Our Deepest Fear Is That We Are Boring
Deep down we all know that one of the biggest challenges in ministry, even in our own person spiritual lives, is boredom. I am not sure which is more terrifying, leading something that people unanimously find boring or being bored by it all myself.
I am intimately acquainted with boredom. I always struggled to sit still. So much of the story of my life can be considered through the lens of an unending quest to stave off boredom. Some of the stupidest things I have ever done I did because I was bored, including (but not limited to) jumping off our roof with an umbrella, and trying to light fireworks by pouring a line of gunpowder leading up to them (a caper that actually burned off my eyebrows).
However, boredom also pushed me towards some of the smartest things I’ve done, too. I ran for class president because I was bored with school. I played high school sports because I was bored after school. I learned to use tools, and how to take apart a bike and put it back together. I invented elaborate games, and was in constant ergonomic research and development of the best arrangement of my room. And of course, the best thing boredom has ever pushed me to do, is to plant churches. I have planted (and helped to plant) so many in large part because of this ongoing, lifelong, battle with boredom.
Peter Toohey, in his thrilling and thought provoking book “Boredom, A Lively History,” argues that boredom comes from repetition and confinement. Shockingly, this seemingly innocuous experience actually produces some of our most dangerous emotions; anger, depression and disgust (boredom is to disgust what frustration is to anger). This may not be something we have thought through, but just try and remember the last time you were profoundly bored — perhaps it was in church — and you will recall feeling these very same emotions.
The experience of boredom is like the slowing of time. Like monotony it is the psychological torture of confinement. When we are truly and completely bored, we tend to compare the experience to dying, saying we are “bored to death.” While hyperbole, this is not completely untrue as it relates to ministry (especially preaching). When we are bored in the presence of the church we are experiencing a kind of spiritual death.
Boredom has its place in the ancient Christian experience as one of the tests and temptations of the desert, solitude, and extended prayer. The desert was a place of confinement and repetition, and ultimately a place of temptation (a meeting with the Devil). The fourth century desert father Evagrius, in his work called ‘On the Eight Evil Thoughts’ names what he calls “acedia,” or the noonday demon. In his description, it is hard not to rename the noonday demon the demon of boredom. Boredom opens us to temptation, because what we feel in the throes of boredom is actually disgust. In that disgust with the fruitlessness of that moment or even our lives as a whole we are open to something that is more appealing and that promises to release dopamine into our brains. One study revealed that 52% of teenagers are at risk of using drugs if they have one of the three characteristics: stress, too much money, or boredom.
However, Toohey argues that boredom is actually a good emotion, precisely because it produces anger and even disgust. It becomes a healthy catalyst to unhealthy repetition or confinement. Boredom can save us from complacency; a yawn is not a sign of sleep but instead actually a sign of fighting sleep, increasing the blood flow to a tiring brain. The yawn is our body’s attempt to antagonize sleepiness. Maybe spiritual boredom is in the same way meant to antagonize apathy, spiritual idleness, and inactivity.
Part of the motivation for planting a church should actually be disgust. A yawn against disbelief, hopelessness, and unforgiveness. Disgust protects us from disease and things that could be dangerous to us. When we feel that way toward things like abuse, idolatry, and all kinds of evil, what can we really do besides summon the presence of Christ Jesus, in his prescribed form, the church? Research shows that people find a towel with a brown stain more disgusting than a towel with a blue stain. This sense of disgust protects us from hidden but potentially very real danger. Boredom is the disgust of confinement and repetition without reason. Maybe we are spiritually disgusted with ourselves to protect us from something that is spiritually dangerous. Maybe we should feel some disgust by a neighborhood without a witness to the reality of Jesus, a kingdomless place.
If you have ever felt bored in prayer, you know that there is a temptation to think you must be doing it wrong, or to just assume that your faith is weak because your attention span seems so short, but perhaps that boredom is not a bad thing. Maybe it is God letting you know to shake it up; not to stop praying, but to pray differently. What if God is bored too? What if that disgust you feel is meant to make you wake up and change something?
If you have ever felt bored in a church service (God knows I have), maybe that is not a bad thing either. Maybe the work of the noonday demon is something God uses to wake us from our monotony and shake us from our complacency. Maybe being bored by church is the perfect time to plant a new one. Perhaps that disgust is a warning light going off in my heart because God is greater than the confinement of his word and work in this one place and this one group of people.
I wish that everyone who feels bored with their life would plant some expression of the church. Maybe God made us for adventure, and life was meant to be something it currently isn’t. If you are bored with the church as it is, maybe it is time to go plant a new one. Maybe we are not testing ourselves, and maybe the disgust we feel is with the lameness of our lives and the truce we have called with mediocrity. What if the part of us that longs for God, the part of us that used to dream, the part of us that once walked under the miraculous cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, the part of us that walked through a parted sea from the hands of certain death, what if that part is screaming out from the deepest place in our soul: “There is more. You were meant for more!”
The disgust and torture of boredom is really a gracious reminder to look for something more. Our deepest spiritual crisis can be described as boredom, and this kind of existential boredom is what St. John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul.” It creates a sense of emptiness, isolation, disgust, and waywardness. Whether it is ordinary boredom or existential boredom, I do believe that the sense of unfulfilled longing offers honest data about whatever is causing the crisis, and I am convinced that prolonged exposure to ordinary boredom in a church setting eventually creates existential boredom as we question the deepest things of God in the tedious, lifeless settings of church done wrong.
If church planting is cure for our boredom then we have to remember that the churches we end up planting can also become a place of boredom for our people, and to release them to do mission too. First, we must vow not to bore them. But in so doing, not be tempted instead to entertain.
Entertainment is not the cure for boredom, on the contrary it only increases the appetite for the wrong kind of experience and church as entertainment has actually caused great harm to the work of the grass roots church planter.
I would argue that the real work of staving off boredom is not to entertain, but to captivate. The one we do, the other is the work of God alone. One feels within our control and the other requires emotional vulnerability and surrender. We have to live a life of witness, engagement and risk. To see the church formed where it did not exist is never boring. This work promises us the novelty and joy of following the Spirit of God and in turn, this is the kind of life we must lead our people toward.
If boredom, at its best, is a warning light about the trajectory of a course of action or situation, and a clue to an unfulfilled longing, then boredom inside the church has to make us look for change and allow our people to go an do what has brought us life. Something that repeats itself, but is never monotonous, never the same twice. Plant the church again. And again. And again.
