[the teeny-tiniest of spoilers below]
Late last month, millions and millions of people from around
the globe (including myself and my family) assembled together in local
gathering places, all on the same day, all with a sense of reverence, anticipation, and
joy. We gathered together to celebrate victory over death and the vanquishing
of evil powers in this world. And, while people have attended similar
assemblies many times before, year after year . . . for the first time, our
gatherings grossed more than a billion
dollars!
I am, of course, talking about opening night of Avengers: Endgame, which premiered on
April 27 and which destroyed all previous box office records by earning $1.2
billion. The movie was pretty good, as far as such things go. As a life long
comic book geek, I continue to be torn between relief that being into Marvel
superheroes and villains and the Infinity Stones is now mainstream, rather than
a “Dork City” stamp on my cultural passport, and annoyance at all these
Johnny-come-latelies horning in on my
thing. I mean, if you would have told me in 1991 that the comic book
miniseries my friends and I were obsessing over would be made into a movie
almost thirty years later, I would have assumed the audience would be a small
niche-of-a-niche type thing.
But that’s not what happened. Not even close.
In fact, even if you
haven’t seen any movies from the
Marvel Cinematic Universe, you must
know something about them. After all, there have been more than twenty star-studded films
over the course of a decade, all telling their own stories while also
furthering this one overarching plot, building up to a massive battle of good
versus evil, life versus death.
As a Christian, that should sound sort of familiar. Our
sacred text is a collection of sixty-six books, each telling its own story
while furthering the overarching metanarrative of God coming to save us and
defeat the Dragon. Which brings us to the question: why, in a year when (according to one news story I read) church
attendance was falling even while Easter approached, did a record number of
people cram themselves into crowded theaters for a three-hour-long movie with
really no good point at which to duck out and pee?
I know, I know. Church is a completely different phenomenon from a movie with lasers and aliens
and a $350 million budget (at least it should be!), but I still think we can
learn something from how, less than a week after Easter, a story about a “god”
of thunder (who has—spoiler alert!—kind
of let himself go) and his friends fighting a big purple bad guy can so engage
theatergoers on day one, even in an age of streaming movies, digital platforms,
etc. Endgame didn’t have a better
story than we do; so what accounts for all the success?
I have several suggestions:
·
Anticipation
– This movie was the culmination of twenty films that came before it; it was
the grand finale and everyone knew it would be huge! I saw people dressed up as
superheroes at the theater. I saw people crying during the movie. People were
even spontaneously applauding, despite the fact that it was a theater, not theatre and therefore the actors
couldn’t actually hear the applause. Why
all this display? Because the audience had so built up inside themselves
expectation and desire for this event that when it finally happened, it was like opening the
floodgates of emotion. Granted, this one seems quite disconnected from
church on two levels: first, church isn’t (or, again, shouldn’t be) designed to manipulate your emotions until you pump
your fist and shout or break down and cry. And, secondly, a movie only needs to
draw a crowd out once (or maybe twice); it doesn’t need to sustain the sense of
anticipation in an open-ended way. Still, perhaps something we
can learn from Iron Man and Thanos is that approaching church with a sense of
anticipation (after all, we are gathering together with the saints to encounter the God of the universe!) can
set a tone and can be contagious. If those gathered have a sense of holy
anticipation or a sense of mundane routine, it can greatly color both our
experience and our desire to come back and experience that encounter again.
·
Excitement
- Okay, so this kind of overlaps
with the last one. But all the anticipation in the world won’t overcome a big
letdown if the delivery is underwhelming. In fact, high expectations can be a recipe for major dissatisfaction.
Luckily for Endgame, it delivered
laughs, tears, and tons of action and suspense. So, what then? Should
churches try and do that, only on a
much smaller (and much sadder) scale? No. A million times no! Rather, we should set
our anticipation—our hunger and thirst—on the things that the church is
supposed to deliver. Prayer, worship, reading and exposition of God’s Word. Where we set our hearts, excitement follows. In 1991, when I found a copy of Infinity Gauntlet #1 (the comic book
series on which this latest movie was very loosely based), I was ecstatic! I had longed for it and looked for it and
finally found and acquired it! If we long for encounters with God and find him
regularly in his Word and obey him in gathering together to encourage and edify
each other, to worship him, and to encounter him in the bread and the cup and
the waters of baptism . . . we will be excited. And not with the kind of
contrived excitement that lasts only a moment (or three hours), but with
something lasting. We will be satisfied.
·
Community
– Feeding into the massive throngs on
opening weekend were the many conversations, fan theories, videos, etc. being
shared about Endgame—both in person and over the Internet. (Heck, I was on a podcast discussing the movie the morning after I saw it.) You don’t get to a billion
dollars at the box office by enticing individuals to come see your movie; you
do it by creating communities of people, all coming together, talking about it the day before at church and debriefing it over
coffee and dessert afterwards. Likewise, it’s no accident that all the most
successful TV shows during my lifetime have been water cooler fodder—people
wanting to discuss a common interest, in which they are all invested. The same
is true of church. When we approach our spiritual lives as private,
individualistic aspects of our lives, of course they are going to run cold.
When we fan each other’s flames of faith and devotion, though, when we discuss
our lives as followers of Jesus and lift each other up, we are more likely to,
in the words of St. John, “overcome to the end.”
·
Resolution
– Most people who saw Endgame had
seen most of the previous movies. I knew a number of people who were hurrying
to binge all of them in time for the finale. And those (like me) who had been
watching them for ten years were happy to have some closure/resolution. You
see, every Marvel movie had ended—after the credits—with a cliffhanger/teaser
for what was coming next. It left you always a little off-balance, a little
ill-at-ease. But now all that tension would be resolved. And while attending
church certainly doesn’t remove the cliffhangers and stress from our lives, we
do have the end of the story. We know how it plays out. And we can remind each
other of that. We can encourage each other in the name of the Lord. We can
gather together at the end of the weekend, as a new week dawns, and be reminded
that God will never leave us, that he is working all things for the good of
those who love him, and that he will not suffer all the loose ends hanging
there forever. He is a God of resolution. In fact, the over-arching story of
the Bible can be broken down into four parts: creation, fall, redemption, and
consummation. That last part is as real to us now as anything can be: our God
will wipe away every tear and right every wrong. It’s important for us to
remind each other of those promises.
· Peer Pressure – So let's face it, some people didn't care at all about the plot of the movie or any of the characters; they just didn't want to miss out. They felt like they should see it so they wouldn't be left out of conversations, confused by memes, etc. This used to be a factor with church as well, especially at Easter and other big holidays. I think this is fading away too. Which is just as well. Peer pressure can up your numbers but it's not the best way to bring people to the cross. Yes, the Word of God never returns void and I know of a number of people who have come to faith when they didn't really even want to come to church. But the world has changed and we can no longer count on some cultural sense of I should go to bring people to the Lord's house on the Lord's Day. Church attendance on the whole is down quite a bit and this is part of it.
But here's the weird thing: over the past couple decades, per capita attendance at movie
theaters has waned quite a bit as well, which makes these huge blockbuster successes all the
more noteworthy. And yet, I’ve noticed something else happening in theaters over
that same time period. There are a lot more perks, comforts, and even luxuries
to be had. At the cinema right near my house, you can now buy a glass of wine
to sip while you watch. You sit in big, cushy easy-chair-type seats, which recline with
the touch of a button. The picture is crisper than ever and the sound has never
made you feel more like you’re right
there. We’ve got 3D films, IMAX screens six stories tall, and special seats
that shake and move with the action. And yet, none of this has kept people from
going out to the theater less and less. Tubs of popcorn with free refills and
seven different flavors of topping, robotic soft drink dispensers with 18 types
of Dr. Pepper (seriously, who wants peach
Dr. Pepper???)—none of it really succeeded in creating the sort of pull that a good
story, a lot of excitement and anticipation, and a desire to belong to a
community could.
In the same way, many churches today are trying to create
all the comforts and luxuries they can to entice a lost world to come and
experience an encounter with God. And while there’s nothing wrong with most of
it, we can easily become distracted from the story itself. Instead, let’s focus on
gathering together each week with a sense of anticipation, hungering and
thirsting for God’s Word, for the bread and the cup, desiring nothing more than
to lift up his name with our fellow believers and share our walks and lives
together.
It’s true that the word for “church” in the Greek comes from
the words “out” and “to call,” but by the time the New Testament was written,
it had one meeting: “assembly.” To “be
the church,” then, is to come together and worship, come together and serve,
come together and love one another and receive forgiveness in Jesus’ name. In a
time when casual and cultural church attendance has all but disappeared, it’s
perhaps more important than ever for those who truly follow Jesus to come
together with excitement and expectancy in the assembly of the saints.
Or to put it another way . . . Christians, assemble!
