P.S.
1. I think a lot of people like big, professional churches to which they contribute little because they view the church as a metaphor (or replacement?) for their faith. If the church has always been there, and always will be there, and doesn’t come from them but is driven by outside forces, they have little fear of their faith ceasing. On the other hand, if their church collapses, will their pursuit of Jesus follow suit?
2. Can we stop pretending the Sunday morning service (or “main” service – whenever it is) isn’t the crux of all that we do? It’s the only thing 95% of church-goers attend. It’s the clearest act of our congregation. I realize people stick around a church because they have friends and feel like they contribute, but leadership can’t force those things. We can, however, make a killer service. Let’s just say it: service is the center of what we do. Now can we move forward…?
It seems like the leaders of church services get a lot more out of the services than the average parishioner.
The pastor, worship leader, band, choir, etc. spend all week preparing for the service. They’ve done tons of front-end readying, and the service is the outflowing of all their preparation. Just like someone who’d studied art history would get more out of an art museum than someone who went in cold.
Similarly, the leaders are also the ones who actually do things during the service. They sing, or speak, or pray into the microphone, or play instruments – and feel altogether necessary. Congregants, on the other hand, watch and maybe sing and maybe clap(?).
For all “our” complaints about consumer-focused American Christianity, that’s the only option we (pastors) have provided.
My thesis, then, restated, is this: normal church service provide more opportunity for spiritual growth for the leaders than for the “followers”. I don’t want to reverse this trend; I want to even it out. Nobody here is Jesus – we all need to learn.
Helmut Thielicke:
“[Theology] can be sacred theology or diabolical theology. That depends on the hands and hearts which further it. But which of the two it is cannot necessarily be seen by the fact that in one case it is orthodox and in the other heretical. I don’t believe that God is a fussy faultfinder in dealing with theological ideas. He who provides forgiveness for a sinful life will also surely be a generous judge of theological reflection. Even an orthodox theologian can be spiritually dead, while perhaps a heretic crawls on forbidden bypaths to the sources of life.”
A, b, c…
1. The Church (or church) is NOT more important than individual Christians. God will not judge the Church (or church) for its deeds; he will, however, judge individuals. The Church is nothing more than a collaboration of individuals. To talk about “the Church” as a single entity is poor thinking.
2. Big churches get big, then spend TONS of time and energy and money trying to make themselves feel small again. Why go to all that trouble?
3. Everyone uses Acts 2:42-47 as a recipe for church success. I’m beginning to think that passage might be descriptive, not prescriptive. I wonder if 1 Corinthians 14:26 isn’t more important.
Of Lesser Import
David Sirlin, in regards to the ability to save only at certain points in video games, writes:
“Here’s my proposal for rule #2 of game design: the player should be able to save the game anywhere! There is nothing so important in a game that it should decide it gets to supersede the player’s real life needs to go do something else or play another game, or whatever.”
“It is, in my opinion, the highest arrogance of a game designer to think that the precious needs of his game outrank the real-life needs of the player to turn off the game and have some reasonable way to save (most of) his progress immediately.”
Sometimes it seems to me that churches – as organizational entities – imagine that their artificial needs are more important than the lives of their congregants. Whenever an American church refuses to cancel its Sunday evening service on Super Bowl Sunday, it feels to me like the church understands its own definition of “biblical community” (Acts 2:42-47) or “meeting together” (Heb. 10:25) – i.e., Christians sitting in a room together singing praise songs and listening to a sermon – to be more important than the personal desires or culture of its congregants.
I realize that “some people don’t like football,” but I don’t think that’s the real reason some churches refuse to cancel their Sunday evening service. I think that, at bottom, they imagine that the Church is the dispenser of Christianity.
Early Bird
10-year-old Mark is excited – his birthday is Saturday and it’s Thursday afternoon. Mark is excited because his dad promised that for this birthday, he would build Mark a little miniature workbench. Mark loves to stand and watch his dad work with wood out in the garage, building bookshelves and fixing chairs and tables. For months, Mark has been asking his dad for a little miniature workbench of his own where he can fix his own chair and fashion his own masterpieces. And now the time has almost come!
Mark is just too eager, though. Instead of waiting for his dad to build him a sturdy little workbench on Saturday morning, he opens up his dad’s toolbox and begins hammering pieces of wood together on Thursday afternoon. His dad is still at work, and without his dad’s knowledge of or skill at wood working Mark doesn’t have much success. Instead of a miniature workbench, he just ends up with a bunch of bent nails and a couple crooked 2×4′s.
Sometimes I wonder how much our generation’s pursuit of justice mirrors Mark’s attempt to build a workbench. I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t pursue justice, or that God intends that we sit around and wait for his Son’s second coming. I just wonder what our expectations should be – of our own attempts at societal justice – while we wait for our Lord to return and dispense perfect justice.
I’m not saying do nothing; I’m not saying do everything. I just wonder what God expects of us in this age, and, thus, what we ought to expect of ourselves.
