Monday, October 08, 2007
Shuffling The Deck Chairs
For all the money, time, and effort we’ve spent on cultural relevance—and that includes culturally relevant worship—it seems we came through the last 15 years with a significant net loss in churchgoers, proliferation of megachurches and all.That may be the single most damning statement ever uttered about the church at large, and it is so deserved. What it implies is that the church has conducted itself in these last years to a limited, niche market. We have assumed that the marketplace is only so big and we have gone about capturing as much of that market as possible, and in doing so we have actually decreased the size of the market generally. So what's up?
- We fight to preserve the institution rather than the mission to which the institution is dedicated.
This talks about pastors fighting to maintain or create jobs instead of fighting to build disciples. If the market place for soda is assumed to be X worldwide and you are now in all available world markets, what is Coke to do? Why start poaching customers from Pepsi, of course!
Now, that is just free market economy at work, and I have no stomach for mainliners that complain about the independent churches poaching. If the mainliners were doing their job, stealing their customers would not be so easy, but it does say that the independents are not so successful as they think they are.
- We lack vision!
Do you think Christ intended for us to compete over a limited market. I believe the Great Commission says something about ALL.
- We lack faith!
Do you think that maybe if we really understood that we had the actual power of God at our disposal we might be a little bolder? Maybe instead of worrying about our jobs, we'd worry about our mission? Maybe we'd learn to define success on God's terms instead of our own limited terms.
Where is the angst? Where is the rage over a statement like this, and especially its truth? Whoa! - am I going all "Elijah at Horeb" here?
The bottom line is he same one it has always been. We need to spend less time worrying about how to build the church and more time worrying about how to be better Christians. Read Acts again. Yeah, they had strategy meetings, but not a lot, and most of their success was seemingly accidental. They spent their time learning how to be God's people, and let God worry about the bigger things.
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