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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 5 (Conclusion)

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No need to wait for March Madness, the Final Four are here today!

So without further cleverness, here are the final four issues that the Church in the West needs to address if she’s to be the light to the world that the Lord intends her to be.

4. Make the church for believers
Anyone who’s been watching the Church in the West, and America in particular, has seen the spectacular, meteoric flame-out of the Church Growth Movement. All sound and fury signifying nothing, the CGM gave us their new and improved Church without a Cross™. The upshot is that we now have a Church whose teaching consists of nothing more than milk 24/7/365, and mostly byproducts at that. It’s like casein —and anyone who’s ever eaten a $2 pizza knows how gross that tastes!

For 13 years I was part of a what was once a fantastic church that progressively fell on hard discipleship times because it swallowed the CGM whole. In our final grim days there, it got so bad that I alerted the church’s denomination that the church had gone so far to attract anyone they could that they’d actually stopped preaching the Gospel. Messages had become mired in Human Potential Movement garbage and a smarmy cuteness aimed at those who live for cultural relevance. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to get to the pastor to ask him what was up, my wife and I finally left.Only later did it come out that we weren’t the only ones. More than 40% of mature Christians within that church were bailing out year over year. Eventually the leadership of the church recognized the hemorrhage and repented, but we were long gone—and with a bitter taste in our mouths.The lesson here is one that all Christians should heed: the Church of Jesus Christ is for those who believe in Him. It is NOT for unbelievers. We are sent OUT to the world to bring the Gospel out to the perishing. Once the lost believe, we are to bring them IN to our churches. In their attempts to reach the unsaved, what our churches must never do is dumb-down the messages and training toward maturity that growing Christians need so that unbelievers can be accommodated. And especially if that accommodation looks no different from the world.

The Church consists of the called-apart people. Our teachings should be geared toward Christian maturity, not toward those who don’t even know Christ. The abject failure of the Church Growth Movement is that it didn’t spike the numbers in the truly converted. Sure, it attracted a few people who traditionally had skipped church, but that came at the expense of people looking for substance. Meanwhile, mature Christians have abandoned the typical church on the corner, delving into house churches, emerging churches, or skipping church altogether. They’re so fed up they don’t know what to do.

What to do is this: our churches should always hold Christ’s banner high so that those who can embrace it will, not low so that it gets trample upon. The Church has to be for believers first. Strengthening real believers into hardcore disciples is our mission. We send them out into the world equipped and ready; they bring in the harvest. No other method works.

3. Recover prayer & fasting—especially to repentance
Truthfully, I’m not sure I should add anything here. I’ve said before that we can’t expect miracles to happen, we can’t take down the Enemy, we can’t do anything at all in the Lord’s power unless we’re serious about prayer.But we’re not praying. We’re “practicing the presence” or we’re tossing up tiny “prayerlets,” but our frenzied lives have left us devoid of real down-on-our-knees prayer—though we’ve never needed that kind of prayer more than now.One of my all-time favorite Christian authors and speakers was Leonard Ravenhill. He said this about prayer: “No man is greater than his prayer life.” I don’t think a greater truth ever existed in eight simple words.Fasting. What can I say? Are we doing it? I knew a lot of guys growing up who fasted in order to find a wife. Sounds hokey, but a host of guys are nodding their heads as they read this. However, now that we have wives, we’ve let this one slip. The Bridegroom’s gone away, but if we want Him to come back to find faith on this third rock from the sun, we better be fasting along with our praying. Fasting goes with prayer like peanut butter goes with jelly (well, maybe that’s not such a great illustration—pairing food imagery with fasting—but hey, it’s late!) Both are great individually, but together they’re more than the sum of their parts.

And to what end should the Church be fasting and praying today? To repentance.

Does anyone besides me think that if every church in this country called the faithful to prayer and fasting toward repentance that God wouldn’t shake things up? People have called me idealistic before, but I still believe that if the Church in the West got down on its knees, fasting and praying until the gates of heaven shook, God would do a mighty work among us.

I believe that dire days are ahead for the Church in the West unless we repent. God has already removed some of His Glory from us and given it to the Third World because they have come to Him in their poverty, believed Him, and gone out to minister as if every day is the last. And what did the West do? The children of the world said, “Jump!” and we replied, “How high?”

I don’t ordinarily pick fights with people, but I will on this topic if people say, “No way.” We’ve lost something here in Western Christianity and if we don’t want to see our lampstand removed altogether, we better get serious about prayer and fasting, especially to repentance.

2. Live by The Golden Rule
I may have reiterated this particular case here one too many times in these twenty-one steps, but I promise this is the last time. Stay with me.Jesus wasn’t scourged for 401k accounts. He didn’t have a crown of thorns driven into His scalp so we could fight to get the latest iPod. He didn’t have three nails pounded through His hands and feet so that we could climb over the little people on our way to the brass ring. He didn’t die in agony on a hillside for the world to see so that we could pass by the homeless man on the street and feel good about our lot. Jesus Christ died for people—and not just you and me.I believe our hopelessly broken societal “norms” have led us to this grim place where our first inclination when we meet someone for the first time is to assign them a stereotype we believe they fit. We judge. We assess. We categorize. We assume.Jesus Christ annihilates that thinking. He says:

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
—Luke 6:31 ESV

I can’t help but think that if we truly believed this verse and lived it out, it would transform every single aspect of how we relate to people. We think the Golden Rule is good enough for our children, but when did it stop being good enough for us?

What would happen in the Church in the West in 2006 if every one of us who call Jesus Lord would view every relational encounter we have in a day through the lens of Luke 6:31?

I’ve got to believe that the world would be a far different place.

1. Show people Jesus
Earlier, I mentioned how a church I’d been a part of self-destructed by going completely seeker-sensitive.During a service at that church back a handful of years ago, the Lord revealed a great truth to me. I saw all those people in that huge church glued to some well-calculated, but throwaway, piece of church programming, yet the cry of their hearts was for what they were not getting. That cry was, Show us Jesus.Folks, are we showing people Jesus or are we giving them something (or even someone) else? The heartcry of every person on this planet no matter what it may seem to be on the surface is show us Jesus.Now I’m not so ignorant that I don’t realize there are people who are sworn enemies of Christ, but I still believe that even they want to see Jesus, if for no other reason than to steel their own resolve against Him, to hate His people more, to gnash their teeth at their own Christ-denying error.

But this is not about them. It’s about those people who are desperate to know Jesus, but have no idea where to turn to find Him.

What saddens me more than anything else is to see people crying out to see Jesus, yet we give them man-made garbage instead. For those of us who know Christ, why has it become so hard for us to show Him to others?

The problem starts in the household of Faith. If we’re to show people Jesus, then we have to know Him first. We must know His words, know His voice, and have spent so much time at His feet that we know Him better than we know ourselves. Only that kind of dedicated servant of Christ can show Him to other people.

That’s where the weakness is, though. We truly don’t know Him all that well. We know about Him to some extent, but we’re not spending enough time on our faces before Him to know Him as a person. So the world goes waiting while we get to know the cast of our favorite TV show, or the latest stock market trend, or whatever noise the world serves up to us to keep us from knowing the one person who can save the world.

Jesus. It always comes down to Him because He is all that matters.

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I believe that if we took these 21 steps, the Church of Jesus Christ would be radically altered. If we only took these last four steps, nothing would be the same.

I can’t live like the middling throngs. Breathing light into the darknessThe Christianity we live in the West doesn’t have to be toothless. Christ didn’t do all He did so we can be feeble in our living of the Gospel. The Church we see in Acts rocked the world! Strongholds were demolished, people were wrenched out of the hand of the Enemy, the dead were raised—and not just the spiritually dead!

Are we happy with the Church we see today? I’m not. My problem is that I’m the Church. If I expect to see change, then it starts inside me. Christ alone has the words of eternal life. Only in Him is true purpose found, true life.

Leonard Ravenhill, again, put it all in perspective when he said, “When are we going to get serious about getting serious?”

For 2006, let’s answer that question with the only answer that matters: Today.

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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 4

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Today brings four more issues confronting the Church in the West, America in particular. Please keep commenting, too. We all need to be talking about these things.

8. Rethink how we use our time
We live in an age of distraction and entertainment. We exist in an era when people are increasingly torn in myriad directions, their days measured in a succession of frantic activities that drain away one successive hour after the next.Some people would say that those two are incompatible, but if we’re the kind of people who are assaulted all day by a parade of activity, it’s easy to understand how an hour of mindless television or a couple chapters of some potboiler novel becomes all we can manage before we trudge off to bed. Every year sees our average work week increase. Every year sees our commutes get longer. And so it goes, day after day after day….Into the blender of daily living comes the Church. And what does the American Church ask for? Even more of our time. Volunteer for this ministry, lead that group, homeschool your kids, date your spouse, have a meaningful devotional life, and…and…and….

But nothing gives. We’re just having more tossed onto the pile of “To-Do’s” that we already fail to manage. Is it any wonder that we feel isolated from each other, disconnected from life, and enslaved by the clock?

Sadly, the idealistic model held out to most Evangelical Christians is based upon 18th century ideals of home and family. Ministry after ministry wants to take us back to those golden days when America was first founded, when everything was noble, pure, and good.

The problem is that the entire world changed. Every aspect of 18th century life was annihilated by the Industrial Revolution and social Darwinism. The result is that today’s Church is demoralizing people by asking us to live like Founding Fathers without addressing the radically altered nature of work and family life that has become our 21st century regimen.

I’ve probably blogged about this issue more than any other (see my entire Business series and posts here, here, here, and here.) Unless we begin developing a Christian mindset that rethinks how we work, play, and live together, nothing will improve on the time front and we will only grow progressively more frenzied.

I continue to be frustrated by a clergy that never speaks to this issue. Nor are wise Christians with a public forum offering means by which we can live in a manner wholly countercultural that redeems time and allows Christians to truly live for Christ rather than for broken, worldly systems.

Let’s get talking more how we Christians can fight the forces that seek to entrap our time. Let’s break out of the box we’ve been put in so we can better serve each other and the lost around us.

7. Strive toward true community
Hand in hand with the idea of rethinking how we live as Christians at even the most basic levels comes the need for true community.I’m sure most of us have seen at least one war movie. The staple of those movies is the character that watches guys’ backs as they move from one position to another. He’s got the gun ready to take down anyone who makes a move against his buddies. He’ll look out for them no matter what—or die trying. We all know his line: “I’ve got ya covered.”Too many Christians have no one no one to say, “I’ve got you covered.” Most are left to their own devices. And when they get picked off by the world’s or the Enemy’s snipers, no one’s there with the medic.

If we haven’t noticed, Christians are divorcing at the same rate as the godless. Christian young people are no better than their Christ-denying friends when it comes to biblical knowledge and sexual purity. And when people are in desperate financial straits through no fault of their own, their church says to them, “That’s too bad. We can’t help you.“

But that’s not being the Church. The anti-church, perhaps, but not the communion of saints. The truth of Christ shines in a dark placeWe Christians in America must abandon the Rugged Individualism that has permeated all of American culture and start living like our brother or sister in Christ is as much our concern as our own families. We’ve got to start asking if there are better ways to live in community than the fatally flawed half-dead thing we call community today.

Because of the strength of community in the 1st century Church, no one wanted for anything—at least according to what Acts 2:44-45 says. Or do we not believe that passage? The way we live today certainly proves that we don’t believe it. What really gets me is how ardently some Christians will argue against that passage while their neighbor goes bankrupt.

It goes beyond money, too. In our churches we may complain about so-and-so’s punk kid, but that punk kid is also our responsibility, not only because his parents are our brother and sister in Christ, but because the kid just may be, too. We may wag our tongues when some young girl in our church gets pregnant out of wedlock, but when was the last time we heard an entire congregation say that her failure was a result of their (that church’s) failure? That kind of group responsibility in other cultures is powerful, especially when practiced by Christians. But here in America it’s always somebody else’s problem.

That’s not community. There’s a million ways we can do better. Let’s start trying at least a handful.

6. Develop a holistic Christian worldview
Believe like a Christian; think like a pragmatist. Jesus fish on the car; Darwinism on the brain.The 2005 Gold Medallion Book Award for best book on Christian living went to Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. (You’ll notice that book listed under my Godly Read tab at the top of this page.) Pearcey’s book has made this The Year of the Christian Worldview. Many have talked about how important it is to have a holistic Faith in Christ that impinges on every aspect of our lives. Such a worldview provides the godly glasses through we interpret the world before we speak it back indwelt with the grace and truth of our Lord

When we roll out of bed in the mornings, we’re almost instantly assaulted by worldviews that set themselves up against God. We may not even realize it’s a fully-realized worldview we’re encountering, and this is to our own detriment. The businessman who proclaims Christ and sits on the board of the local Christian college is just as likely to be channeling a pragmatic worldview in his business and college dealings as he is the truth of Jesus Christ. Our child comes home dressed like a goth/vampire despite the fact that she’s the Awana Bible memorization regional champion, and we just shrug our shoulders, not understanding that a competing worldview has overtaken all her Bible verses, one that runs contrary to what all those verses mean.

How many Christians are hardcore evolutionists? How many Christians think it’s okay to hurt people far away as long as it accomplishes a nearby noble goal? How many Christians live by “If it feels good, do it” rather than “You are not your own, you’ve been bought with a price”? How many Christians think its okay to slash and burn the forests and meadows because it’s all going to burn in the end anyway?

The answer? Far too many. And we have non-Christian worldviews at operation in those people to explain their behavior.

Because we no longer teach a comprehensive view of the Bible that encompasses the entire spectrum of Creation, Fall, and Redemption (the crux of a Christian worldview), we have more Christians in America operating out of contrary worldviews than a Christian one. Sadly, too much of the Church doesn’t understand that Christianity works within the realms of philosophy, chemistry, economics, art, and whatever creative and rational thought we can imagine with the brains God gave us. Too often we default into various “-isms” that are the spawn of hell, yet we coat them with a thin veneer of Bible verses to give them mass Christian appeal. In our technological age, we’ve become convinced that Christianity can’t explain reality, yet nothing explains reality better than the truth of Christ.

If you haven’t read Pearcey’s book, do it. There’s nothing new in the book, but rarely has one book brought the pieces all together in one place so convincingly.

Now let’s start drilling a Christian worldview into our kids from the day they’re born and see if they can do better than we have.

5. Restore the importance of the Scriptures
There’s been far too much hellish mishandling of the Scriptures in our churches today. There’s been far too little meat of the Bible fed to people who are dying to hear God’s word. We have pastors who can’t preach the word of God, and people who can’t tell they’re not getting what they need. George Barna reports that pastors have never thought higher of their ability to get the Scriptures out there to their people, yet never since polling began have so many supposed Christians demonstrated more ignorance of the Book.I could beat this point to death, but I suspect that most readers here can go to more sources than I can to prove that we simply aren’t the people of the Book that we once were. For that reason what follows isn’t academic, but personal.It pains me to say this, but I was once a far better handler of the Bible than I am today. I memorized huge chunks of it, spent a couple hours every day in the study of it, knew where to find just about anything anybody wanted to know from it, and had a good answer based on it always at the ready. Unfortunately, I spent too much time with folks who thought there were more important things to the Christian Faith than storing up the word in one’s heart. In fact, I felt there were times that I was the oddball because I did have that “Bible advantage” going on. I let people convince me that I was haughty and made other people feel bad because I could quote verses from memory and could find any passage people wanted to locate. And though it didn’t feel right, I believed them.

I was a fool.

Now I didn’t give up the Bible, but I didn’t let it absorb me like it once did. I didn’t study it for hours on end anymore. Sometimes I didn’t even read it at all. And sure enough, over time I became exactly like all the people around me who couldn’t find things, couldn’t remember passages, and just didn’t handle the word of God well at all. I went from a workman approved to an apprentice’s apprentice. The wretched part of this is that many of the people I know who once deftly wielded the sword of the Lord have also grow slothful. We once burned brightly in this regard, but have dimmed today.

The cares of life? Yes. More trials than we anticipated? Sure. Marriage? Yep. All have contributed to that decline in the knowledge of the word. The weeds grew up and choked us.

But grace is sufficient and we can all get back to where we were (and beyond) if we realize that knowing the Bible inside and out can save us from countless defeats. It renews the mind and the soul. I pray that for all of us, we put the Scriptures in their rightful place in our lives.

We should not let a famine for the word of the Lord be self-created. To whom else shall we go? Only Jesus Christ has the words of eternal life.

Part 5 examines  the four issues I believe we Christians need to examine more than any other. Any ideas what they might be?

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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 3

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New light in an old churchFour more issues we need to address in this series of “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church.” (Previous installments: #1 and #2.) If you start to see a trend here, well…it’s intentional.

12. Be a church for all kinds of people
It bothers me as a Caucasian to look around on a Sunday morning and see no faces that look different than mine. While it’s true that our churches draw from surrounding neighborhoods, I know that while my neighborhood is predominantly white, it’s not exclusively so.It bothers me that at most churches the second a family hits the lobby they scatter. Mom goes to her MOPS class, Dad goes to his men’s class, while each child is sent to a separate classroom. Poof! They’re vapor. We talk about unity of the Body, but the designs of our churches and their programs tell a different story.

The singles are herded into a corral with other equally sexually frustrated people and we expect them to behave. Nor do we really want to know what they’re up to so long as they don’t whine about it.

Same goes for the elderly, because God knows that once you’re old you no longer have any viable purpose. (No wait, perhaps I’m confusing the Church in America for the movie Logan’s Run.)

Yet a body cannot function compartmentalized. Cut the heart off from the rest of the body and we know what happens. Remove something as small as the pancreas and see how long the body lasts.

Why we think it’s healthy to compartmentalize people in our churches is a real head-scratcher.

Somehow we’ve gotten it all backwards, thinking that our little nuclear families are the ne plus ultra of God’s design. Jesus turned that idea upside-down, though, when He said that the Christian family does not consist of those who share a biological relationship, but of those who do His will.

A healthy family is available to all its members. It doesn’t shunt its elderly off to a home to die. It doesn’t let its singles twist alone in the wind. It doesn’t believe that the five-year old can’t contribute. The foreigner and the alien are welcome and given a place of honor. Angels are entertained without our knowing.

Why are our church programs segregated by age and various other distinctions? Why do we have separate educational materials for each age group rather than a unified curriculum around a set area of study that is taught age-appropriately to all people in our church? Why do we set up parents to fail with their kids because they never know what the kids learned in Sunday School?

I believe we need to start asking questions why our churches look all white, all black, all middle class, all young, or all old. If the Church on Earth is a representation of the Church in Heaven, then why aren’t we preparing now to look like that Church at the End of All Things? I wonder if God is asking the same question.

I’m not filled with answers on this one, mostly questions. Still, I think that all of us need a gut check on this issue because it causes the Body of Christ to suffer needlessly in the long run. I’ve written a few smatterings on this topic before, so I won’t needlessly rehash old posts. Let’s just agree that this is an area of growth we should be pursuing in order to make our churches all they can be, not only for the Lord, but for all His people.

11. Conduct a proper self-examination
Ever encounter a truly humble person? I haven’t met many, but one characteristic stands out in the few I have met: they live in peace with all men. Why? I think the major reason is that they’ve truly believed that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.This past year, the garrulous tone that the Godblogosphere took on disheartened me because it was a rush to self-justification. Each side in whatever battle was picked launched into the other with fingers wagging and hearts pounding. Jumping into some of my favorite blogs lost its allure. After awhile I was just sad.

If I learned one thing in 2005 it’s that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Sure, I’d memorized that verse a long time ago from my Navigators Topical Memory System days, but the deeper meaning behind it had gone undiscovered. What I learned this year is that most people don’t get up in the morning plotting evil. Usually evil comes as they try to go about their day using whatever flawed coping mechanisms they’ve acquired in time. The result is shattered lives and bondage to sin.

This is not an attempt to diminish sin, only an acknowledgment that none of us are perfected yet.

Before we launch into a tirade about homosexual activists, our snooty neighbor, or the promiscuous girl in the youth group, perhaps we should put ourselves in their shoes first. Maybe then we can better examine ourselves to see how far we’ve fallen and carefully note the chinks in our own armor. That homosexual activist may be a slave of sin, but he’s there at the bedside of every friend who has ever died of AIDS. The snooty neighbor who needs to know Christ gave a third of her income to help destitute children in Africa, never saying anything about doing so. The promiscuous girl who is fornicating her life away tutors dyslexic kids every day at her school.

Where are we? And just how big is the log sticking out of our eye?

We need better self-examination, folks. If we’re not putting ourselves in front of the Holy Spirit daily to allow His Light to root out our darkness, then we need to be doing a whole lot less finger-pointing. Ironically, when we do put ourselves under the Spirit’s illumination we do a whole lot less finger-pointing anyway.

There but for the grace of God go I. The humble man realizes this because he’s been there. He knows the depth of his own failure, so he’s less likely to grouse about someone else’s. I pray that our churches would be filled with that kind of humility.

10. Fire the youth pastor…then rehire him for his true purpose
Okay, now I’ve ticked off the multitudes of youth pastors out there, but hear me out. Trust me on this one.If you’re familiar with the
Business series I wrote this last summer, then you know that youth ministry started as a reaction to industrialization in England in the early 19th century. Young people were leaving farms to come to the big city to work in factories. Alarmed by the loss of parental support and the tendency of youth to turn idle hands into the devil’s toolkit, well-meaning Christians attacked the problem by creating a new kind of ministry.

The only problem is that no one thought to ask was if there was a better way. In truth, for centuries there had been a better way: parents taught their children at home about the Lord.

In taking the role of teaching one’s children about Jesus and placing it in the hands of supposed experts, the Church in industrialized nations created a monster. Teens today don’t work in sweaty factories or live in factory-sponsored dormitories, but the model used to meet that need is still paraded as the best way to reach young people.

Yet by every measurable standard, today’s youth ministry is a devastating failure. Every poll shows that Christian youth are indistinguishable from their pagan counterparts. Same amount of sexual sin, same pathetic understanding of Scriptural truth, and on and on. The model is not working, yet we continue to believe it is.

Why not take what was usurped and turn it back over to the people who once did it right? In other words, why are we using youth ministers to instruct our children in the faith rather than using their parents? It’s the parents’ responsibility anyway, isn’t it? Aren’t we simply undermining that responsibility?

Fire the youth pastor. Then rehire him for his true purpose: teaching parents of youth how to teach their own kids about the Faith.

Today’s parents were never shown an example of how to raise their children for Christ. Most don’t have a clue. I find it hard to believe that this was the case with Christian families two hundred years ago. The failed reality remains, though. We have to do something about it.

Already in a tailspin from its heyday in the 1950s, the early 1990s saw the wholesale shuttering of Christian Education departments within churches. Time was that every church had a paid person on staff responsible for overseeing the education of people within the church, but this has long since gone the way of the dodo. In many cases, the Christian Ed department was there for the very purpose of helping adults instruct their kids in a holistic Christian worldview. Now it’s gone.

But a youth ministry 180 degrees from the typical youth ministry model of youth pastor and clan of kids can counter that loss. A youth pastor dedicated to teaching parents how to instruct their kids in the faith puts the pieces back in their rightful place. It betters families, improves parent/teen communication, and also saves the youth pastor from the typical two-year burnout and rampant divorce patterns that have plagued youth ministers for the last thirty years.

This doesn’t mean that a youth group must go away, only that it be better incorporated into the full functioning life of the entire church. The elderly are involved, entire families are involved, and parents get to take back what they let slip away.

It’s time we moved to this model. (If you didn’t get enough here, I may write on this again in the future.)

9. Be hospitable
In the latter half of last year I wrote series called “The Little Things.” One of those little things that has gone unnoticed is our lack of hospitality in our churches and our homes. This lack of hospitality manifests itself as an unspoken message of division and exclusivity. Rather than reinvent the wheel here, I’ll point you to “The Little Things” post on hospitality and hope it speaks as well now as it did then.

Follow the link below to part 4…

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