Christianity

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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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 2

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Light in the ChurchThe second installment (#1 here) in the series “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church” adds another four issues the Church in the West, in America in particular, needs to address. None of today’s items are earth-shattering, but it amazes me how the simple things get overlooked and fester in our midst:

16. Deal with offenses swiftly
I don’t know when we became so thin-skinned in America. The rise of the culture of victimization, I believe, is the reason that so many people simply can’t get along with those who hold differing views. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, we too easily take offense at what the other side thinks. It’s as if we’re stabbing someone in the heart if we say that we don’t agree with a dear position of theirs. When you get right down to it, though, the source for being so easily offended is just human pride and self-centeredness.Nowhere else is this more evident than in churches. It used to be that churches split because of fierce doctrinal battles, but I heard of a split recently due to differing takes on whether the church parking lot should be expanded. All this rancor bodes ill for a Church whose growth in America has plateaued. The world looks at us, sees the disunity, and thinks, That’s no better than what I’ve got to deal with every day—and they’ve got more rules, too! Should we be surprised that we aren’t growing? Who wants to step into the middle of a group of people who take offense at everything?

The Lord has something to say about this:

There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.
—Proverbs 6:16-19 ESV (emphasis added)

Did you catch that last one? God considers stirring up discord to be an abomination. I’m fairly familiar with the abominations that Christians prattle on about, but offending our brothers and sisters in Christ is curiously left unmentioned. If only each one of us would heed that warning!

It’s time to stop to consider how others think. Time to walk a mile in their moccasins, as the old aphorism goes. Most arguments aren’t worth it, yet we would rather fight than not because we in the Church today have developed a chip on our collective shoulder. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, we have to be right and damn everyone else who thinks differently than we do! Literally.

This isn’t a call to abandon good doctrine, only to realize that it’s easier to get someone to your side by lovingly (with genuine affection) dealing with another person as God directs in His time. We need to pick and choose our battles wisely and be willing to let some things go. Our fellowship with another believer is infinitely more important than the size of the church parking lot. Let’s start living like we believed that to be true. Like the Bible says, if you have offended a brother in Christ (or he you), go and be reconciled before you render your spiritual service. Let’s not pretend that Matthew 5:21-25 doesn’t exist in our Bible.

Let’s learn how to be the bigger people.

15. Not more church plants, but more connection to existing churches
We practice a sort of Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ekklesia that goes hand-in-hand with taking offense at others. Nothing else can explain the need for another church plant in the middle of a region filled with churches. Few church planters ever ask whether another church is necessary in a town of ten thousand that already has a church on every corner, but our predilection toward believing that ONLY WE ARE DOING IT RIGHT tends to lead to that congestion.The result is that estimates put the number of churches in this country at more than 350,000. That means that if every man, woman and child in this country were to be in church in Sunday, each one of those churches would hold about 850 people. Last time I looked, I didn’t see every man, woman, and child in America in church on Sunday. In fact, if you believe church pollster George Barna, we’re seeing fewer people in church than ever before.

I understand that some will cry that we need to build more churches to reach more people who don’t have enough churches around them to choose, but the fact is that too many churches are under-attended. Not only that, but church planters aren’t rushing to plant churches in rural communities where there might actually be a dearth of churches; they’re trying to put one across the street from three other churches in the fastest-growing Caucasian section of town. I know an area near me that is growing like crazy, but nothing explains the half-dozen monster churches built (for millions of dollars that could have been better spent) within a quarter mile of each other. I suspect you could put 2500 to 5000 people in each of them, but I guarantee that not even a third of that are showing up any given Sunday. And if they are, there’s another church somewhere that lost those people.

The plain truth is that we’re just cannibalizing each other’s churches. We’re not talking about the “three thousand added to their number that day” kind of evangelism that everyone dreams about, but no one actually does anymore. No, we subdivide our Christian population like a randy amoeba bent on replicating itself in ever smaller bits until there’s nothing left.

But what if a church decided it wasn’t going to view the church across the street as competition? What if we did a better job bringing people into existing congregations rather than building yet another church? What if we worked with the churches we had rather than build a new one because of a church split (see #16)? Or what if we changed our view that other existing churches can’t possibly be preaching the Gospel, instead suggesting that someone looking for a church might find a better fit in the church across the street than the new one we’re thinking about building?

Until we start getting off our duffs and actually start evangelizing people to the point that our own church is swelling because of new converts, not recycled ones from some other church, we just don’t need another new church to add to the cacophony of churches already screaming, Don’t go to those heretics over there, come in here!

We’ve got to stop thinking about our own little mission and start thinking about what serves the Lord best. Yet another church that is hot today and dead tomorrow is not serving the Lord best. Let’s stop now.

14. Think like a visitor
Over the course of a men’s retreat my own church held, I brought up the issue that churches, in general, rarely think about what visitors experience walking into their church for the first time—especially if those visitors have never been in a church in their lives. The puzzled looks on the faces of several of the men told me that they’d never once thought about that. They’d grown up in a church and knew church practices and culture like the back of their own hand. What could possibly be “scary” about church?I have a degree in Christian Education. One of the things drilled into me by my profs at Wheaton College was keeping an eye open for how churches actually communicate with people. What does a church say through non-verbals? Those unspoken messages can be powerful, in many cases overshadowing the message that comes out of the pulpit.

A church that preaches the love of God, but never talks to visitors, is at cross-purposes to their message. Yet the doing may be even more important than the saying.

I suspect that most people reading this are old-timers. By and large, we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be new to a church—any church at all. We know the Christian lingo, the do’s and don’ts, where to take our kids to the right Sunday School class, and what weekday ministries our church offers. But visitors don’t. And when they find themselves overwhelmed by choices and less-than-helpful church regulars, they won’t come back. Ever.

We Americans are amused when folks from other countries talk about America and what it’s like. We take for granted that we live in a big country that has supermarkets everywhere, or that people drive rather than walk to destinations. We’ve all heard the stories. A Japanese fellow told me how frightened he was to drive on the highways here because of the sheer number of monstrous semis that roared alongside him. He’d never seen so many huge trucks, nor had he ever battled them for position on a highway at 70 miles an hour. That was a source of terror for him.

What sources for terror exist for visitors to our churches? To them, our church may very well be like another country where they don’t speak the language, can’t find anything, and seem stupid about the customs that everyone around them performs without thinking, as if in some intricate ballet.

Start thinking like a visitor. Act like we’ve never stepped foot into a church before. Note the lingo and culture. Brainstorm how to make the church more accessible and less scary.

Five simple things we can do to help:

a. Always be on the lookout for people we don’t know. Don’t leave it up to the greeters to be the friendly and informative ones. Offer to sit with new people. Offer to take them out for lunch afterward—on our tab (or even the church’s if the church is wise enough to see how meaningful that can be to retaining people.)

b. Make sure signs in your church point out where people need to go. We should walk them ourselves to make sure they’re accurate.

c. Install a map in the lobby that pinpoints the locations of all church small groups meetings. Have flyers near the map that have the pictures, phone numbers, and addresses of those small group leaders on them. Ideally, if we’re doing #1, we can take people to that small group map ourselves and walk through options with them.

d. Prominently display a plaque with the church beliefs and vision in the lobby.

e. Volunteer to call people who may have filled out a visitor card, especially if they live near us.

What other ideas for making visitors feel welcome can you come up with?

13. Our neighbors matter to Jesus
Yes, the people who live next door. The couple down the street with the sickly child. The elderly couple across the street who can’t do as much around the house as they would like. The single person in the nearby apartment who gets lost in the shuffle.Steve Sjogren once gave a message where he said that he didn’t understand how someone could jump on a plane to go to India for missions work when that same person’s neighbor didn’t know Christ. Say what you will about the slight that gives to world missions, but he does have a point. I’ve never understood how we can expect to win over another culture to Christ when we can’t even lead our neighbor to that same Christ.

Our best mission field is within a half mile of our homes. What are we sowing in that diameter of one mile? And if we can’t sow there, where can we expect to sow?

Every Christian and every Christian family is like an outpost on an unforgiving and hostile planet. Imagine living on the planet Venus with its 900 degree days, acidic atmosphere, and crushing surface pressures. The house of the Christian is the sole sanctuary from that brutality. If we all lived on Venus, people would be flocking to our little respites from savage living conditions.

Our problem is that we forget that the planet Earth is unforgiving and hostile. Our unsaved neighbors are already living with one foot in hell. Do they find a respite in our homes? Do we take our respite to them in their time of need? Do they have even one clue as to the source of our respite from the storms of life?

If not, why not?

We talk about growing our churches, but we too often forget about our neighbors. Instead, evangelism becomes a concept rather than a reality. If we are not there for our neighbors in their time of need, how can we call ourselves servants of Jesus Christ? Can we expect our neighbors to suddenly fall under the conviction of the Holy Spirit by some random encounter or can we be the ones to bring the Spirit of Life into their homes?

Churches convinced of the need to grow need look no further than the neighbors of the people in the church. That’s where it starts. And if our churches are hindrances to our neighbors, then we need to find ways to take down the barriers without compromising the natural offense of the Gospel. If Christ is the stumbling block, then so be it. He Himself declared that He would be rejected because of who He is. But we, our churches, and the way we live out our faith should never be obstacles that keep our neighbors from Christ.

Tomorrow brings four more issues. Thanks for stopping by. I pray that what you read here stirs your mind, your soul, and your actions.

Blessings!

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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 1

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Shining the light on darknessToday I begin a new series called “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church.” During this five-part series we’ll be examining the ways that today’s Church in the West can rise above mediocrity and get back to being all it can be. We’ll count down to what I feel are the most important issues we need to address by order of importance.

I want to thank all those who contributed ideas. Many of those are included in this countdown, so you have been heard. I pray that the results are satisfying and that all who read this are not only blessed, but begin thinking about how they can implement these ideas in their own churches.

And now on to the first five:

21. Two-way sermons can increase biblical understanding
Given the appalling level of scholarship and biblical knowledge in the Western Church today, few people have enough grounding in the Scriptures and Church history to teach anyone anything. Churches that jettisoned their primary teachings on Sunday in order to present watered-down seeker-sensitive messages that bored the faithful to tears usually have an adult teaching model that pushes all the real meaty Scripture study down to small group leaders, many of them barely biblically literate. With adult Sunday School programs vanishing faster than you can say “ignorance,” fewer and fewer people are equipped to teach, more of that role falling on the pastoral staff.The problem then becomes one of understanding. What good is a sermon or teaching that people can’t grasp? I’ve been around enough churches to know that plenty of people leave on a Sunday scratching their heads, even if we can’t see it. Worse yet, most can’t remember the message a week later; often this retention issue revolves around failing to draw the necessary connections to put the teaching/preaching into practical focus.

Opening up the message to questions is one way that folks can grapple with meaning in the environment primed for delivering meaning. A two-way sermon allows the pulpit to connect with the pew and vice versa. I know that if I were a pastor, I’d like to know when my people were comprehending or not. Too often I think that pastors assume the message got through and take it at that. I would offer that the intractability of discipleship failures in our churches only points out the fallacy of that belief.

Preachers/teachers/pastors—take questions! Open the message up so that folks can truly understand. Don’t make assumptions about comprehension. Welcome the opportunity to let the Spirit guide your responses. You may find your people ask smart questions when prompted!

How can this be facilitated? Have an elder gather written questions that can be answered by the message-giver at the end of the message. If the congregation is small, consider fielding questions as they come to people. If the church is huge, give the message-giver a room in the church to field questions immediately after the service.

Some Emerging churches are doing this very thing and I believe it’s a great idea. Rarely do we give people the freedom to ask questions, so most don’t. But if we create an atmosphere of learning and expectation on Sunday, I suspect everyone in the church will benefit.

20. Leaders should seek out the gifted
We might think we know ourselves, but time and again parents and spouses have keener insights into how we operate than we do. Despite the fact that we live in a self-help culture, most of us are blind to at least a few of our own traits.The same is true of spiritual gifts. Few things are more useless than a self-administered gifts inventory that reaffirms what we already know about ourselves, yet this is how countless people judge their own gifts. It’s amazing how many times our results look exactly how we desire ourselves to be, though.

I personally believe that one of the great failures of the Western Church is that church leaders are not looking for gifted people within their ranks. They’re waiting for those people to self-identify. This is one reason why we have vast swarms of people in leadership roles in churches who are ill-equipped to do the very thing they believe they are qualified to do. How many of us have encountered teachers in our churches who shouldn’t be allowed to teach a preschool class much less adults? I’ve personally lost track.

If we truly believed the Holy Spirit guides into all truth, then we should be able to trust Him to point out gifted people. A pastoral staff that is not going before the Lord daily asking Him to give them eyes to see the truly gifted in their congregations is wasting God’s resources. The tendency is to respond to the boldest extroverts who say they have this gift or that and miss the quieter folks who may truly be the needle in the church haystack.

Not to give pastors one more task, but picking out the folks upon whom the Holy Spirit is resting in power is a critical responsibility. Start taking it seriously!

19. Leaders should primarily come from within a congregation, not from the outside
Want to know if a church’s discipleship and education programs are effective?The surest way to take the pulse of a church’s effectiveness is how many of the pastoral staff came from within the congregation from one generation to the next. Hiring all your pastors and leaders from outside? Then the answer is clear: your programs stink.

The chilling truth is that too many churches have to hire from the outside. Any church that does so is a failure from a discipleship standpoint. If Church A has to go to Church B to get staff, then maybe everyone in Church A should be at Church B.

The surest mark of a church’s health is an unbroken generation-to-generation line of leadership succession. Not nepotism, but genuinely earned positions based on maturity developed within that same congregation. That so many of our churches today can’t do this is appalling. Time to get tougher on how we educate people.

Going hand-in-hand with #20 above, we should be recognizing which young people coming up are gifted for church leadership and we should be encouraging them in that regard. Even more, a church should ensure that the next generation of gifted young people gets the additional training they need to make best use of their gifts, even if that means that the congregation pays for that training! How’s that for a radical idea? If we value leadership and gifting as much as the lips service we give to it, then we should be willing to open up our wallets and put our money where our lip service is.

18. Christian intellectuals must be honored
One of the most insidious trends within Evangelical and charismatic circles in the last thirty years is the absolute scorn with which most Christian intellectuals are held. The wholesale mental slaughter inflicted on thinkers in your average megachurch is contemptible.Everyone loves the people who will let you cry on their shoulder, crying along with you. But how much value do we place on Christian thinkers? My own experience is that they’re treated as carnival sideshows in a lot of churches. Folks who think deep thoughts are somehow inferior to the weeping Wendys and empathic Eddies who get all the attention.

Who can blame intellectually-deep Christians for fleeing the average church? What happened to the Francis Schaeffers and J. Gresham Machens of this world? I’m not really sure where they go, but whenever there’s a “spokesperson for Christianity” quoted in the newspaper or featured on a TV roundtable discussion one truth can be counted on: you’ll never see the theological equivalent of William F. Buckley.

Why so many Christians despise the intellectuals within their midst is beyond me. That so many church leaders allow this confuses me to no end. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the best we can do is Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson whenever the news media wants a Christian perspective.

We need to change this attitude NOW. Instead of poking fun of the theology whiz-kid, we should be holding him up as the standard for the rest of us—unless we’re satisfied with the stupidity we see paraded in public whenever a Christian is asked for his opinion on an important issue.

17. A church’s core values should be obvious
No one should walk into a church and have to ask what people at that church believe. If folks have to go on an extended hunt to get a statement of faith and the general vision of a church, that church has failed to communicate. The first thing folks see when they walk into a church’s lobby should be a big plaque on the wall that lists core values. Also, newcomers should have no problem recognizing the core values because they are proclaimed from the pulpit and lived by the people in the church.In addition, there’s no reason to have people hanging on at a church when they don’t assent to those core values. Nothing drags down a church faster than being loaded with people who don’t want to follow the core values. I think that church leaders should reiterate those values and let people know that if they don’t like them, there’s always some other place down the street that malcontents can attend.

If that sounds harsh, well…it is. But it should only be harsh if the core values of the church don’t align with the core values of the Gospel. If that’s the case, then we should only be happy to leave such a counter-productive church. Otherwise, we should let the dross know just where they stand.
The Church Growth Movement has made us too mamby-pamby about losing people. The honest truth is this: a church of 50 who are all on-board with the church’s core values will grow and make a difference for Christ. On the other hand, a church filled with 5,000 who continually question the core values—or who never live them out—will get nowhere and fight perpetually losing battles until they become worthless for the Kingdom.

I hope you’ve gotten something from the start of this series. Stay tuned for the next four entries coming tomorrow!

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