"Doing Church"
I am pastor, and I used to be on staff at the biggest church in the county. Everybody had heard of us. We were huge. We had a lot of people, a lot of money, and a lot of ideas. It was pretty exciting. We believed God was blessing us, and secretly (sometimes not so secretly) we believed we were the best church around.
Every now and then, someone would come to town to plant a church or leave us to plant a church nearby. We were always confused by it. This may seem hard to understand, but we really didn't see why there was a need for more churches. We thought that the best thing would be for everyone to work with (for) us. It sounds cocky, but we really did mean well. We thought that we "did church" (a phrase I still don't understand) better than the other churches in the area, and that people should just join us. To our credit, sometimes they did. The thinking was that the church should be unified, and we are the biggest one around, so be unified under us. After all, we "did church" really well.
The hubris of it all escaped me until I found myself on the outside of it...planting a church.
The story as to why is long and not necessary here. What is important is that in the process of God leading me out of the kind of job most pastors dream about, He opened my eyes to the fact that not everyone wants to come to church.
Ingredients
Just a few years ago, people still felt like they should go to church. They may or may not have known Jesus, but they believed church was a good thing to be a part of. So, for generations churches could count on the fact that nearly everybody who left church when they went to college would come back when they started having kids. There was essentially only one ingredient:
- A building.
- A piano/organ player
- A pastor
Really, all you needed was a building. Having some music and an actual pastor would increase attendance. Having any semblance of childcare made you the king of the ecclesiastical mountain. People were going to come back to church. All you had to do was exist...and wait.
Eventually, people started coming back to church wanting something other than aunt Ethel at the organ for music. The secret to church growth changed, but the ingredients were the same. We just added some spice:
- A building...just cooler and newer.
- A band
- A moderately engaging speaker.
But what happened a few years ago is that people quit coming back to church; they just started changing churches. People left old churches for new ones, and most of the old ones either died and closed or died and stayed open. When an old church died, we blamed it on the fact that they weren't willing to keep up with the times. We'd talk about how your building has to be new, your music has to be new, and your pastor has to be cooler.
Dead churches tell no tales, and growing churches don't ask questions. No one was checking to see if church growth was really Church growth. Meanwhile, the culture stopped caring about church. Church attendance has pretty much fallen through the floor over the last few years. The United States is becoming increasingly "post-Christian."
None of us noticed. None of us cared. We were too busy running the business and baking churches with the only recipe any of us had ever known that we forgot to consider the one ingredient that mattered.
Some pastors started checking the recipe, but it scared us. Francis Chan started asking questions like, "What does the Bible say about the ingredients for church?"
Chan left his megachurch in a wealthy community in California to plant a church to impoverished urban people. A fellow minister told me Chan had "gone off the deep end." I remember thinking that if loving the poor and not having a nice church building isn't seen as good ministry, then we really should reconsider whether we are really following Jesus' ministry model.
So, what are the ingredients? What does a church need get the job done?
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
We need the Holy Spirit. That's it.
Jesus promised us that we would be His witnesses, fulfilling the great commission (Matthew 28:1-9-20) when the Holy Spirit comes upon us. Every time He has showed up, the church has fulfilled it's mission to make disciples.
No one cares about buildings, music, and pastors anymore. The truth is that all of those things have failed, but people will come for miles when the Holy Spirit is working.
Let's start talking about going on mission with the Holy Spirit.
