Form Over Function?
Reminder – This Sunday (9/10) is our All-Church Vision Sunday. That means we will only have one service at 9:30 am in the gym. That’s right, one service together in the gym! And then we will have lunch options for purchase, free Kona Ice, and time to be together in fellowship.
When I was in high school, I was really into guitars. Now, before you get too far ahead in this story, I was definitely not good at playing guitar. My friends were always kind to me and while they were really talented, they let me join in the fun with them and never made me feel bad for my inability to keep tempo. Here’s the thing about my guitar-playing career, I loved collecting guitars more than I actually loved playing them. Over the years, I was able to acquire some pretty cool guitars. Early on I really wanted a specific style of acoustic guitar, and I started saving my money. However, what I wanted and what I could really afford were two very different things. So I sought the advice of my friends who were more knowledgeable on these things. They encouraged me to look for an acoustic guitar that didn’t have all of the features I was looking for and instead buy one that played and sounded great. Did I listen to them? Nope. I wanted what I wanted, and I was looking for a specific type of guitar. It was the form of the guitar that I was most preoccupied with, and that was a problem.
After a few months of saving money, I went to a local music store called Pianos n’ Stuff. It was a local institution, and ironically, they didn’t sell pianos! I was determined to buy the specific style of acoustic guitar, after all, I had waited for what felt like an eternity. And you know what? I walked out of the store that day with a new guitar! But, after a few months with it, I realized my friends were right. The guitar I could afford really didn’t do anything well. It played and sounded okay. Its construction was decent. And its onboard electronics really didn’t work well. In fact, I ended up having to spend more money to make them work. Because I put such emphasis on the form of the guitar over the function I wound up with regret and guitar that I didn’t want to play only a few months after purchasing it.
Have you ever done something like that? Where you prized the form of something above how it functioned and then ended up regretting a purchase or realizing your mistake? Honestly, we’ve all been there. Maybe it was your first car. You passed up on the reliable option for the stylish one and spent too much money keeping it running. Or maybe it was college. You really wanted to go to that one school even though the more affordable one was just as good. The thing is, we don’t just do this with purchases. We also do it in relationships and we do it in our relationship with God and the church. Too often, we have deep preferences for a form of church, and we miss out on the function that the church is to play in our lives. Or worse yet, we miss out on the work of God in our lives and through the body of Christ.
In Ezra 3 this is precisely what happened at the rebuilding of the Temple. Ezra, along with Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, had led the exiled people of Israel back to Jerusalem. Through Ezra’s specific leadership, they rebuilt the Temple and restored right worship of God. But there were some who had remembered Solomon’s Temple and wept because this restored version wasn’t nearly as big. Here is the really sad thing, they missed an amazing work of God because they prized form over function. The Temple was only glorious to them because of how it looked and not because it was the dwelling place of God on earth. Haggai would go on to chastise them when he told them that this restored Temple would have a far greater glory than the previous one.
When we think about our relationship with the local church, are we like those in Ezra who wept and missed God’s moving because we prize a certain form over function? That is not to say that form isn’t important. God gave very clear instructions in the book of Exodus for the form of the Temple. But the Temple was always glorious because of what happened there not just how it looked. If we want to be found faithful as a church, it is going to require each of us to stay focused on the function of the local church and give grace and charity when the form just isn’t our cup of tea. Remember, we don’t want to miss out on God because the form wasn’t our preference.