October 2004 Archives

A provocative article by Chad Hall:

I do not even doubt that communities of believers are the God-ordained means for carrying out this grand plan. What I doubt is that what passes for "church" these days is the manifestation of Jesus in our world. I even doubt that my own church is a church.

Why all the doubt? Like other congregations, the one I serve strives to be an authentic church, but we get in our own way. Simply put, our chief aim is not to connect people to God, each other, and the world, but to build an organization that does so. The distinction is subtle but significant.

Building an organization isn't an inherently evil thing to do, nor is it necessarily counterproductive to spiritual aims. Indeed, modernity gifted humans to become more efficient and effective in building organizations. Businesses, governments, and charities give us meaningful and productive work when they are better organized. There's nothing wrong with that. But building an organization is not the same as being a church, even if the aim of the organization is to do the work of Jesus...

I desperately want to be part of an authentic Christian community more so than giving my energy to building a church. I am a young guy, but when I add up all of the hours, energy, books, prayers, and anxiety I have directed toward figuring out how to build a church, it is enormous, and it towers in comparison to the attention I have given to exploring and living out true Christian community.

I think what Chad is saying is that the organization sometimes gets in the way of mission. Some good stuff to think about here, even if you disagree with his conclusions.

During these years the Church has fought for self-preservation as though it were an end in itself, and has thereby lost its chance to speak a word of reconciliation to humanity and to the world at large. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison)

We've tried to ignore it, but it's getting harder every year. Richview's church building is now over twenty years old. We've never had to put a lot of money into it, so it hasn't been too much of a problem. We don't have any debt. The building has just been there.

Yesterday, we received a report that outlines the amount of money it will take to maintain our building over the next thirty years. The numbers are staggering. It is going to take a third of our current budget to adequately fund this facility - not to add to it, but just to maintain it. That is a lot of money, six figures every year.

I still don't know what we're going to do, but the numbers don't make sense. With 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day and 3 billion people living on less than two dollars a day, we (and many other churches) will have some tough questions. Can we justify that money with for how we currently use our facility? Is this investing in the Kingdom? Lots of questions, not as many answers.

From an interview with Dan Kimball:

For those who have grown up in the church, we really have taught them to view church like they would if they were on the panel of "American Idol". The expectation of performance, the mindset of "what does this church have to offer me?" the way they judge church by how good is the preacher, how good is the music etc. I think we would admit that this is the mentality of most Christians in evangelical churches if we were honest.

I don't blame them, because since they were children we taught them to view church as the place to have "fun" with hyper-kids games and videos, and for youth to view church as the place to get emotionally charged and hyped from songs and energetic rallies and camps which teach Jesus etc. We have brought them to the Christian concerts, fed them into the consumerism of Christian commercialism of T-Shirts, CD's etc. and in many ways have based their Christian experience primarily around these things, with an occasional missions trip to Mexico thrown in. I hyper-exaggerate here, but I have a sinking suspicion if we really think about this, we leaders may be the very ones who had a lot to do with what we are now fighting in our churches in regards to consumerism.