The Virtue in Boredom

Jordan Bloom of The American Conservative writes about a San Antonio megachurch that has recently spent $5 million dollars on an animatronic ark for their children's ministry. Given Bloom's high church leanings, he does the standard guffawing over such ostentatious expenditures (it's a good thing none of the older denominations of Christianity ever spend money frivolously). And he's right, of course, in a broad sense. It is pretty ridiculous to spend $5 million bucks on fake giraffes for children's church. Back in my day (the early 90s), we cut Bible characters out of coloring books, colored them with crayons, and then glued them to a Popsicle stick. Boom. Sunday School.

Look, its easy to make fun of excesses like this. The stories write themselves. But the pastor of the megachurch who defends the expenditure is absolutely correct when he points out that the church is competing against a lot of fancy enterprises more than willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money to get people to come by. We are a nation absolutely addicted to entertainment, and it is easy for people like me to talk about how church isn't the place for entertainment but I'm already a believer. When your goal is to bring new people into the fold, and you're competing against Disney World and Las Vegas, it is petty to impute bad motives to people who are trying to attract nonbelievers to their places of worship.

So the substance of Bloom's critique, and others who make similar critiques, ought to be directed more broadly against our culture itself. A culture that, above all, is absolutely terrified of being bored. I'm only being slightly tongue in cheek when I say that it is probably our greatest fear. Our entire cultural apparatus is constructed so that we will be protected from creeping boredom. Three year olds can operate smart phones so they can play Angry Birds while mom shops and they don't have to, even for a second, think of how to entertain themselves. Or just be bored and deal with it. A recent Sprint commercial informed its audience that we have a right (ah, the language of rights) to unlimited data. We are entitled to never having to be bored.

It is fair to hold the Church to a higher standard and worth arguing that we ought not be complicit in the dumbing down of our culture, but I don't know that we can point at San Antonio and say that is what they are doing. The church I went to in Manhattan met in a small, old-style church building with a steeple, a small meeting room and a basement with an open space and a kitchen. A hip Christian ideal. There was no room for any sort of children's church, and, in a classic case of chicken and egg, there were hardly any families with small children that attended. That was reality. And it wasn't going to suddenly change unless we bought a new place. We may bemoan it, bewail it, decry it, and gnash our teeth as we wish for the good old days of bewigged preachers and two hour sermons, but it is a fundamental reality of the culture the church is trying to reach.

Any change must start on the individual level, by encouraging Christian parents to unplug their kids. No smart phones (EVER!), allotted time for video games, allotted (and monitored) internet usage, mandatory reading time, mandatory backyard time. Make them sit in church with you and stay awake and take notes. (In junior high I went to a church with a Baptist preacher of the windbaggery persuasion and can tell you that kids can sit through 80 minutes of very boring sermoning maintaining good posture and a respectful demeanor.) Part of my goal in parenting Owen and the ones to come is to force them to be bored for at least part of every day. There is no virtue in boredom, but there is virtue in the fruits of boredom, properly channeled. And, yes, I have heard the old phrase "idle hands are the devil's playground." Two things: first, boredom is not the same thing as idleness; second, if idle hands are the devil's playground then what are young hands on an unbound technological device?

Implicit in my tiredness with these critiques of megachurch excess--critiques, remember, that I agree with--is that most of us making them are still complicit in the entertainment-saturated nature of our culture. For example, after writing a paragraph on the virtues of boredom I switched over to the Amazon tab on my browser and watched an episode of Justified on my prime account, afraid that this book on the Trinity I am reading would be less engaging than watching Timothy Olyphant strut around and shoot bad guys. In other words, we inundate our average lives with entertainment, hopping from blog to blog or video to video and then expect our churches to silence all of the noise for an hour and fifteen minutes on Sunday morning so we can contemplate in peace before we rush off into the next thing.

If we want the church to be different we need to be different. If we want the church to stand out from the constant noise of our culture we need to stand out from it as well. We can keep making fun of the megachurches which is a good enough time, but unless we are cultivating different habits in our daily life, habits which would make the church feel as if it weren't part of its mandate to entertain, then all we are really going to be doing is making fun of other Christians for being just like us every other time but Sunday morning.