Hysteria is the state of unmanageable fear or emotional excesses whereby a crisis renders us paralysed to act to address our situation.
So for the many passionate, articulate and striving-to-be-authentic peers I have encountered down through the last ten years around the island of Ireland who can diagnose with pinpoint accuracy how Christianity in the form of the church has failed them, hurt them, bored them, underwhelmed them or otherwise turned them off; is hysteria not appropriate word to describe them?
You sit here and read this. And you may well be hysterical.
You might be a Roman Catholic living a liturgy-haunted world or a born and bred Presbyterian who really hates how staid and formal church can be or maybe you are a burnt Pentecostal who is rebelling against anti-intellectualism. It doesn’t matter where you came from. If you have been able to see scars or sicknesses in the Body, then it is your job to get stuck in and fix them. The dugout is not an option for the Christian, nevermind the grandstand or even more commonly, the reports in the sports pages the next day. We have to be on the field playing the game and honing our skills.
If you can identify the problems or a problem within the church, if a local body of Christians has let you down or judged you or hurt you, then you have the means at your disposal to make a difference. Get in there and make the changes needed. Or get together and create new formulations based around the things you have learned together. To back away and be consumed by your disappointments, to be paralysed by your insight that the church is not finished yet, that is hysterical.
There is no beauty that can compare with God. There is no potential greater than local groups of Jesus people. There is nothing the world needs more than grace. But when I look around at Irish Christians in their 20’s, with respect and acknowledgement that I am way out of bounds to even try to make the judgment, I see people who are either busy cursing religious practice for being religious from a distance or people who are falling into a kind of religious practice with better style, devoid of the scalpel sharpness of authentic Christian communities.
We need alternatives. But we need you to craft them.
Take a deep breath. Remember where we’re called to go. And push back against the hysteria.
Your Correspondent, He didn’t come in here to do no conquering, he came in here to do a little bargaining
preach it brother
Provocative. But to backtrack to your first couple of paragraphs, I don’t see how being bored, underwhelmed or turned off implies that one is in a state of unmanageable fear or emotional excess. Being failed or hurt *might*, but not necessarily so. Non sequitur. So to answer your rhetorical question, no, I don’t think hysterical is an appropriate word. ;o)
Maybe you can elaborate?
If Zoomtard’s archives prove one thing, it is that I can elaborate.
When faced with the proposition that church is making, being left bored does induce emotional excess. We both know the kind of things that turn us off in church. It isn’t the shape of the pews or the colour of the walls but the hatred or the untruths proclaimed as our essential source of hope. This can be the source of a legitimate internal chaos. And so on…
I was writing here about the kind of Christians I spent far too many of my student weekends with. They had experienced grace and loved Jesus but have grown tired (or hurt or failed) by the church. That disappointment can be felt very seriously. It can induce a kind of paralysis at getting involved. But I think that the disappointments we have experienced are the absolutely essential ingredient in a new expression of ekklessia in Ireland.
Nicely done.
)
Great stuff here again Zoom. I see myself in the group that is cynical and as a result a poor contributer.
Just wondering how you reconcile this statement
“Or get together and create new formulations based around the things you have learned together.”
with what you were saying last week about independant churches.Am i missing something here?
I think a common context in which people grow bored is when a Church’s organisational structure does not enable individuals to make a difference at an organisational level. Perhaps sharing Christ’s love on an individual level is then sufficient?
This post provokes a desire to change, but it may not reach deep enough in combating frustration. Really a small post isn’t enough and an entire series on how to deal with hysteria may be required. For example, I suspect people often reach this stage because they don’t have well defined bounds on what they are responsible for (how they can act to encourage change) and what they aren’t responsible for (how others respond to their actions). If we scatter seed, a good thing has happened and we should be encouraged. If the seed fails to produce a harvest we should consider what we can do better, but if we can’t see where to go from there, let’s not give up.