Firstly, please do not be offended by the term ‘weirdos’. It is not meant cruelly, as I will explain. But you do see some odd looking people in churches, and I have given this some thought, and so did C S Lewis.
The train of thought that led to this essay began while I was speaking at a local church a few nights ago. It’s a small independent church somewhere on the Evangelical/Charismatic spectrum and I was talking on behalf of a local Creation group. I spent some time chatting with one of the men there, shall we call him James, whom I know from years ago. He is separated from his wife and estranged from his children. I have heard his wife’s and one of his son’s sides of the story and I tend to feel sympathy for them rather than him. There is no need to say more. I think he is a genuine believer but perhaps I am a little concerned about him.
7 or 8 years ago, on a train journey home from Reading, I saw on the platform at Winchester station a man whom I knew attended my church. This individual, let’s call him Matt, has a very distinct and slightly odd look about him (odd hair style, very stiff and angular gait, and somewhat staring look) and I believe he is somewhat autistic (nowhere near as badly affected as my daughter Sarah, who is also epileptic. I’m not breaking confidences here, Sarah would tell you in her stammering voice about her disabilities as soon as you met her and she often wears autism or epilepsy society shirts. Sarah looks odd too, not least to the huge collection of keyrings she wears on a chain round her neck.) A member of the company I was travelling with remarked on Matt. I forget his exact words, but they were not charitable. I said nothing.
If you spoke with Matt, you would notice his speech is a little odd. But he is, as far as I know (and we have been at church together for almost 10 years and sung in a Christmas choir together) a decent man and an authentic Christian. But is a loner and comes across a bit odd.
So, I will admit that there are some odd people in church, and, yes, some people with significant character flaws. Me for example. And this made me think about a passage in C S Lewis’s classic book about human weaknesses and how Satan exploits them, The Screwtape Letters. As I may have mentioned, this book was instrumental in my conversion in 1974.
For those who haven’t yet read it, it is in the form of a set of letters written from a senior devil (Screwtape) to a junior tempter (Wormwood) and gives advice and observations about how to most effectively deceive and corrupt a particular man, to his eternal ruin. Although the book is obviously fictional, we know that Lewis believed there were (and are) real devils and they are our deadly enemies. Their strategy depends on remaining hidden and injecting false ideas into the minds of individual humans, and (through key opinion leaders) into society as a whole. I find that this belief, although not provable by direct observation, has considerable explanatory power.
Anyway, in chapter 2 of the book, Screwtape, noting with displeasure that Wormwood’s ‘patient’ has become a Christian, encourages him, whatever church he joins, to get him to develop bad habits. One of the first, and worst, of these is to get him to look down on other church members, exaggerate anything funny about them, and despise them as beneath him.
Screwtape writes ‘When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.’ (1) ‘When he gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty hard on those neighbours….Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.’
Screwtape then goes on to say how important it is not to let the patient ask himself exactly what he expected Christians to look like, let alone look in the mirror and think about his own appearance and oddities. ‘All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question ‘If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people on the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?’
We read similar things in Scripture, for example in the letter of James chapter 2 verses 1-9 where the Apostle severely warns against showing favouritism to well-dressed and wealthy people while not welcoming shabbily dressed poorer people into church.
The church is often accused of being Middle Class, and there is something in this. John Wesley wrote (I can’t place exactly where) that upward mobility would be a challenge for the church. In his day, when people came to Christ through his preaching, often people would abandon drunkenness and gambling and adopt virtuous behaviour such as education, hard work and saving. In a couple of generations of such behaviour (setting aside any question of God blessing them as He blessed, for example, Abraham and Jacob), their families would tend to lift themselves up out of poverty. And then, there would be a tendency to pride.
I see this myself-lots of my friends at church have children at Oxford or Cambridge or studying to be doctors. If passionate believers in the Socialist Utopian ideal of ‘equality’ want to call this ‘Middle Class privilege’ then parents sticking together faithfully, leading by good example, limiting their kid’s use of junk TV and gaming etc, encouraging and helping them to do their homework and aim high in life etc is ‘Middle Class Privilege’. Oh really? I’d prefer to call it ‘Trying your very best to better yourself and your children’. But that takes us off at a tangent into an essay for another day. Let’s get back to the subject of weirdos in church. Perhaps the term weirdos is offensive, I don’t mean it to be-let’s say ‘people who look and act a bit odd and are not among life’s better presented or more successful.’
There are several reasons why odd-looking, unpresentable and indeed bad people go to church. The most appropriate one is that we realise ourselves to be sinners in need of salvation. As Jesus said, the healthy do not need a doctor, only those who are sick Luke 5:31. The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost Luke 19:10. Ideally, in a healthy Christ-centred church you would be having people coming to Christ from the most desperately awful situations, including mental illness, prostitution, drug and alcohol misuse and crime-including the worst crimes.
Incidentally, while churches should welcome the broken and wretched, they should also welcome wealthy people and hypocrites-if they are genuinely interested in obeying the Gospel. Hypocrisy is a sin that opponents of Christianity often like to bang on about, perhaps because Jesus was so critical of the religious hypocrites of His day. Hypocrisy is a particularly easy sin to accuse Christians of, especially if you have zero moral standards yourself. A man who believes that he is not bound by God’s laws concerning sexual conduct, probity and honesty is not being a hypocrite when he betrays his wife (unless, of course, he complains when she betrays him). But not being a hypocrite does not make him a good man. The only way to avoid hypocrisy is to consistently have no moral standards for yourself or others, or to have high moral standards and always keep them. As far as I know, only one person ever lived a perfectly moral life from birth to death, and they crucified Him for it! So, there are bound to be some hypocrites in church. Perhaps they are struggling with it, just as others are struggling with gluttony, drunkenness, pride, pornography and other sins and weaknesses.
Hypocrisy is not the only sin, nor is it especially unforgiveable. Jesus, Paul and James (also see Ezekiel 16) also said some harsh things about those who hoarded their wealth and did not aid the poor and needy, although being wealthy is not a sin in itself.
Another reason for finding misfits in church is that they are looking for acceptance and can’t easily find it elsewhere. They ought to be welcome, although the church is not primarily a friendship club and full membership must depend on conversion. At my church, anyone is welcome to attend our public meetings, but there is a process for membership which involves an interview, a handbook saying what we stand for (which members are expected to accept) and a register. There are no fixed arrangements e.g. tithing concerning money. I have never once been coerced or pressured for money, as I know happens elsewhere. There is a single ground for church discipline, ‘Bringing the name of the Lord Jesus into disrepute’ and as per Matthew 18:15 any 2 members can bring this charge against any member, including the elders and pastors. I have only known this procedure used once in 8 years, and this was concerning a persistently troublesome individual who would not listen to correction.
But there is a third class of ‘difficult’ person who may enter the doors of churches, and may even get into high office, and I mean the person who desires to exploit. This can be predatory paedophiles, or other sexual abusers, people whose aim is simple theft, or potentially false teachers who, consciously or unconsciously, seek to divide, weaken and harm for their own purposes. Sorry to say, there are many warnings about these people in the new Testament, for example Galatians 1:6-9, 2 Peter 2:1-3, 2 John 7-11 and the letter of Jude. Many other texts could be supplied warning about those who creep into churches with wicked intent. We can’t say we weren’t warned. But how do we distinguish between Matt and James (who should be welcomed albeit with a degree of caution) Kevin (see below-about whom there were no red flags at all) and someone with truly malicious intent to deceive and destroy? Because we are going to find all these people in churches.
It’s difficult. Where there is a church that has the slightest pretensions to be following the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles, you are likely to find people who are (in varying measures) welcoming, trusting and generous. You will find children, and the perennial call for Sunday School helpers. Sad to say, paedophiles target such places. I know this because our church’s safeguarding lead (a paid post) has spoken about this to the congregation. Although we have not had any incidents, and hopefully we never will, it has been judged necessary to put strong safeguarding and child protection procedures, badges and vetting and all, because there are evil people in society who seek to exploit others and some of them are very clever and persistent deceivers.
30 years ago, I was in a church where the leader of the children’s work was accused of child abuse. We will never know if Kevin (not his real name) was guilty as he drove into a wood in another county and gassed himself in his car. Kevin was a highly presentable person, attractive and well liked. Not the sort of person you would suspect of being an abuser. But abusers know the risks they run if discovered and will go to very great lengths to cover themselves, just as Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. There have been authenticated cases of proven abuse in church, and in some cases there have been establishment cover ups. This is not to say that Christians are worse than other people, but churches are places where vulnerable people come-because of their vulnerability. In most cases I am sure people are accepted.
Of course, now we have to contend with the ongoing efforts of sexual liberation activists to infiltrate and destroy the church from within. They have had a lot of success. We can expect false charges as well as false teaching to increase. Just today in the Sunday Telegraph I read about a case where a homosexual man in a mental health institution asked specifically for a Catholic chaplain to visit, then questioned the man on his views on homosexuality, and then made a vicious (and, the priest, says untruthful) complaint against him which led to him being dropped as chaplain. Expect more of this kind of anti Christian activism as the revolutionaries try to finish off the church.
The only thing the sincere believer can do is, as ever, look to The Lord Jesus and the Scriptures for guidance, and watch and pray. Bad times ahead, as prophesied, but we are nearer to salvation that when we first believed. He who endures to the end will be saved.
So, we should embrace and welcome that odd looking person in the church, but let’s not be unaware of Satan’s devices. And although Screwtape is dated in terms of style and culture, it is bang up to date in terms of the deceitfulness of the human heart, most especially our own. Lewis could not have written as insightfully as he did had he not known himself to be a sinner, and this is one of the enduring reasons why he is still always worth reading.
- Lewis personally disliked hymns and hymn singing (he once turned down a chance to help edit a hymn book on the grounds that he would be a bad person for this job due to his personal preferences) and had very fastidious taste in literature and music, so perhaps his own snobbery showed through here. On the other hand, he reminds us that the devil is a liar and always tries to put everything Christian in its worst light. Which is one reason we need apologetics.
Old Hampshire C S Lewis Society 