June 2007 Archives
Cerulean Sanctum on the problem with technological solutions to organic problems:
Our churches launch some guaranteed program backed by the slickest marketing and the best sound bites from the hottest church leaders and we hope and hope. A couple years later, that program stands forgotten. Sure, it was billed as the pesticide for whatever plagued us, but it wasn't God's way, was it? No fruit.
It's all about the fruit. If all our work produces no fruit, then we're just being wasteful. Sadly, that's what a lot of churches are doing, just wasting time, money, resources, and people's patience.
I think our problems with patience underlie the greater issue here. Yes, people get upset when the newfangled program bears no fruit, but it was sterile from the get-go. What people need is patience for the simple ways that work, the real discipleships that spans decades, not months. You try too hard to rush the fruit and you wind up with tasteless fruit. Think your typical grocery store here. Sure, you bought a package of mass-produced, industrial-strength strawberries. But they taste more like straw than berries.
We may be doing the same with our disciplemaking process. Better to go local, go organic, be patient with the old ways that served us for eons—even when it comes to making disciples.
God knows we have enough spiritual pests out there, but we can’t poison our young “plants” in our attempts to kill the weeds or wipe out the bugs.
Eugene Peterson from The Jesus Way:
The local congregation is the primary place for dealing with the particulars and people we live with. As created and sustained by the Holy Spirit, it is insistently local and personal. Unfortunately, the more popular American church strategies in respect to congregation are not friendly to the local and personal. The American way with its penchant for catchy slogans and stirring visions denigrates the local, and its programmatic ways of dealing with people erode the person, replacing intimacies with functions...
The great American innovation in congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise...If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our congregations is to identify what they want and offer it to them...We are the world's champion consumers, so why shouldn't we have state-of-the-art consumer churches?
Give the conditions prevailing in our culture, this is the best and most effective way that has ever been devised for gathering large and prosperous congregations. Americans lead the world in showing how to do it. There is only one thing wrong: this is not the way in which God brings us into conformity with the life of Jesus and sets us on the way of Jesus' salvation...The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, 'deny yourself' congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church.
From Christianity Today:
In our managerial age, we instinctively look to 'leadership principles' and 'keys to effectiveness' to 'master' dysfunctional congregations. Some of this arises from a sincere desire to help the church be the church. Yet some of it is pure hubris and vain imagination, thinking that with organization-speak we can transform the church. Worse still, organization-speak has a way of deafening our ears to the unique language of Scripture. Only that language can open our eyes to see 'the glory of the Lord,' the one reality that transforms us into Christ's image 'from one degree of glory to another.'"
From Henri Nouwen's In The Name of Jesus:
The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which the world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. … It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest.
From nakedpastor:
I believe every institution's unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally claimed for itself. So even if our church claims to be about authenticity and relationship, that may not be true. We may actually be willing to sacrifice true relationship for the sake of the perpetuity of the institution. I feel it is urgent to consider this. I realize this is a sobering thought, but I believe we need to be honest about this to-the-death tension that exists between institutions (particularly the church) and people if we are concerned with the wellness and freedom of human beings.
I really wish I read more church PR like this. It tries to communicate what other churches can learn from their "successful" church:
Its hard to point to our wisdom and virtue that built the church. We have walked through some doors simply because all the others ones were closed; we have made mistakes that turned out to be strokes of genius. Why? I don't know, other than that we have trusted in the God of Abraham, Who is just as intent on building His kingdom through us as He was through Abraham! Abraham and the patriarchs are the "fathers of faith;" not the "fathers of the master-church-builders." Just as Abraham "received mighty strength" because of his faith in God's determination and ability to bless the world through him, we have received power by believing in God’s passion to bring blessing to the people of our city.
It is a lack of faith, not a lack of expertise, that keeps us from tapping into the overflowing reservoir of God's mercy. Isaiah 59:1-2 says that "The Lord's arm is not shortened so that it cannot save, nor is His ear heavy so that He cannot hear. Rather, it is our sins that have separated us from God." In other words, it is no lack of mercy or power on God's part that keeps Him from sweeping through our churches and our city, but our sin--primarily the sin of failing to believe that God loves people and has the power to change them--that keeps us from seeing Him go Pentecostal on our cities!.
It's not even that our faith has to be that strong! Mine certainly hasn't been. It doesn't need to be. It's like tapping into electricity--the slightest touch still gets the strongest reaction. A mustard-seed amount will suffice...
We do not hope people will copy our strategies. Just because one strategy works one place doesn't mean it will work somewhere else. Our hope is not in the brilliantly-conceived plans of men. Sure, we have learned from others, but our hope is in God's passion for our area.
From Common Grounds Online:
We are scared to death to boast in our weakness because it violates culture (best foot forward, turn your good side to the camera), but if all of us in the Church would boast in our weakness together, we would become a Gospel-suffused community of honesty, brokenness, repentance, grace, forgiveness and restoration. In short, we would be a community of joyful intimacy.
Thomas à Kempis writes:
Jesus has many who love his kingdom in heaven, but few who bear his cross. He has many who desire comfort, but few who desire suffering. He finds many to share his feast, but few his fasting. All desire to rejoice with him, but few are willing to suffer for his sake. Many follow Jesus to the breaking of bread, but few to the drinking of the cup of his passion. Many admire his miracles, but few follow him in the humiliation of the cross.
An article by William H. Willimon (PDF):
I recall that great preacher, William Sloane Coffin, telling us Yale students, "I don't see how you can attract folk to Jesus by appealing to their basic selfishness - 'Jesus can fix everything that's wrong with you' - and end up offering anything like the self-less, self-denying faith of Jesus."
When, in Seeker Services, do we pull out the cross? When, as we're touting all the benefits of Jesus, do we also say to them, "By the way, Jesus said that anyone who bought into his message would also suffer and die."
I believe that today's "Seekers" are seeking many things, but I am unsure that many of them are seeking a cruciform savior or a cruciform life. That's fine since the Bible hardly ever, almost never depicts anybody seeking Jesus. Rather, the story is about God's relentless seeking of us in Christ.
