Phil Yancey wrote a final column for Christianity Today that has been resonating with my pondering of late.
Those who know me well know that I spend a good deal of my time on the issues of form and structure of church. Not something I write on much because to be honest, it’s quite boring most of the time.
The tradition of church I am involved with and ordained into is part of the “Stone-Campbell” movement. The movement was originally about church unity and finding form and expression of church in New Testament principals and experience. It’s a worthy goal however we can easily get caught up in silly questions like “Should we have musical instruments in church?” and it really starts to miss the point.
Getting back to my pondering…
Like I said, I research a lot of form and structure questions because I believe that context is important to the shape of a local congregation and can not be externally imposed by either a church governing body or by society and culture at large and the latter does seem to be playing a leading role in how we structure our churches.
So my thoughts are, what if everything we do in church is counter-productive to the gospel? How often do we sit down and ask the hard questions like this? Is having a building productive or counter-productive? Is music productive or counter-productive? Is prayer time productive or counter-productive? Is meeting productive or counter-productive? Are small groups productive or counter-productive? Is feeding the local homeless productive or counter-productive? Is not feeding the local homeless productive or counter-productive? And so on.
There are two questions that come out of this. 1. What would happen if we just did the opposite of everything we are currently doing? 2. Are there some elements of our practice (in our particular contexts) that should just be rid of?
In one church I worked with they took the first approach uncritically and without thought. They saw the decline in their church and said to themselves “what we are doing isn’t working so let’s do the opposite”, but it all ended up being superficial. They changed the music, painted the hall, even changed the communion plates but it was at it’s core the same place.
When we set about to change things do we ever really deeply examine ourselves and our church community to see beyond the superficial? I’m not saying you should stop feeding the homeless if that’s what your church does, but there may well come a time where doing so is counter-productive to the mission of the gospel in your church. Hard to believe, but it’s true. Just because you can do something does not mean that it is the right thing to do.
(This is a bit of hyperbole but I really want to make the point clear that just because something is good, that does not necessarily make it the mission of your local church, all of these things need to be approached with prayer and discernment.)
Simply cutting programs is not the answer to indiscriminate change. Just because the visitation program has been running for 50 years does not make it an antiquated or useless endeavor.
Getting back to the point once more…
Have you had an honest assessment of the health of your church and it’s activities in sharing the gospel?
Let me suggest these questions to gauge the health of your church:
* Is it growing? Growth is not the best indicator of health but an unhealthy body doesn’t grow.
* Are your programs understaffed? Are you just spreading a congregation too thin?
* Are you scared of asking somebody outside your church to evaluate it’s health?
* Pastor are you scared of your congregation?
* Congregation, do you look for an excuse to not be involved in the life of your church, be it Sunday or any other day?
* Are you spreading the gospel?
