THOUGHTFULLY DRIVING THE PORCELAIN BUS

A Column by John S Schroeder

January 12, 2002

This column, started mid-week, was originally what is presented below as "The Rant." I still think the arguments there are meritorious, so I have left it in tact. However, it was written in response to current events in my life, and as I consider the situation further, what I wrote in that rant is not really why I was upset. So upset that I was forced to start writing (at 4AM I might add) to begin with. So, I am going to write a little more.

The mainline Christian denominations are dying. This is no secret. Needless to say, they do not want to die, so they are fighting hard to get well. There is a "conventional wisdom" concerning how to get better, it is called "contemporary worship." That is what "The Rant" is about. In "The Rant" I hint at the real reason I have been upset, but now I want to state it plainly. As best as I can figure it, and as best as I see it, putting contemporary worship, or any new program for that matter, into a dying church is like changing your clothes when you are suffering from heart disease. You may look better, but you are not healed.

This statement does not mean the programs are bad, it just means that they do not address the issue. I base my concerns on several things. First of all, Jesus did not come and attempt to reform the religious structures of the day. He came and dealt with people. What Jesus knew was that the organization is a by-product, and that if he tended to the people, the by-product would improve on it's own.

Let me try to explain this by an analogy to business. The analogy breaks down eventually, but it starts well. It is very common in this day and age for executives from very successful businesses to try and reduce their success to a formula, write a book about it, and watch it become the latest management craze. There is a new one every 6 months to a year -- I quit paying attention after "Total Quality Management." All sorts of companies, particularly struggling ones, adopt these formulas, yet they do not improve. So after a couple of rounds of adopting the latest management fad, the company either fails completely, or there is a clean sweep in management and things get better. In other words, in a struggling company, things do not really change until the people do!

In the church if we want to change things, if we want to get better from our potentially fatal illness, we have to change the people, just like the business. But this is where the analogy breaks down. In a company you change the people by firing and hiring, in the church we do not have that option. In the church, our challenge is much, much harder. Instead of putting new individuals into the slots, the church needs to recreate the individuals that are already there. That recreation is the promise of the Holy Spirit, but it is a whole lot harder than hiring more staff or changing a management paradigm.

OK, two points from here. First of all, when a struggling church focuses on program to get better, my heart worries that it is looking in the wrong place. That is the source of my real worry and concern. When a church is struggling I think it needs to be less programatic and more prayerful. When a church is struggling, I think its leadership needs to spend less time on business, and more time on becoming better disciples of Christ. Which brings me to the last point.

This is not the first time, I have said what I am saying here, and inevitably when I say it, the question comes, "So just what are we supposed TO DO?" In one sense, nothing, the rush to do something often impedes the Holy Spirit. By doing "nothing" we give Him room to operate. But, in another sense there is much to be done. Here are a few practical steps that I think should be taken:

1. Clerical and Lay leadership of the church should commit to weekly gatherings for purely spiritual pursuits. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I would suggest rotating weeks between bible study and prayer. This suggestion will be met with complaints of how busy that leadership already is -- I am to the point where I do not care anymore. There is no more important matter in our Christian community than the Word and prayer, and if we are to take seriously the community part of that, we HAVE to do it together.
2. All business meetings of the church must begin with a deliberate devotion, and end with shared prayer.
3. The pastor, and select lay leaders must deliberately set out to disciple a few individuals in the congregation. If the reader does not know what I mean by that, there were a bunch of books written on the topic a few years ago.
4. There must be a deliberate prayer ministry started in the church. I do not mean just a prayer list passed around, I mean a team of prayer warriors, meeting on the property, praying specifically for the church, its leaders, and its programs, physically laying hands on the building and property, and periodically calling in the staff and lay leadership to lay hands on them.

There is much more to do after that, but that is enough for the first two years. My real point is a struggling church should get "back to basics." Let me be a Hoosier for a minute…When things start to break down on a good basketball team, they do not install a new offense, they go back to running the basic drills that got them there.

The world may say the church is struggling because its is anachronistic, but the church is in the business of not being of the world. If the church is struggling the answer does not lie in responding to the world's concerns…it lies in returning to what the church is supposed to be good at, seeking and listening to the Lord God Almighty.

The Rant…

The "conventional wisdom" tell us that the path to church growth in the so-called mainline denominations lies down the road to contemporary worship forms. Study after study bears out the fact that the only mainline churches that are growing are those that have a contemporary service either as one of several services, or as the only service(s) offered. Hence churches around the country are rushing headlong into contemporary worship. Churches faced with declining attendance, and worse yet, giving, swim for this bit of data like Titanic passengers to a floating piece of furniture.

This trend bothers me a lot. In part, because trends in general bother me a lot. The Christian life is not a trend -- trends pass. I pray God daily that my relationship with Him will never pass. My objections; however, are more substantive than that general sense of discomfort. First, I would like to address some areas where I think the studies that have produced the conventional wisdom may be lacking and secondly I would like to address some issues related to using that data.

I must first confess that I have not personally read most of the studies that are cited in these discussions, particularly in the last five or six years. I read a couple of them back about seven years ago but that's it. I have heard all of them quoted to me endlessly from sources all around the country since then. If the objections I am about to state have been addressed in studies I am unfamiliar with, I look forward to the reader presenting me with those studies. The two concerns I have about the studies are related. The first concern is that I have not seen any studies that include data on and draw conclusions about churches that adopt contemporary worship forms, but then fail to grow. I find it hard to believe that the formula is 100% effective. I, in fact, have personal experience with a church that adopted it, had tremendous growth, but within a few years collapsed back to where it was before it started. My second concern about these studies is that there is much that happens in a healthy, growing church that is simply non-quantifiable. I do not know of a "Holy Spirit Activity Index," nor quite frankly, do I want to. I have never seen a "Coefficient of Spiritual Health" or a "Closeness to God ratio."

Both of my concerns about these studies center on one central question -- Is contemporary worship the reason a church grows, or is it merely a symptom of something else at play? I believe, as the Church confesses to believe, that growth comes from the Holy Spirit, and not from action on our part. I know that the Holy Spirit is capable of producing growth in a variety of ways. Therefore, I must conclude that there is far more operating in a growing church than just contemporary worship.

Some have argued with me that of course there is more involved in church growth than just contemporary worship. However, just as we have to start behaving like followers of Jesus before we necessarily feel like one, maybe we need to start to behave like a growing church before we become one. That could be true, but only if the "cost" is not too high.

I'll get back to the issue of "cost" in a minute. First, I would like to challenge the whole concept of church growth. I am not at all sure that "church growth" is the goal that Christians should adopt individually or corporately. I do not, in scripture, see much emphasis put on the development and maintenance of institutions of faith. In fact it is quite possible to interpret the great story of the Bible as the story of God acting in man, man responding by building institutions of "worship," those institutions becoming confused with the person of God, and God having to destroy those institutions to make Himself more apparent. Christ was deliberate in His ministry on earth in not becoming a temporal leader, politically, or in religious institutions. There is grave danger, to the point of potential idolatry, in making the growth of the institutions a measure of success of God's kingdom.

Most respond to this concern on my part that the point is not to make the church grow, but to draw in more people to hear the gospel. In other words, "church growth" is not "Christian growth," but the two somehow move in parallel, and the one that is quantifiable (church growth) can be used as a rough index of the other. Let's call this the "Shotgun" approach to evangelism. In a nutshell, the shotgun approach says the more people we talk to, the more potential positive response to the gospel we have. On the surface that is not all bad, but in practice, I find a real rub. Hearing the gospel and responding to it, must be followed with a period of concentrated spiritual study and growth for that conversion to really take hold. All of us know people that have said "Yes" to Jesus only to forget about Him soon thereafter. In my experience, building contemporary worship as the place where "we draw 'em in" takes so many resources from the church that it lacks the ability for that follow-through and the result is that the growth does not hold.

I have one final big issue with the contemporary worship phenomena. Most of the mainline churches that are in decline have a core of believing and committed saints that love Jesus Christ. When such a church makes a move to contemporary worship, these people can end up marginalized. I have seen that happen in two ways. The first is that those "selling" contemporary worship are just brutish and they shove the traditionalists aside. I do not think anyone backs this. The second way is more insidious. In a more traditional church, there are many ministries that do work well. Yet in a time of decline their resources are limited, and the change to contemporary worship strains those resources to the limits. This often results in cuts to working programs as well as ones that are not. Those cuts hurt the committed core of traditionalists -- taking away much that is precious to them. Christ said, "you will know them by their fruits." I do not think it is fruitful to marginalize and reject those that have held steady in the faith for the sake of "spreading the word." I do not think it wise to throw away ministries that work.

 "Wonderful John, you have now dispensed altogether with the idea of church growth -- so what are we supposed to do with these institutions we have hanging around?" Don’t worry about them. Focus, as Christ did, on being God's person and on helping the people around you be God's person. If we do that the Holy Spirit will take care of the rest. He may use those institutions, or He may let them crumble in favor of something else. That is His decision to make. All I know is that focusing on church growth seems to be focusing in the wrong place. God can grow the church if we stand on our heads, eat only rice cakes, and speak Swahili. Let's focus on being better Christians, and let God handle the heavy lifting.

With Love,