Sometimes I’d actually seek out someone that I thought would tell me what I already knew I should do but didn’t feel motivated to do, because then I might feel bad enough to change.

Of course it didn’t work very well. It would last for a little while but not very long. Then I’d need another “fix” of being told – in stronger terms than before – what I should do. Of course I don’t know if it was the churches’ fault that I was that way, or just that I was particularly prone to that tendency and for me the church just reinforced it.

I have a book by Drs. Cloud and Townsend (also the authors of Boundaries) called False Assumptions, about teachings that Christians have picked up and think are “Christian” but are what they call “emotional heresies,” false assumptions about spiritual and emotional growth. Mostly they have some kernel of truth, but used in an unhealthy way.

For instance, #6 is “Leave the past behind,” and #7 is “If I have God, I don’t need people.” It’s possibly to dwell too much on the past, and to depend too much on other people. But it’s also a mistake to try to just go on as though the past hadn’t happened, or to expect God to meet every emotional need we have apart from contact with other people.

#8 is that “Shoulds are good.” That was a tough one for me, because it was so obvious to me that shoulds are good. The authors say “The problem is doing good things from a sense of obligation instead of out of genuine love.”

I don’t see the words obligation and duty as negatives, as so many people seem to. I remember being in a meeting of 20- and 30-somethings at church (that was what they called the group), and every other person there talked about having stopped attending church at some point, and when they finally went back it was a choice, not a duty.

I never stopped going to church as a young adult, not because I enjoyed going but because I considered it the right thing to do. A duty to God, and a choice. After all, God says that the person who loves Him is the one who obeys Him. So doing what was right was loving God, whether I felt love for God or not.

By the end of the chapter, the authors do acknowledge that shoulds are not bad themselves, only the way Christians so often use them to produce guilt and shame (which is #9, the next chapter). Shoulds provide a standard, not so we can feel bad about ourselves for failing, but to show us where we need to change and point us to the benefits of doing right.

These days I look for churches that focus on the latter approach. But it doesn’t surprise me that there are still a lot of churches majoring on guilt and shame. Until I became a regular on this blog and became familiar with the backgrounds and perspectives of other regulars here, I pretty much connected churches that would be considered “fundamentalist” as those that used “shoulds” in that negative way, because that was my own experience with them.

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Cuz I can say that I think my pastor does a good job of preaching both the should’s & the shouldn’ts, about sin & about forgiveness & grace, about God’s wrath & about God’s mercy.

From regularly reading Tony’s contributions here, I’d get the impression that “the church” is full of legalistic, harsh, judgmental people. I just don’t see that in my own church nor in other Christians I know from other churches.

So, fellow WOWers, is this what you see in your own churches?

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