Bored

Ever since returning to my "home church" after being away for quite a long time, I've found myself with a very uncomfortable problem. The inability to stay focused during church. On the better days, when I've been able to get a full nights sleep, I find myself zoning out very quickly during the sermon. On days when I'm tired (my job sometimes has me working late Saturday night), I actually start nodding off. It's a problem for a couple of different reasons.

The least important being that, in a church like mine, being caught not paying attention or worst, sleeping, during the sermon is seen as deeply unspiritual. Especially if it happens a lot.

The real problem, though, lies in the fact that it means I'm just not getting anything out of the sermons. I've seen more then a few articles and blurbs written on "How to Stay Awake During A Church Service", some written with serious intent and others meant to be funny. But that still doesn't solve the problem. If all I do is manage to stay awake, but still zone out, I'm still learning nothing, getting no spiritual encouragement, and the Holy Spirit isn't working.

I finally figured out the problem one particularly frustrating morning as I sat zoning out, giving up on trying to take notes. I started to flip through the notes from past sermons, wondering what was wrong. As I turned back to the passages I had written down for those past outlines and read through them, it started to occur to me why it was hard to pay attention. I even wondered why I hadn't figured out the problem sooner.

Everything was so...shallow. Right at the surface. The only things mentioned on my outlines (meaning the only thing the preacher talked about) were the most basic, easy meanings of the text, without any kind of depth or extra study involved in it. The only reason I had written it down was because I was trying to stay awake and pay attention.

What happened to really studying the Bible in depth? Looking at more then 3 or 4 verses at a time? Looking at the context of the passage? Looking at the context of the book? Explaining the cultural setting and how it differs from our western 21st century setting? Isn't that the job of a pastor? Shouldn't he be encouraging his congregation to study Scripture in the same way? Yet, all I was seeing in my notes were concepts so simplistic that I wasn't sure why we had a separate children's church.

To make it clear, I'm not looking for some kind of secret meaning, or for the pastor to find something in Scripture that no one has ever found before. I don't want heresy in the name of "something different." I want a church that seeks to study the Bible as a whole, in depth. This is not too much to ask.