May 2006 Archives

My latest column at Christian Week:

Three years ago, I heard a pastor talk about how to make Church attractive. His church provided different musical styles in different rooms concurrently to appeal to different tastes.

I could relate to his desire to make Church attractive. Churches face pressure to meet people’s needs and keep them in the pews. After 30 years of the church growth movement, churches are more contemporary and relevant than before.

But as he spoke, my mind filled with questions. Despite more relevant churches, overall attendance is plummeting. Statistics Canada reported this month that Canadians are practising their faith at home, but increasingly staying away from religious services. The study says Canadian-born residents are losing their faith. Perhaps these trends would be accelerated without the help of the church growth movement, but why are we losing people just as we’re making Church more attractive to them?

And even if this approach works, are there dangers in conforming Church to what people want?

I remember sitting in that conference when a familiar passage entered my mind. I began to wonder what it might mean for churches, not just individuals, to take this passage seriously.

From A Place For the God-Hungry:

Sometimes we get overly focused on matters that were foreign to the experience of the early church. We get worked up over matters were not a part of the experience of the earliest Christians. Think about what is familiar to contemporary Christians but which was absent among the eariest Christians...

Are these things bad? No. Yet, it is possible to get so consumed by this stuff that we miss the work of God. We get wrapped up with "running the church" smoothly. Consequently we can spend hours in church committee meetings and the word "God" or "Jesus" may not even be mentioned. We miss seeing the lives that are being touched and changed by God while our time and energy is being consumed by the above.

Ultimately, being a Christian is all about relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It is to experience his life in the power of the Holy Spirit. Being a Christ follower is learning to treasure him more than houses, cars, careers, appearance, or having the latest toy. It is to believe that God is at work in me and in the church, the community of faith.

Until I hunger for that life, I will stay right where I am, wherever that might be. I will get focused on large or small church buildings, committees, and whatever-- while I miss what God is doing in the lives of ordinary people all around me.

If Jesus had a church, he would want his people to stay focused on what he is doing in real, everyday people. To miss what he is doing in our lives is to become focused on something other than Jesus.

via

From BP News:

In a culture increasingly hospitable to isolation and anonymity, Bonhoeffer reminds us that God's purposes center not on the Christian alone but on the Christian within the church, the body of Christ. Whereas churches compete in a Christian-consumer, winner-take-all landscape that affirms and rewards the spiritual shopper for spiritual products, promising to make him holy, Bonhoeffer proclaims an intrinsically relational discipleship where mutual interdependency between covenant-bound brothers and sisters defines the path to holiness and indeed to Jesus Himself...

Bonhoeffer insists that the issue is not how to make the Gospel relevant to the world but rather to expose how irrelevant we have all become in our rebellion against the living God.

via

Pastor Sam is frustrated. He is tired of looking after the sick and the hurting members of his congregation, when other pastors are clearly able to devote their time to greater goals. Now, thanks to a megachurch pastor's new book You Too Can Be a Megaman of God, Sam believes he can delegate pastoral care to a committee ("let the lesser people take care of the lesser people") and begin to megasize his church.

More at my book blog

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