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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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Cheep Cheep Cheep, Talk a Lot, Pick a Little More

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Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
—”Pick a Little” from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man

The image from my favorite musical is a crowd of well-to-do women in a circle squawking endlessly about this person and that, but mostly about River City’s librarian and the questionable relationship she had with the deceased owner of the local library. To drive home the point concerning their activity, the director of the film version of The Music Man juxtaposed the image of the bobbing, feather-hatted heads of the townswomen with hens pecking for grain.

Save for being carriers of bird flu, a hen is not considered a ferocious beast capable of inflicting great damage. Despite this, I suspect that few of us would want to be at the center of a flock of crazed chickens intent on driving us off. A peck is a peck, but multiplied a hundred times over, blood might very well be shed.

I know a couple driven off from a church recently by the relentless pecking of chicken-hearted people who love to hear themselves talk. Their talk is “cheep,” but it still hurts. The Bible says this:

A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends.
—Proverbs 16:28 ESV

Loose lips sink ships, or so the old war caution went. I would contend that gossip sinks people and churches, too. Again, the Bible sets down a clear-cut case:

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.
—James 1:26 ESV

Isn’t it frightening how often the people who think of themselves as the pillars of our churches are all too often the ones flapping their jaws about this person or that, proving with the tongue how worthless their profession of faith is?

In the last few months I’ve witnessed some of the worst outcomes imaginable because of what one supposed Christian said about another. GossipNo matter if what was said is true or not, if the end result is that people are devastated by what was said, then we know the true origin of what the tongues wagged.

This is not about godly conviction —speaking the truth in love to people who are in sin—but about slander, backbiting, and pride. It’s about circulating gossip in the form of prayer requests, the infamous “Did you hear about Sister So-and-so’s sin? Let me tell you all about it, then we can pray for her more appropriately.”

We’ve all been on the receiving end of gossip. After a particularly difficult break-up with a girl, I was asked by a friend to come to a Christian singles group. I’d never been to one before. What I did not expect when I showed up that first night was to find that everyone there knew the intimate details of my break-up. My friend plead ignorance, and I believed him. He wasn’t the type. But I knew some other people in the group who weren’t so careful. How they knew this all, I could not know, but what I did know was that I was never coming back to this little group of gossips

I’d been a Christian for several years before that incident. While it was sickening, I’d built up some resistance to the poison. But what about those visitors who show up one Sunday in our pews and by the next Sunday everyone knows their particular issues? Worse yet is the ubiquitous telephone game that occurs when our oral tradition is lacking and what started out as “She entered her baked goods at the fair” transmogrifies into “She entered into an affair with the baker.” Your first week of considering a church and you’re trying to figure out which Sunday School room is your child’s. Next Sunday everyone is staring at you because you’re “that woman.”

I mentioned a couple days ago that the growth of the Church in America is stagnant at best and going downhill slowly at worst. And this despite being purpose-driven and seeker-sensitive! It seems to me, though, that at the root of our lack of growth is not just our evangelistic compromises, but the fact that we’ve somehow loused up simple human interaction. Perhaps we’ve become so self-centered and self-righteous that we can no longer look at another human being and put ourselves in his or her shoes. What else can explain how badly we treat other people?

I may have gone to a secular elementary school, but they drilled this one into us:

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

Remember that one, The Golden Rule? How easily it’s consigned to a dusty trunk in the basement of our childhood. How many of us want to be on the wrong end of someone else’s gossip? Doesn’t it just tear your heart out to have it make the rounds for so long that it finally gets back to you? I hate to think that being on the receiving end of hurtful words is the only way to remember the Golden Rule.

I don’t care how great each of us will say our churches are, too many of them are filled with gossip. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that this might be the most prevalent corporate sin in our churches. (“Corporate” because no one person can be an effective gossip without another to willfully listen.) The amount of this will vary from church to church, but I doubt that it drops to zero anywhere.

What an incalculable human toll, though! If true love does not keep a record of wrongs, then our churches should be gossip-free zones 24/7/365. The mere thought of the Gospel and gossip spewing out of the same mouth together should keep us tongue-tied whenever the opportunity arises to scald someone with our words. Better to say nothing at all than to tear down our brother. Or better yet, how about this precious metal standard:

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.
—Proverbs 25:11 ESV

If we’re to be people of grace, then we have to be able to dispense it. Rather than speak ill of others, why not turn that around and find something edifying to say about them, instead? If we can’t find anything nice to say no matter how hard we try, then we’d better say something to the folks who run the discipleship programs at our church because they’re not doing their jobs very well!

Don’t spread gossip. Don’t listen to gossip.

The tongue is a fire. Keep the extinguisher handy.

More Thoughts on “The Godblogosphere’s Black Hole”

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Last Thursday’s post, “The Godblogosphere’s Black Hole” riled up a lot of people. Unfortunately, I was unable to devote time on Friday to keeping up with the comments because of a hectic day and more household illness, so I think I’ll say more here.

First, I want to thank everyone who commented. I read every comment even if I didn’t reply personally. Blogging can consume all your time if you let it, so I couldn’t comment on everything that readers said. I hope to cover a few general replies here, so read on if you were slighted and just maybe I’ll ramble into addressing your particular concern.

Second, I’m not down on blogging as a tool. Blogs make dialogue possible. While that’s perfect for heated discussions, I feel we’re thinking too small with that use. I know hundreds of people who are hurting or covering for hurts they feel the Church will never address. I want to address them. I want to find a way to meet the practical needs of hurting people all around, whether they be hurting because of physical needs or hurting because they don’t know Jesus Christ.

Before I get a number of responses saying that someone knows of a church that’s meeting everyone’s needs perfectly, DestituteI would like to add that my own experience as a Christian is that in most of my darkest times I had to tough it out alone because other Christians hit the road at the point of my deepest need. And it’s not just me. I talk to other people all the time who are left twisting in the wind by the Western Church. I would even venture a guess that the majority of people sitting in the pews on Sunday have a viable need going unmet. Say what you will, but this is the Biblical model right here:

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
—Acts 4:32-35 ESV

There was not a needy person among them. Can we say that about our churches today? Or the Church universal?

Now a complete lack of monetary want may very well be the case in some of our upper crust churches; you know, the ones with the chauffeur’s entrances. But while I did attend such a church at one point in my life, I don’t today. My church is packed with needy people. I suspect yours is, too.

If even one person in our churches is going ignored in an area of need, then we can’t sit back and say we’re doing the job right. Not only this, but I think the Lord would have us expand our notion of what constitutes a lack of need by going beyond money fixes. I know people who are dying for someone to call them on the phone to talk for a few minutes. I know single moms who would love to have a solid Christian man around for her sons for a couple hours each week. I know a family who faced foreclosure on their home because the breadwinner lost his job to outsourcing and can’t find a job to replace it. I know a family that would have loved to have had someone talk to them at the church service this last Sunday. But you know what? In every case that need went unmet. No one called, no one took the single mom’s sons to a sporting event, the family lost their home because no one bothered to help them, and the mom, dad, and two kids that showed up this last Sunday made it all the way back to their car in the far corner of the church parking lot without anyone caring enough to say hello.

I’m sick of those stories. I contend that one of the reasons that Christianity is not growing in the West is because of stories like those. Every year more people stop going to church in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Yeah, even if our doctrine is perfect, our living out the Gospel sure needs a major overhaul. This is the major reason why I’m not going to participate in anymore theological “discussions”—especially ones guaranteed to be contentious. I don’t need a finer point on my doctrinal stance. I need a bigger heart for the needy. I need to put the doctrine I already know into practice or else it’s utterly worthless.

The fact is that if all this truly made a difference to us, we’d go to whatever lengths it took to meet people’s needs. Unfortunately, too many of us simply don’t care because:

  • We’re too mired in our jobs.
  • We’re too addicted to entertainment.
  • We’re too geared up about buying the latest digital camera, computer, plasma TV or other piece of ephemeral electronica.
  • We’re too in love with the world system.
  • We’re too worried about what other people might think if we went 100% counterculture for Christ.
  • We stopped asking God if He wanted to use us in a way that could change the world, even if it meant that we started small by just helping our nextdoor neighbor or the family beside us in the pew.

To whom shall we go? Where is the Kingdom of God found outside of Jesus? Do we need to fill our houses with one more gadget when the money we spent on it could have been better spent funding a dozen struggling churches in Africa? And for all the good that Christian books have done us, why do most of us Christian eggheads need one more tome for our sagging bookcases when we’re not putting 0.00001% of that accumulated wisdom into practice reaching out to the lost, destitute, and broken?

I’m not sure we really believe there’s a heaven. We don’t live like the world to come matters more than this one. If we did, I suspect we wouldn’t be so hot to be on our second generation of iPod or standing in line for the latest digital camera to replace the one we bought just four years ago. We’d be asking God every day how to give it all away until it no longer mattered because it no longer held our interest—instead, heaven was ringing in our ears. We’d be known as people who lived unencumbered lives. As Leonard Ravenhill was fond of saying, it is one thing to say that Christ is all we need, and something altogether different to say that Christ is all we have.

If it really mattered, we’d find a way—even if it meant we had to pick up a cross and carry it daily. Oh wait, we’re supposed to be doing that already. It’s easy to forget isn’t it? Hey, there’s a sale at Best Buy….

I’m working on a Godblogger map that may help us field needs more effectively. I also think it would do a better job of getting bloggers together if they saw how close their proximity is to other bloggers. Still, the point of that map is to make it easier for us to help other people. If we purposefully made ourselves more available, especially those of us who get huge traffic running through our sites every day, perhaps we could become a resource for meeting people’s needs. We have so many strong Christians blogging. I’ve got to believe that we can somehow band together to use all the gifts God has given us to make a difference in the lives of the unheard people, many of whom may be too poor to even own a computer.

We know that the world’s need is great. I believe that the power of God’s word paired with a Good Samaritan’s heart might be the synergy needed to reach a world that is not so impressed with what we say as it might be with what we do. We Christians get a lot of bad press today and I think part of that is reflected in the fact that we’re not as plugged in locally as we should be. Our atheist neighbor may have all sorts of preconceptions about the greater unwashed mass of Bible Thumpers that get in his way of receiving what we have to say about Christ, but I can guarantee that those barriers will come down if we’re the one there for him when he is ill (especially if—as is so often the case—no one else bothers.)

And like I said, that kind of charity begins at home. If we can’t practice it in our churches on each other, then there’s no possible way we’re going to make it work with “scarier” kinds of people out there in the gutters of the world.

Earlier in this post I said that I believed that the majority of people in our pews have vital needs going unmet. I’ve been around long enough to know that this is absolutely the case. If you don’t think that’s true, I don’t think you’re looking hard enough. Many people may appear fine on the outside, but inside there’s devastation that we know nothing about. Some people in our churches possess minds ingrained with the idea that they can’t ask for help because American Christianity states that “God helps those who help themselves.” So they go without, sometimes for decades. I think it is a sad thing to hear from people that they’ve been in various churches over the years and no one ever bothered to lift a finger to help them when they were struggling. I heard another one of those stories just this morning. As long as their need is within the bounds of what I can do to help, I can’t call myself a Christian if I can’t be there for that person. Should their need be beyond what I can do, then I either find someone who can make it happen for them or I throw myself on the mercy of God alongside that person so they know they are not alone. And not just once, but for as long as it takes.

God created the Church to be His chosen instrument to the world. Yes, He can act on His own through miracles if need be, but more often than not, He wants us to do the work.

As for me and my house, we’re rolling up our sleeves.