I was invited to Summit Church this past Sunday. I don’t consider myself a Christian. I don’t self-apply any religious labels, really, but tend to think there are good things to be learned from most religious traditions, and I consider Jesus, out of all the secular and religious literature I’ve read, the best example for a good, spiritually fulfilled life. So it’s not like I was going into this place with some sort of Reddit-atheist chip on my shoulder.

But holy shit, the internal conflict that grew as this spectacle went on: I imagined Jesus standing behind the stage curtains, speaking in response to the pastor but unheard over the din: As the pastor called one member of the church to the stage to pray for her before she went away to do mission work in Asia, I could barely hear Jesus repeating his words in Matthew 6:5-6:

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”

The pastor must not have heard him. But maybe, I thought, Jesus would pull him over and have a little heart to heart as he walked off stage later.

Nope. Pastor left, pastor came back, and the sermon ended with a baptism-spectacle: a portable hot-tub rolled into the middle of the congregation, lines of people tearfully getting baptized as the rest of the churchgoers cheered them on, and Jesus, standing behind the curtains, repeated, “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” But nobody heard a thing.

I left, certain that there was no spiritual progress to be found there. Just another church taken over by the society of the spectacle, so that “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity.” Hence the words of the on-screen pastor that, rather than “running with perseverance the race that’s been marked out” (Hebrews 12:1), his congregation should “rest in the comforts of the work that Jesus has finished.” The fuck? At this point Jesus was no longer behind the curtain, and I’m pretty sure I heard him flip a table on his way out.

Maybe I’m taking this whole thing entirely wrong. Maybe thinking of Jesus as an awesome role model rather than as a deity makes me unable to grasp the virtue of this whole situation. But seriously, how can a church say that those within it are supposed to follow Jesus’ example, then center its activity around public dramatizations of “faith”? How can a church write off mystical encounters with the divine as, in the words of the on-screen pastor, “weird moments” brought on by “some sort of ritual” when its role model isolated himself in a garden and prayed himself into sweating blood (Luke 22:44)?

If we’re going to accept that there is some sort of divinity which can be encountered through spiritual practice--be that divinity a deity, Nature, a piece of our own psychologies left behind by confused evolutionary forces, whatever--and if we’re going to accept that Jesus gives a good example of how to contact that divinity, then we’ve got to conclude that this major church (and, by extension, the whole branch of performative Christianity of which it is a representative) is perpetrating some first-rate, God-tier bullshit.

But why do I care, you might ask, if I’m no Christian, no member of the church? Or am I just ranting to rant? I care, I’d answer, because I accept both of those premises in the last paragraph. And I have friends involved in this church and in various religious groups here. I’d like to see them have the best lives they can, and part of having the best life possible is spiritual fulfillment. Churches have lots of power over the way their members approach spirituality. So if a church is fucking up as hard as Summit is, at least according to their own claimed standards–and, really, according to the standards of every spiritual tradition of which I know– it can make it a hell of a lot harder for friends of mine to become spiritually fulfilled.

So let’s have a conversation here about how spirituality can be better approached, not only in Christianity but in all cases--divine, natural, and psychological. Because going to Summit this past weekend, seeing its faults but also seeing its massive crowd, has slapped me in the face with the fact that some janky spiritual practices have reached a position of colossal prominence here. Comment on this article with ideas if you want, or send me a direct message, and I can compile them into an article written by you all for next week, because I’m certainly not the only one who has an opinion on this.