Over the past decade, I’ve reflected on this question: put plainly, why do I experience a physical reaction of discomfort and cognitive dissonance when certain Christian maxims are uttered; especially when spoken with supreme confidence. An example of this is the Paschal greeting (”he is risen” followed by a response “he is risen indeed”). This phrase is commonly used on Easter Sunday and I typically experience physical agitation when I observe it in practice. I have a similar physical response during worship ceremonies at church when attendees raise their hands and close their eyes in worshipful adulation.

An atheist might venture I’ve outgrown primitive constructs like religion. A Christian might say the Holy Spirit is struggling to help me believe. For a long while I thought either could be true, but I’ve come to see that it’s neither. Instead, I’ve come to believe that church services, especially the type in which I was raised, practice dramatic forms that can act as a preventative barrier to truth seeking. These dramatic forms superficially and unnecessarily conflate with better questions about the true veracity of Christian tradition. I explore this idea in what follows, but should point out an important caveat before proceeding: I have no direct criticisms of ceremony or drama. In fact, ceremony is something incredibly, deeply human, acting as a type of abstraction that gives access to greater realities. Dramas, such as plays, are platforms for telling stories about truth. Problems only arise when ceremony or drama becomes preeminent over what they're meant to represent.

This entire analysis must start with the rather debatable idea of Sunday School. Children are naturally and wonderfully impressionable and it is this impressionability that makes Sunday School controversial in my mind. For me, Sunday School established ideas as truth before I could decide they were indeed truth. By adolescence, I knew the stories of Creation, the Burning Bush, David and Goliath, and of course the Crucifixion and Resurrection, with remarkable nuance. The repetition of these stories from infancy into adulthood established these ideas as truisms in my young mind. They were presented as unquestionably true. It was this form of unquestionability in pedagogy that acted as a strong reinforcement in the larger drama of church itself.

Beyond Sunday School, the main church service can be divided into three acts: worship, sermon, and invitation. During worship, my church experience largely comprised of a song leader, accompanied by a pianist, guiding the congregation through several hymns; however, in my last ten years of church experience production quality soared, with full bands delivering pop-quality performances. These experiences typically run twice as long as the sermon portion, while in the past the opposite would have been true.

Once worship concludes, the sermon begins. From a procedural viewpoint, a single Biblical passage is usually selected as the starting point and the reading of the passage marks that the sermon has officially begun. The pastor will then lay out other preliminaries, such as the sermon’s thesis and main points. It’s not uncommon for the opening to include some type of dramatic story or history, which is resurfaced near the end of the message to bring everything to a tidy end. It’s important to note that the sermon is intended to incentivize a posture of sorrow in the listener; sorrow for sin and a desire to find God’s grace and forgiveness. This brings us to an important point: although sermons are very often well structured with openings, sequential points, and closing comments, it must not be forgotten that the intent is to bring out a response in the listener.

This entire structure becomes incredibly interesting when viewed through the lens of ceremonial drama. Within the service itself (even beyond the sermon) there are characters, plot lines, climaxes, and dénouements. The pastor acts as a sort of prophet and the congregation as a sort of wayward people. The congregation is divided into striations of saints who must avoid resisting God’s spirit and unrepentant sinners who must finally capitulate to the will of God. The spirit of God influences the congregation, stirring them to action and gives the preacher the power to speak convincing words. Unconverted sinners play a sort of anti-hero, while demons are the true villains; these unsavory beings distract the saints from praying effectively and surrendering to God’s spirit. The ultimate goal of the demons is to prevent sinners from repenting.

The service comes to a close through the invitation. I wouldn’t so much refer to this as the climax so much as the denouement. In its own way, this invitation illustrates the drama format more than any other portion of the service. The pastor signals to the church musicians, indicating they are to come forward. They might select a hymn to perform such as Just as I Am by Charlotte Elliot (1836). This song, which provides strong motifs and lyrics of surrender to God, was a frequent staple by the invitation special teams in my childhood churches. The pastor then begins, for several minutes, to verbally invite the congregation to respond to his sermon. He speaks encouragement, praises humility, and rebukes pride and hardness of heart. Depending on what happens next, the invitation could be as short as two minutes, or as long as an hour. Usually it’s over within a couple of minutes, and the proverbial curtains close.

Specific criticisms of such church services can start with the aforementioned Sunday School. The issue, to be very clear, is not that children are taught Biblical stories. Instead, the issue is they are taught Biblical stories as unquestionably true events. It’s too much to even hope for, but imagine a Sunday School teacher asking a class of fifth graders to list every objection they can conceive as to why the story of Jonah is implausible. While such a standard of truth-seeking (challenging your own assumptions) is common everywhere else, it’s certainly not welcome in a church. If the events are as irrefutable as I remember some of my teachers claimed then there’s little risk the teachings are rejected by the class. It should withstand the rigor.

Unfortunately, this is not the practice nor even the attitude of a typical church. Instead, there is unintended priority for pedagogical efficacy, amounting to over-focus on compliance in belief. As the drama of the main service unfolds, the congregation already knows their role: the foundational themes, motifs, stories, and histories were laid out years ahead of time. The pastor carefully weaves the sermon, pointing out the foolishness of stubborn doubt and the virtues of submissive faith. The gentle but clear “amens” of patriarchs and matriarchs reinforces congregational support of the message. Finally, and with no little tension, the pastor closes his Bible, eyes resting on the top of the pulpit, as if struck blind by God’s hand. The invitation is given and sinners come forward to repent under the gentle lilting of hymns. The service is then closed and everyone returns to their homes, at peace with God and man.

The problem with all of this is that I can’t stop wondering if the movement at large has stopped long enough to ask if it believes the things underlying the drama? Returning to the previous example of the Paschal greeting, are attendees routinely asking themselves if they truly believe this maxim they’ve been declaring every Easter for decades on end? It is an incredibly serious and, if true, awe-inspiring claim. If it’s not true, then it’s a despicable farce. Either way, the frequently unthinking ceremonies of church motions obfuscates this serious question. Instead, the dramatic form has attempted to replace the underlying truth and failed.

Perhaps my frustrations ultimately come down to what feels like a greater interest in form over function. Even though the world today faces difficult questions, the church seems more interested in the drama of ceremonies than in whether the truth is being conveyed. The church should be willing to engage with the hardest questions humans are capable of conjuring up. The modern world is desperate for answers to these big questions. Christians claim to have the answers; they claim to quite literally worship the embodiment of Truth (remember, Jesus said he is the truth). If this is so, then the bar for truth seeking should be the highest for a church, not the lowest.

Whatever one thinks about the truth or falseness of Christianity, it isn’t a middle-of-the-road faith. One way or the other there are serious ramifications in accepting or rejecting it. There are also incredibly serious messages at the core. After all, the purpose of the invitation is to profess to God that you believe a Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth came back to life after being brutally murdered by Roman soldiers. All of that to say, each sermon is typically packaged in a single, dramatic speech where in the end you are given a few minutes to make an incredibly important decision. The assumption is that you’ve been given the information you need to make that decision, all before Just As I Am comes to a close.