Yesterday, I spoke about the increasingly common phenomenon of LARPing your job. LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. In other words, pretending to work when you aren’t really doing anything at all. For a helpful outline of LARPing your job by the person who coined the term, you can read this by Anne Helen Petersen.

Yesterday, I was most interested in looking at what the Bible had to say about LARPing your job. Particularly as it pertains to those who, for reasons of slackness, are seeking to look busy rather than actually do anything of proper worth. You can read that here.

But I was set to thinking about LARPing at church. I remember a conversation some while ago with a now-ex Anglican minister. He was speaking about the tendency of some Anglicans to view their church more like a mission. Whilst some would have a ‘charitable assumption’ about all who attend that stretches credulity to breaking point, others view their work more as a mission. They recognise there are many unbelievers calling themselves believers whom the vicar does not consider believers, but he nevertheless lets them (as my friend put it) ‘play at church’ regardless. This ‘playing at church’ gives the impression of being part of the church despite all evidence that you are an unbeliever. It is ultimately damaging both to the church and the one under the impression they are safe in Christ when they are no more a Christian than a person LARPing is actually a real life medieval warlord.

It was the term ‘playing at church’ that struck me most in my friend’s description. I think this is particularly apt when the majority of the church are evidently not believers but are nevertheless following the rituals and traditions of the church. Such churches led by unbelieving vicars also, though clearly not good or healthy places, are not in any way churches. They are just rooms full of unbelievers. But those led by gospel-preaching, bible-believing people, who recognise most their congregation are unbelievers, but who nevertheless operate like a church that incorporates them are effectively encouraging most in little more than live action role play.

It should be said, something of this order (though often to a lesser degree) exists across denominations. There are plenty of churches of all stripes – whilst maybe not majority unbelieving and being encouraged to pretend by the leadership – nevertheless incorporate people who are evidently unbelievers whom we are happy to let LARP as though they are believers. They may join in all aspects of what we do as a church, taking communion and serving wherever they will, and to all intents and purposes, look no different on a Sunday to anybody else in the church. Rather than marking off the church from the world, there can be a tendency to allow the world into the church and permit it to LARP Christianity.

Of course, before LARPing became a word, we had a more old-fashioned word for this phenomenon: nominalism. The problem with the word ‘nominalism’ is it covers people who never go to church, who have zero involvement with Christianity whatsoever and yet own the label ‘Christian’. For Millennials in particular, nominalism was a less obvious thing. In my school, I was the only person I was aware of who even went to church. That was deemed a weird thing to do on your weekend just 25 years ago. As Giles Coren rightly notes in his recent Times column (paywall), ‘Atheism is the assumed default position of every modern urban adult.’ There may well be a turning of the tide, certainly among Gen Z and seemingly amongst a raft of older generation people who have found the secularist atheism they adopted to be empty, but it is still the default for many. Nominalism doesn’t really describe, certainly not adequately, those who are not content to merely call themselves Christians, but who also turn up to church LARPing Christianity. They have more association with the label than a bloke who does nothing more than tick a box on the census, but by the reckoning of any biblical measure of faith, they are not Christian.

For such people, the church need to be clear on who belongs and who does not. If ever there was a case for close communion, it is this. In most of our churches, there will be people who are more than nominal – there is some actual association with Christianity in practice – but who are, by the reckoning of the church, less than actually Christian. If we do not have some means of directly and clearly helping such people to see they are sub-Christian – that is to say, not actually Christian – all we are doing is helping them to LARP Christianity. If we do that, we are giving them false assurance and encouraging them to believe they are safe in Christ whilst actively keeping them out of the kingdom.