Programmed to Receive

"You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave."

I thought of this line from the Eagles' "Hotel California" in a discussion about church membership. It can be very hard to leave a church by un-joining, but a lot of people check out.

I think "Hotel California" is a nightmare version of a shallow, perverse, sensate culture. There is plenty of room, and you can live it up, but still, when you're in the middle of it, you think, "This could be heaven, or this could be hell." Nothing's quite straight: minds are "Tiffany-twisted," and materialism gives you the "Mercedes bends." No one quite knows what they're doing there, "some dance to remember, others dance to forget."

I think some people join churches this mindset - not quite sure what they're there for, except they think perhaps its a "lovely place." And maybe it is, but maybe that's all it is. The worst thing is, that the church may not quite know what it is there for, except that it is "programmed to receive."

I think "HC" is also about drug addiction, and I'm not meaning to say that churches or membership just feed addictions. I would say, though, that in the world we are all "just prisoners here of our own device." We may look pretty but need a radical salvation. Try as we may, we "just can't kill the beast" - the sin nature within or the Enemy who works against our souls. What does overcome the world is faith; that is what churches should be about, and that's what its members should have.