Note: Viewing and honoring our countries military prevents me from writing a column on 4/20/02. I did however have a joke published in the 4/19/02 "Best of the Web" from the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com. Other than that joke, I will reappear next Saturday 4/27/02.

To whom does the church owe its service? What should be a congregation's primary focus? There is a simple and straightforward theologically correct answer to those questions -- GOD. Unfortunately that answer is at once entirely informative, and utterly useless. There is no doubt that in my personal participation in church activity my focus should be on God and I should be rendering my service unto Him. But when we try to decide what the group is supposed to do it gets really complicated. Is God served more by establishing a "seeker" service, or training neighborhood evangelists? Does a contemporary worship service somehow grant God greater focus than a traditional one?

Questions like those are generally counter productive. In my experience when people start trying to answer such questions in the terms described it is a formula for UGLY. It is the place were informed debate turns into holy war. There is in fact no room for compromise when two disagreeing parties believe that what they want is each the best thing for God, or the will of God, or anything like that. So in this sense the "theologically correct" answer to the initial questions really is useless, if not counterproductive.

Yet, in another sense, it is very productive. Any church leadership group can only be served by maintaining a group focus on the Lord. As I have said before in these spaces, any meeting where church business is to be conducted should begin with scripture based devotion and should find significant time for prayer. If the group takes time to put its corporate focus on the Lord, if the group invites the Holy Spirit into its presence, its debate will be better. I've experienced it, I know it, and God promised it. So, the "theologically correct" answer to our initial questions is useful in laying some personal and corporate groundwork, but is not terribly useful as a framework for forming our debate.

Having said that, how can a congregation decide to use its limited resources? Where should it focus its attention? The answer to that question is probably as individual as each congregation. I have already talked about some practical matters about how a congregation should conduct such a debate. What I want to talk about in this column is the boundaries within which such a debate should occur.

As I see it, the church has only a few basic functions:

1. Provide for the "gathering together" of believers as is called for in scripture. This is for the mutual support of believer, for instruction in the Word, for training leaders and things like that.
2. Organize efforts to "go and make disciples of all nations"
3. Worship
4. Care for "widows and orphans" and others in need.

Generally the issue is one of balancing resources amongst these basic functions. If you have traveled around churches much at all, you have undoubtedly seen churches that "specialize" in any one of these functions. Some churches go so far as to create specialized institutions for each of the functions. For example, some churches do not try to train leaders -- they think that is the job of seminaries, as a result they end up heavily staff dependent.

Then, of course, there is the fact that these functions are not mutually exclusive which creates debate about whether is better to draw people into the church to evangelize them, thus worshipping at the same time, or to go out there in the world and get them.

So it goes….

Obviously, I cannot unpack all the issues -- Let alone answer them in this space, but there are a few principles I would like to lay out.

The first principle is that a church really does need to do all of those things, because only in doing ALL of them can the focus of the church stay defuse enough to allow God to be visible. You know the old "can’t see the forest for the trees" cliché? Well, that's what I am talking about. When a church focuses on one function to the exclusion, or minimization of the others, they start focusing on the trees -- under such circumstances, it's real easy to lose sight of God, who in this case is the forest. A church that focuses too heavily in one area or the other really is practicing a form of idolatry. Counting converts cannot be more important than the object of the conversion.

The second principle is that, "each must have this attitude in himself that was also in Christ Jesus, to count the other as more important than himself." (Philippians) Too often, churches become unbalanced by granting some sort of preeminence to those that serve one function or the other. This is particularly true when it comes to staff people. Paying people for service to the church is a matter of convenience only. It troubles me frankly. God has called all believers to serve Him, not just pay for others to do it. In one very real sense paying people to do ministry that we should all be involved in is just another form of "indulgence" -- that hideous practice of the Roman Catholic church that started the Reformation. The role of staff in a church must be limited -- it is not to do the ministry of the church, but to enable the congregation to do that ministry. That is a vitally important principle, if you are considering professional Christian service, you are not considering doing direct ministry, you are considering helping others do direct ministry.

The third principle is that while the church functions are not mutually exclusive, too much combining of them can render a ministry ineffective at any of them. Have you looked at the so-called "all-in-one" computer peripherals? These are machines that scan, print; serve as fax machines all attached to your computer. The idea is to make a more efficient use of your office space and power. The problem is they do not do any one of these functions nearly as well as a stand alone printer, scanner and fax machine. Likewise, a worship service designed to draw in the general populace for evangelical purposes will not be as good a worship service for long-time believers as separate evangelical and worship programs.

The fourth and final principle is that the church is not a collection of programs and ministries, IT IS A COLLECTION OF PEOPLE. Leadership, both professional and volunteer, must never lose sight of that fact. People cannot be reduced statistics, roles, and functions. People are just too complicated to be so pigeonholed. In serving God, the church exists to serve those people. Designing programs that people are supposed to fit into gives the program the preeminent position. The priorities of the church must clearly be the opposite.