Does your church practice competitive virtue signaling? If so, then you may already be in hell!

Radical honesty creates authentic community. Jesus is the great Amen of God, the Yes to life in all its agony and ecstasy. Following his example and empowered by the Spirit, the church also says yes to life, to both its joy and its suffering.

Suffering wants us to believe that we are alone, but love knows differently. For this reason, the church provides consolation. The word consolation derives from the Latin con or with, and solus or lonely. It means “to be with the lonely.” Consolation does not take away the pain, but it does lighten it, because pain coupled with loneliness is excruciating.

We suffer less when we suffer with others, and we suffer less when we suffer wisely, so we suffer best when we suffer in a wise community. A thirteen-year-old youth in our church lost a friend who was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. The Sunday after the accident, the youth came to church and, as her fellow parishioners offered condolences, eventually began weeping.

Three matrons of the church, who had known her since she was born, stood up, surrounded her, and just comforted her—undistracted, undisturbed, and undismayed—until she was finished. Did they make her sadness go away? No. Did they explain why this tragedy happened? No. Did they let her know, without words, that life would continue, and become good again? Yes, because they believed in the power of community: “Bear one another’s burdens,” writes Paul, “and thus fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2).

Backstage churches are authentic; frontstage churches are inauthentic. Our sharing of sorrows helps us to get real and live authentically, but such sharing occurs only in backstage churches. Backstage churches are different from frontstage churches. In frontstage churches, everyone puts their best foot forward, showing up well-dressed and clean and all put together. Many frontstage churches believe that God rewards religious virtue with health and wealth. God may test us, on occasion, but if we respond faithfully to the test, then God will reward us with even greater prosperity, as in the utterly shallow, prosaic conclusion to Job. These churches inevitably devolve into the hellhole of competitive virtue signaling, in which parishioners compete to see who can appear the most virtuous, hence the most blessed by God.

Worse, if a church believes that God sends suffering as a punishment for vice, then parishioners will have to hide their suffering from each other. We know a woman in a fundamentalist area of the country whose young daughter got cancer. She set up a website to raise money for medical bills and, being a person of faith, she asked for prayers on the website as well. Most comments were kind and supportive, but a large number speculated about how her family had sinned, causing God to punish them. Others suggested ways that they could get right with God so the cancer would go away, or even claimed that their use of modern medicine revealed a lack of faith. The mother had to edit her request for prayer, insisting that the cause of her daughter’s cancer was purely medical, and she informed visitors that any comments suggesting otherwise would be deleted.

The belief that human suffering is divine punishment for hidden sin produces frontstage churches and lonely churchgoers, a combination of words that should be oxymoronic. Likewise, the belief that prosperity is a reward for virtue produces pride: “My life is perfect, see how God has blessed me!” This boast is a misery-inducing lie, to oneself and everyone else. It arises from envious insecurity and sinks us deeper within it. It misrepresents God’s love as conditional and separates parishioners from one another.

Frontstage churches foster rivalry rather than grace and contest rather than community. “Therefore, let’s have no more lies. Speak truthfully to each other, for we are all members of one body,” admonishes Paul (Ephesians 4:25). Because we need to be known, because we need to be seen, we need to share ourselves with one another. In backstage churches, we allow each other to see the inevitable messiness of our lives. Acknowledging the universality of our struggles frees us from envy and recenters us in one another. Sharing life’s joys and worries allows us to be loved through both and to love others through both. This love is oxygen for the soul. Acceptance after self-revelation heals, while secrets eat at us like tapeworms. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 216-217)

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For further reading, please see:

Jurgen Moltmann. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. London: SCM Press, 1993.

Danielle Shroyer. Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.