Define “Good”

If you go to church, and especially if you’re in church leadership, you probably heard about a Gallup poll published back in March reporting that church membership in the U.S. has fallen below 50% of the population for the first time in polling history. Most of us kind of knew church was trending down due to waning attendance and an increasingly obvious dearth of younger members, but aside from boosting our social media presences and flooding our lobbies with coffee and doughnuts, many of us hadn’t demonstrated any real sense of urgency about it. “If you caffeinate them, they will come,” might have been our perceived strategy to your average onlooker.

Now the writing is on the wall, as it were, and we’re all forced to face the situation head-on. How did this happen? Where did people go? What does it all mean?

The easy, fallback answer is that the world – and/or our country specifically – is getting “worse,” right? People are growing farther away from God, and they’re making bad decisions…such as not going to church. But is that really what’s happening? What if this trend is actually an indictment of the church/organized religion itself rather than of the people who are turning away from it?

I ask because recently, at the accumulating behest of several friends and family members, I binge-watched The Good Place. Everyone told me I was going to love it. They told me it was right up my alley. They told me it would make me happy. They were absolutely correct on all counts.

All stories reflect God’s story, and it turns out The Good Place is an overachiever in that regard. In a nutshell, the show is about the afterlife, what it may be like, and ultimately, how to get to “The Good Place” (their term for heaven, if you will). Here, to the best of my ability, is a single-sentence, spoiler-free summary of each of its four glorious seasons:

Season 1 – Where are we, how did we get here, and why frozen yogurt?

Season 2 – Try, try again…but stay away from trolleys.

Season 3 – Can we we move onward and upward by going backward and down?

Season 4 – All’s fair love, war, and happy endings…or at least, it should be.

Though completely secular in its exploration of the human condition and the afterlife, The Good Place manages to provide a convicting accidental (probably?) commentary on the quandary the church is facing today. In particular, the show exposes our failure to admit and deal appropriately with the complexity of three pivotal concepts:

1. Unintended Consequences

After many attempts to earn their way into The Good Place through better living, the main characters come to the realization that it’s nearly impossible to get there because of all the unknown and unintended consequences which result from every decision we make.

An example they give: In 1534, Douglas Wynegarr of Hawkhurst, England gave his grandmother a dozen roses for her birthday. He picked them himself and walked them over to her. She was happy. For this, Douglas was awarded 145 points by The Good and Bad Places’ collaborative points system. Go, Douglas!

In 2009, Doug Ewing of Scaggsville, Maryland also gave his grandmother a dozen roses. She was happy. He lost four points in the same system. Why? Well, first he ordered the roses from his cell phone…which was made in a sweat shop. Also, the flowers were grown with toxic pesticides and picked by exploited migrant workers, then delivered from thousands of miles away, creating a massive carbon footprint. Finally, the profits of this sale went to a racist CEO who sexually harassed his employees. Doug knew none of this when he ordered the flowers, but the consequences remain.

With so many unintended consequences to everything they do, people cannot possibly earn their way into The Good Place. The system is failing the people, not the other way around.

What if the church today is shrinking because the system by which it operates and the structure on which it’s built are actually setting everyone – including its own participants! – up to fail?

Consider this parallel to the analogy of the Dougs: A small group of Christians in the first century meets together in one of their member’s homes. Their activities include sharing dinner, discussing current events, reading over one of Paul’s letters, and spending time encouraging and building each other up. At the end of their evening, they pool their resources to support local widows. For this, in the points system of The Good Place, let’s estimate they would earn, like, 150 points.

A small group of Christians in 2019 holds a similar meeting in a member’s home, with all the same activities. Collectively, they lose 25 points, and here’s just a small list of potential reasons: Maybe they create a menu which includes unethically sourced ingredients or fails to consider the dietary needs of a vegetarian member; maybe their discussions of current events assume everyone is of the same political persuasion and they insult those “on the other side” – which happens to include some of the people present; maybe their Bible study uses exclusive language and Christianese terms like fellowship and providence and prevenient grace without explaining them, which makes a new believer in their ranks feel confused and foolish; finally, maybe the collection they take up is done such that it shames people into contributing whether they can afford to or not, and maybe the ministry it supports is accidentally exclusive because it requires recipients to travel to the church building for help and the people who need it most can’t get there.

So many potential pitfalls. How can anyone possibly avoid them all?

2. Judgment

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen 2 Timothy 3:1-5 on Facebook over the last year, I could be writing this from my second or third home, probably some kind of palace in the moors of Scotland or something. And every time it pops up, I have the same questions: How can anyone be sure that YOU are the good guy in this story, and others are definitely the wayward, reckless, swollen-with-conceit ones? Isn’t it automatically arrogant and abusive to post/call out others publicly for their perceived sins? What if you are accidentally incriminating yourself?

We are so quick to externalize our spiritual condition and use the Bible to judge or shame others.

People love to say, “The Bible clearly says…” and then go on to isolate a verse or passage to support whatever claim they want to make. This is incomplete and misleading at best. One of the most personally influential and wise pastors I ever met, Dr. Robert S. Miller taught that responsible Bible study requires taking the whole of scripture into account. With this in mind, every time Jesus spoke of judgment, it was in the context of righteousness; in short, he always said not to do it until/unless you yourself are blameless and without sin – not merely forgiven, nor even blameless in the specific area in which you are judging, but altogether without sin. Which you’re not. So just don’t do it.

In The Good Place (just as in the Bible), there is only one judge, one entity with the power and wisdom to decide the fates of humanity as individuals and as a whole. When the points system is revealed to be flawed, our characters can’t just turn to themselves and their own understanding of life/human nature/the law/the universe to make the call on what to do about it. That privilege (and responsibility!) goes to a higher authority.

That metaphor ultimately breaks down because their Judge (played by the inimitable Maya Rudolph) is flawed and way more infatuated with Timothy Olyphant than ours (maybe?), but the point is this: Any talk directed toward someone else’s life about what the Bible does or does not condone is a distraction, because scripture was never meant to be weaponized for humans against other humans in the first place.

Whenever we see the word of God likened unto a sword in the Bible, it is in a position against the forces of evil, corruption, and falsehood; more often and poignantly, it’s a tool for cleansing. In the Tabernacle and the Temple, the word was represented by the laver, a wash basin made from bronze mirrors; when you washed your hands, you saw your reflection in the bottom (NOT, it is worth noting, the reflection of your neighbor).

In the full context of scripture, we are exhorted to manage the motives and conditions of our own hearts, and leave the judging of others to God. The message is always: give yourself examination and correction; give others grace. The public persona of the church these days very much has it twisted to face the other way; we are quick to judge others for their actions, while giving ourselves grace for our intentions – sometimes even going so far as to credit intent as righteousness – all while overlooking and even justifying how we are affecting and hurting those around us…and people have noticed.

Speaking of grace…

3. Grace

Grace can actually be another one of those Christianese words we throw around, overused in church jargon to the point that its meaning has become diluted or even lost. Grace is a miracle, an act of boundless, extravagant, overwhelming love. It sets us free from penalties and pressures and empowers us to live fully as our whole selves. It’s what makes us able to be and do better…and even to want to do better. Grace is true love’s kiss.

The Good Place’s greatest strength is in its complicated portrayal of everyone’s need for grace. It makes it clear that no one can get in on their own, most poignantly in the sorry saga of Doug Forcett. In all of human history, Doug was the person closest to predicting perfectly what the afterlife would be like: the points system, the division between good and bad places, all of it. Did this insight make Doug happy, or even give him a leg up in the ability to achieve goodness and secure his spot in The Good Place? Not at all. In fact, Doug turns out to be the most miserable of souls, terrified to make a misstep or do anything for his own pleasure out of fear that he’ll fail. He submits himself to a life of isolation, denial, and complete absence of self-care or even boundaries so he can get every possible point. Even so, after all that misery in the pursuit of good, Doug is unable to attain even half of the points needed to make it into The Good Place under this system of works. If Doug couldn’t do it, it simply can’t be done.

I cried watching Doug’s story unfold and sharing the horrified reactions of his onlookers, because it drove home for me why Jesus came, and what an act of love it truly was that he did. I cannot achieve a perfect life or even consistently perfect intentions on my own. There will always be subconscious fears, unintended consequences, and self-serving motives somewhere working against me. Sometimes I see them, sometimes I don’t, always I need God’s Spirit with me to help me keep fighting and going and growing.

Jesus came to set us free from the points system, expressed in western Christianity as legalism. There is more to this life. More than “making it” or being bad/good/right. More than actions vs. intentions. More than serving ourselves, and more than diminishing ourselves for someone else. More than personal growth and experiences. More than we see or think or feel or fail at or achieve. More than any or all of it combined.

The church is shrinking because we have lost sight of the more. We have traded open doors for restrictive traditions which best serve only certain types of people, and the majority of people are no longer that type. We have become an organization with ministries that support itself instead of the other way around. We are more proficient at making good members of the organization than at making disciples. We have ceased to be bearers of good news for today’s people and problems. We have become ordinary, self-satisfied, and irrelevant.

Good news, friends: There’s grace and more for that, too.