Not long ago, a pastor ran into a woman who had just visited his church with her family. The pastor told her the church appreciated her visit and he hoped they would return. She replied, “We enjoyed the service, but right now we’re just shopping around for the church that meets our needs.”

After all, what is the church about if not about meeting our needs? Of course, the church wants to meet people’s needs. But that begs deeper questions: “Which needs should the church attempt to meet? Who determines which needs the church will not attempt to meet?”

We live in a day when many are convinced that the church should take its cue from business and be more “consumer oriented.” Pastors are urged to create “user friendly” worship and programs that meet people’s needs. In this view, church is a product offered for consumption, to attract and satisfy more customers (or keep the ones you’ve got).

What is the greatest service the church can render? Perhaps it is not necessarily what people think they need. The church is not only about meeting my needs but also about rearranging my needs, giving me needs I would never have had if I had not come to church. (While we are asking what people want, we ought to ask the more frightening question: What does God want?)

The church is not here to meet people’s needs. The church is called to the counter-cultural activity of serving God in a world that does not worship God. In my experience, most of us come to church for the wrong reasons. That is, we come seeking confirmation of our preconceptions, help with our problems, fellowship with people like us.

In worship, in the life of the church, God wants to take our wrong reasons and reform them, redirect our desires, give us more than we would have known how to ask for. In the preaching of God’s Word, our preconceptions get challenged and changed. What we thought were our problems are revealed to be trivial and we are given problems we would have never had before we met Jesus. We come seeking mere fellowship with other people and are astounded to receive friendship with God.

I recall with great shame an incident when I was a zealous young street preacher establishing an outreach in Brooklyn, New York. A well-known Presbyterian church graciously lent us their social hall to conduct our afternoon services. One day while sitting with the church’s minister, in my bold passion for God, I bluntly said, “I feel sorry for you.” All the outward religious trappings, the empty traditions. Where was love for Jesus in all this? I assumed, of course, that our own ‘traditions’ weren’t traditions at all, but straight out of the Bible. It’s amazing how pure you can be in your own eyes.

This encounter was long before I would painfully learn that the ‘sinners’ inside the church are as bad as those outside. Jesus’ story about the Pharisee and the tax-collector bears out the truth that we Pharisee-Christians are worse than garden-variety ‘heathens’. I like to play a little loose with the story and tell it as if it were about two church-goers today. It’s similar to the Cain and Abel story. They were both in a worship service when one of them became offended that his righteousness was found lacking.

When the apostle Paul wrote to the Philippian church he called all of his own moral, law-keeping zeal nothing but “dung” (the Greek word is not as polite). Some like to think he was referring only to his pre-Christian years. His arguments in Romans and Galatians, however, were aimed at the self-chosen, works-righteousness of Christians.

Paul’s earnest plea to God was that he be found in Christ not having his own righteousness, but to be clothed in the unearned, undeserved righteousness of Christ Jesus. That is no little prayer and no small job for a God who only justifies the ungodly (Romans 4:5). Good people need not apply.

Now as I step to the pulpit each Sunday I eagerly look forward to the Confession, to unloading all the pharisaical pretense I’ve managed to pick up during the week. (I know, it’s a nasty habit. I’m not proud of it.) I especially love to speak and hear the words of Absolution: “Almighty God in His mercy has given His Son to die for you, and for His sake forgives all your sins. As a called and ordained servant of Christ, and by His authority, I forgive you all your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The forgiveness of sins that comes to us in the gospel is a reminder that if there is ever found in us a shred of righteousness, it is by grace alone. It is a pure gift from a Savior who gave His life for sinners like you and me.

David Sczepanski has been Pastor of Gospel Outreach Reformational Church since 1993. Recently the church moved its congregation and school to a newly-constructed building at 2845 St. James Place, Eureka. Sunday morning service is held at 10 AM.