Meet My Needs!

Truth be told, the church has never met my needs. That's odd to me since I've been in it my entire life and now serve her full-time. What's odd to me is that people in church keep telling me that we need to do things to "meet people's needs."

Really?

I mean, I suppose the church has met my deeper needs in some ways that I cannot articulate, but the meeting of needs I most frequently hear about have to do with externals: services that last no longer than an hour, 15 minutes sermon about kids and families, events that are fun and high-energy, leadership that doesn't challenge, etc....

I hardly ever hear anyone say, "I think our church should help me get over my selfishness and greed" or "I wish our church would teach me how to be humble person in a competitive workplace." No one ever says, "Goodness, I wish this church had a word to say about the fact that water is thicker than blood and that life is about baptized brothers and sisters in Christ and what they do together in the world, more than about my immediate family." Where are the voices saying, "This church could really be something if we learned to live peace-filled lives and love folks like Osama bin Laden and that crazy guy over in Iran."?

Here's my question: In the church's frenzy to "meet needs" by having active kids and youth ministries, clever preaching, entertaining worship complete with the style of music we like, the lack of prophetic voices, and all at a cut-rate prices, are churches failing to met anyone's true and deepest needs? It seems to me, that many of us in the church are lying to people. We imply that we can meet their needs, yet offer them something that satisfies their wants, but never get close to their needs.

What do you think?

Journey to the Future Church

Truth be told, over the last several years, my feelings toward the church have eroded. What once to me was a flawed but useful, necessary body, slowly became completely useless in terms of rehearsing the Kingdom of God.

The reasons for this disillusionment were myriad: First, I saw church after church make moves and decisions based on any reason you can imagine except for spiritual and theological ones. Effective, anointed, and gifted ministers were fired and/or otherwise replaced with cheap suited M.Divs with nothing to say, no vision for the future, and hungry bank accounts (this was the case with a friend of mine ministering north of Houston and another in San Antonio). Second, as is so often the case, power players with money and an affinity for the status quo, pressed their preferences into policies that ultimately made their churches less a reflection of Jesus than more of one. Third, though I had always suspected it, it was made clear to me that many of the church are more concerned with comfort and maintaining their spiritual country club than with ministering to the world and loving and accepting the irreducible other. Fourth, I continued to see churches -- particularly large ones -- mistreat their ministry staff, somehow expecting that they and their families could subsists on far less money than the average member of the community. Fifth, I witnessed some ministers and church leaders actively resist new ideas, emerging voices and fresh winds of the Spirit. Sixth, it began to dawn on me that my own spiritual growth was happening outside of the church. I don't simply mean outside of church services, but rather outside and away from the folks I worshiped with (the definition of church) on a weekly basis. Not only that, my friends at other churches were having the same experiences and thinking the same things. Something strange was happening.

It was during this time that I began to examine what was going on in the church. The period of searching led me to literature with fancy sounding words like "Missional Ecclesiology," "discontinuous change," "liminality," "post-modernity," "post-liberal," "post-Christianity," "post-colonialism," and others. It was almost enough to make me go postal. It was an education in itself just to understand the terminology. Because I was so desperately seeking, I suppose I never really gave up on the church, though. Rather, I had come to believe that many of us charged with her leadership were groping in the dark, yet because we were charged with leadership we had to act like we knew what we were doing.

It's not working though. We know it's not working. Those within and without our congregations know it's not working, yet because we have so long confused faith with certainty, church leaders frequently have to act like we are certain with this precious jewel which is the church lest we think it become faithless. Frequently my heart echoed the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "So often it (the church) is an archdefender of the status quo...If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned to outright disgust."

I confessed to a friend last week that I was deeply distressed about the future of the church. Ironically, I received an e-mail from my friend Mark Love at Abilene Christian University asking me to be a part of a panel at this year's Annual Lectureship about "The Future Church." Now you should know that I trust Jesus' words when he says that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church He built, but when I first received his e-mail about "The Future Church," my heart cynically asked, "Will there be one?"

I do not say these things about the church as some kind of agitator that is secretly hoping to see her fail. I'm a son of the church, a lover of who she is. I'm not one of those folks who can look around any church and undercut her good by pointing to what's wrong. Truthfully, I'm not even negative about the church. I'm optimistic about what the church can and should be and do, and therein lies my holy discontent.

I'm not too negative, I'm too positive!

I believe that faith-filled, God-centered, neighbor-loving people can actually change the world. I believe that folks like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Billy Graham, Shane Claiborne, St. Paul and others who gave their lives for grand, beautiful pursuits in the name of Jesus are not the exceptions. They are snapshots of what God can do with any and all of us who are willing to give ourselves to Him. I believe that the folks in our pews who want to simply check in and check out of the local church to consume their religious goods and services were sold a lie by a church that promised them stability instead of adventure. And because of that, we've got a lot of work to do and undo!

It's hard for me to talk about the future church, because I don't know what it will look like, and I think that's a good thing. The church is God's, not ours, and He's under no obligation to consult us about her. But if I were to guess about the church's future, I would say that there are three primary options:

(1) More and more Christians will try the escapists' model. We will fortify ourselves in our own schools, churches and sub-culture, becoming evermore irrelevant to the world. This is one way the church can survive in the future. We will simply stand as a anachronism to the larger culture, accepting our new place in public life. Like the Amish, the evangelical church can pick a moment in time and say, "We will go no further."

(2) Churches will continue to simply try to do the same things we've always done, thinking we can be successful if we simply do what we do better. We will fail to see that some of the problem in the church is in the church. We will say the problem is that people don't want "The Truth" anymore and stand in rabid, blind opposition to the culture. The church will become judge and jury over the world, begging it to come back to the dominant days of Christendom and the culture-privileged church. Here, nearly nothing inside the church will change and our proclivities will become unquestioned and unquestionable gospel as the actual gospel goes unheard and unspoken.

Or

(3) The church, as it slowly and reluctantly has in the past, will change! It will take a rethinking of our assumptions about Scripture, people and culture. It will mean learning to re-imagine church, spiritual formation, and faith development. It will mean seeking God rather than political power, influence, image and ego. It will mean engaging the irreducible other -- the people that are not like us -- with a love and acceptance of them that seeks God's purposes in their lives more than their easy transformation into people who look, talk and act like we do. It will mean reconverting -- which will be painfully hard -- ourselves and others into people on a spiritual quest instead of folks who want a serving of Yahweh on the side. It will mean that the church as we know it must die, so that God can once again demonstrate the power of resurrection.

I, for one, think #3 is the church's best option. And I, for one, think language like "missional," "liminality" and "post-whatever" are useful for church leaders, but are not the point. The point is that the church -- the people of God -- are called to be God's Kingdom representatives on earth and what that looks like changes and adapts in time and through culture. Being Kingdom representatives is our primary vocation. Whether we are teachers, lawyers, accountants, maintenance personnel, administrators, students or whatever, we ARE called to enter into the Kingdom of God, to call others into it, and love the world as Jesus did. And each day, as more and more of us do this, the church has a future. And each day, as more and more of us do this, the future has a church.

The Blogosphere

Lat week we hosted and led two memorial services for dearly loved members of our community. One was 93 and the other 74. In the midst of all this, one of our elders' wives was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which they thought was malignant at fist glance. To say the least, it was a hectic, emotional week.

That explains my absence from my keyboard recently. My apologies for those of you who frequently check on the blog.

While I haven't been writing a lot, some of my friends have posted very thoughtful pieces on theirs. I'm always mixed when I read friends' blogs. I'm glad that they are finding their voice and engaging the world, but then I get a knot in my stomach because I think to myself, "Shoot, I wanted to write that." Then, I feel guilty over my jealousy.

Anyway, here are some things you might want to check out.

1. One of my "old kids," Jessica Reese (I've known her since she was 15, now her oldest daughter is older than my youngest), who is - or will soon be - an emerging writer, has some good thoughts on Christian art at her site.

2. My friend, and recently returned missionary now working with Compassion, Russ Debenport, has some great music and thoughts about CCM at his blog.

3. Though Easter has passed, William Willimon has a great piece on the last to believe in Easter on on his blog, "A Peculiar Prophet."

4. Bill Kinnon, who I don't know, has some interesting thoughts entitled, "The People Formerly Known as The Congregation," at his site.

Happy Reading

::Your Inner Geek::

I've long held to the hypothesis that everyone has an "Inner Geek." What I mean by that is that whoever you are, no matter how cool, there is something - maybe even multiple somethings - that you are a geek about!

I'm mainly a geek about church. When going out-of-town or away on vacation, one of my chief concerns is which churches I'll be able to go to. For instance, this spring I'm going to Malibu, CA, and you better bet that I'll try to arrange my schedule to visit Mosaic in LA. In addition the coming months will take me to Raleigh, New Orleans, Abilene, and some other places I can't quite remember right now, and you better bet I'm going to try and catch some innovative, missional church in the area. As a matter of fact, this past Advent season I tried to make four different church services on Christmas Eve. Alas, my wife's sensibilities and high gas prices colluded to reduce me to only two services plus the Pope's midnight mass.

I'm just a geek for church!

In my free time I read books about church, I write ideas about church, and I blog about church. Amazingly, many if these things never reach the light of day. It doesn't matter to me though, it feeds my inner geek.

I have other things that I'm a geek about too. The are the following:

Crossword Puzzles - don't ask.
Preaching - which has something to do with church.
Gadgets - especially if it's made by Apple.

So what are you a geek about?

Peace Keeping 3

Even though every sermon any of us have ever heard about peace—particularly if that sermon originates from Galatians—has told us that peace is not the absence of conflict. The idea here is that we can be people of peace, and have communal and individual peace even when everything around us is in the midst of tumult. This is a Biblical view of peace, but in reality the way we practice peace in the church is about trying to get to a place of peace as the absence of conflict.

This often comes when a church is looking to replace or hire a new staff member. Churches are replete with stories about one minister being too active or too controversial then leaving for another church or being fired and the very next minister being the most uninspiring, milk-toast, oatmeal talking person ever. Churches tend to swing from one side of the pendulum to the other. In this example, the new pastor comes in and gives the church what it wants in terms on not upsetting or challenging anyone, then the next thing you know, the church looks up and wonders why nothing is going on, why they’re not growing and why no new strides are being made. The reason is peace as the absence of conflict.

Some in the church have bought into the idea that peace, as the absence of conflict is always good. I seriously question that proposition. Like I said before, the transformative process by nature is not peaceful.

The church is supposed to call people away from the kingdoms of this world. Those kingdoms are the very air we breathe. We are bathed in it. We can’t escape it. That’s why the church cannot afford the absence of conflict. This, I think, is what Jesus meant when He said that He came not to bring peace, but a sword. The Savior is not interested in senseless violence, but rather He knows that to live as He is calling us to live, we would naturally be set apart—and set at odds—from the kingdoms of this world.

For example, white churches in the south repeated implored Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement to simple wait for equality and not cause domestic disturbance. This—as the absence of conflict—is peace. Yet, their position was not right. If someone had gone into a southern white church in the 1950’s and said, “Hey, we should everything we can to bring about equality for all races,” then he or she would probably have been run out of town. Yet it is the process of disrupting the peace that advanced the kingdom of God and made both the society and the church a truer reflection of the heart of God.

Peacekeeping is often opposition to God.

Market Share

I mentioned in my last post that I would be reading a number of books over the Christmas holiday. Well, I've begun, and much to the dismay of my wife and daughter, once I start reading it's hard to get me untangled.

One of the books I'm currently reading has me asking some questions. The questions are not about the argument of the book, but rather the language of the text. In the book, terms like "organization," "gain market share," and "compete with the competition" keep springing up.

I'm not sure how I feel about the words. Of course there are organizational aspects to the church, but aren't we going a little too far when the organization of church becomes concern with "market share." At what point -- if any -- does the church transition from a community of people seeking and offering life-change into a gaggle of salesperson? How much do we want the church reflect the best practices of the Fortune 500? It seems to me that it is very easy to build a large church: give people what they want, challenge little in terms of transformation, offer more and better activities for kids than any organization in town, make it easy, serve up religious goods and services. The problem is that I'm not sure if the best way to build a church is the best way to make disciples. I often wonder what many church leaders would spend their time doing if they (we) could divorce ourselves from the desire to compete with our fellow ministers and increase our market share?