Hospitality

The Ingredient Needed for a Genuine Church

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We’ve had an interesting conversation here this week about church planting. A few other blogs have picked up the conversation and continued it. I felt I had a couple more things to say, both as clarification and expansion.

Clarification, first.

I am very much in favor of planting churches. It’s part of the life of the Church as a whole to plant churches.

What bugs me is the way we often do it here in the United States. Overseas, it’s less of a problem because, historically, there have been fewer churches. When I’ve talked to missionaries who plant churches overseas, their language, vision, and goals are just…well, different. Over here, though, too many times the talk sounds like advertising and marketing. It’s got a sheen of calculatedness that seems distant and makes the whole enterprise sound like a business deal. And then the final product, the actual church itself ends up being cool, calculated, and often run like a business, with all the trappings of that kill-or-be-killed world. That’s no way to start new churches.

Has my brush been too wide? Sure. Talking about big problems means using generalizations. They can’t be avoided. Some church planters avoid the pitfalls I speak of and some don’t. My personal experiences with this have shown far more planters to be falling into the pit. Your mileage may vary.

Now, onto the expansion.

Looking over the comments so far on that church planting post, a few themes emerge, one of which is the qualities of a good church. Some people have mentioned a strong emphasis on the Gospel, meeting the cultural needs of the attendees (cultural relevance), and so on. Having a nice coffee bar wins a few points too.

But at the risk of alienating a few folks who will not see their favorite emphasis mentioned in what follows, I want to share what I think makes all the difference. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but it bears repeating.

I’ve been a Christian for more than 30 years. I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go. I’ve been in churches with superb preaching, soul-stirring teaching, cultural awareness to the nth degree, globe-spanning mission programs, and on and on. But here are a few questions I think create the dividing line:

When I am in the hospital, who from that church will come visit me?

When someone in my family dies, who from that church will attend the funeral?

When I celebrate a great victory, who from that church will call to congratulate me?

When I get in trouble or need someone’s expertise, who in that church will come help me?

When I am dying, who from that church will step forward to help my surviving family members?

Think about those questions for a moment.

If the answer to those questions is no one, then you’re better off hanging out at your local bar. At least people there will show some interest in you. Lost people are, sadly, sometimes more genuinely helpful and loving than people who claim to know the God of the universe.

If the answer to those questions is a church elder or deacon, then you’ve made it to the lowest common denominator of church life. Nothing thrilling here, but it’s better than no one.

If the answer to those questions is the church pastor, then you’ve actually done slightly better. See, too many churches today have celebrity pastors who don’t really mingle with the nameless, faceless people. Your average megachurch operates this way. It’s a lot like a business where the people who insert Flange A into Slot B out on the production floor never see the CEO.

If the answer to those questions is friends from church, then you’re doing even better. Some people, though, never make enough friends from church to get to this stage. Some try to make friends, and some don’t. Some are unsuccessful, even when they try. So having church friends is a good thing. It at least shows that the church is friendly.

If the answer to those questions includes all of the previous folks, plus people you don’t know all that well or don’t normally associate with in the church, you’ve hit the motherload. When you’re recovering in the hospital and the elders, pastor, friends, and that old lady who sits three pews behind you who you think might be named Eunice come to visit, you’re blessed with a good church.

You see, it’s so much about loving other people. Jesus summed it up: Love God; love people. And one way that you can show you love God is by loving people.

I don’t care how well the pastor preaches. I don’t care that the church’s doctrine is perfect. I don’t care that the church has the best fair-trade coffee bar in ten counties. I don’t care that the music rocks (or doesn’t rock, depending on your preference). I don’t care about much of what accounts for a passing grade doled out by people shopping for churches.

Do the people love each other? And most of all, do they love you?

If that’s missing, you can pack that church with every whiz-bang, trendy (or untrendy, depending on your preference), doctrinal, self-aware, truth-filled reality and it will still be a poor representation of what heaven will be like. And being a slice of heaven on earth is what the Church is supposed to be.

That begins with love. And if we don’t have love, it’s all clanging gongs and crashing cymbals. In other words, noise.

And folks,  too many churches planted in the United States today are nothing but noise.

Still Looking for a Few Good Men

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When I was growing up, it seemed like men were different.

I can’t put my finger on it exactly—and maybe it’s a rose-colored glasses thing tinted by youth and inexperience—but men seemed more serious back in the 1960s than the men of today. Back then, if a man who lived nearby said he’d meet you at 6 p.m. Friday in a neighborhood park to toss a baseball, he would

—actually show up

—actually show up on time

—show you something you didn’t know, like how to throw a curveball or a sinker

—possibly bring you a ball to keep

—tell you, in passing,  why alcohol and cigarettes were bad for your health

—watch his language like a hawk

—not even consider any “funny business”

And your parents wouldn’t think twice that you were out alone in a park with a man who was not a relative.

I don’t know if men changed or our ability to trust changed, but it’s not that way anymore.

When I was growing up, there was a sense among all the men that they had a responsibility to boys, even those who were not their own sons. Call it that “tribal” feeling—that men, all men, were charged with ensuring the next generation grew up straight and true, into better men than the generation that spawned them.

God help us—what happened to that ideal?

Back when I was at Wheaton, I wrote a paper on a thesis of my own devising concerning the implications of the loss of rites of passage within the Church. I grew up Lutheran, and to be a full voting member of the church, we had to go through catechism and then be grilled on the Faith by the pastor. Real men from properly trained boysThese were not lobbed question, either, but stuff like What is the nature of Man? and How does Man relate to His Creator? (Today, you’d be hard pressed to find a kid in your youth group who could thoughtfully answer those questions.)

That rite meant something. When you successfully navigated it, the world changed. Adults expected more of you. You could sit on church boards and make decisi0ns along with the rest of the adults. And the men in the church treated you like one of their own.

Today, we have too many churches who have abandoned rites of passage. And it shows, especially when you consider that some polls have 80-85 percent of Christian teens renouncing their faith by the time they graduate from college. Too many of those “enlightened” graduates go on to be brain-dead party boys who screw everything that moves and live in perpetual childhood. Back when America was largely agrarian, children meant something: the survival of the family. But today, children have no genuine purpose except to be children. So why should we be surprised when today’s child-men never outgrow that perception, never developing into the kind of men some of us older guys still remember. Now, asking callow youth to grow up seems like trying to blow out the sun, given that for 21+ years no one bothered to model for them what a real man, a real Christian man, looks like.

I’d like to think that I was one of those old school guys, like the kind I used to know. But I’m not really. I realize that the ideal started fraying with my generation, that we were the first boys that had an uncertain manhood awaiting us. Feminism was on the march, the drug culture was firing up, and so was the culture of privilege and entitlement. Somewhere along the way, manhood did a nosedive and has not recovered.

Not convinced? Need an example?

I don’t think a better example exists than with the current financial meltdown. If you were to go back to the founding of the investment houses, like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, those companies were run by real men. If some smart-aleck tried to run subprime-mortgage-backed derivatives  past Mr. Goldman, Mr. Sachs, the Lehman brothers, or Misters Merrill and Lynch, he’d have one of those founders burying a foot about 18 inches deep in his backside. Why? Because those founders were men, and their names meant something. Getting involved in such tawdry schemes violated their ethics and their sense of who they were as men. Today? Most of what passes for men today would trade their reputations for a quick killing in the market, no matter who got slaughtered in the aftermath. And that’s exactly what we saw exposed last year.

This isn’t an appeal to go kill a bear with a pointy stick, as has been epitomized by much of the Christian men’s movement, but to start getting serious and singleminded again about how we turn boys into men, real men, not the poseurs masquerading as  men today. We need to see genuine rites of passage return to our churches, a passage not into Spartan-like manhood but into proper handling of  the Scriptures, women, children, the work world, and on and on.

My fear? That my generation is so compromised that we won’t be able to reconstruct what it is that we have lost so we can pass on something of worth to the boys following us.

And trust me, that’s something that should make men everywhere genuinely afraid.

The One Ingredient Essential for a Successful Church

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I’ve been a Christian for 32 years. I’ve worked for or been a part of many churches. A good chunk of my degree work focused on analyzing how churches operate. I think I have some qualifications to express my opinion here.

If anyone were to ask me what the one essential ingredient was for a successful church, I’d say this:

The people in the church are genuinely friendly and loving
toward strangers and each other.

Now before I get thumped by some watchblogger out there, I am, of course, assuming that the church assents to one of the Christian Church’s major creeds, such as the Nicene or Apostle’s. Kid friendsOtherwise, the use of the word church would be gratuitous.

As I see it, a church filled with loving and friendly people can overcome just about any obstacle. I’ve seen it too many times to think otherwise. And churches that lack this trait can have everything else in the world and fail miserably.

Can Jesus make any pagan misanthrope into a loving believer? Sure He can. My only question: Why then are so many supposed Christian churches filled with people who could care less about the person standing next to them?