I’ve been thinking about the church lately, Christ’s bride. When the majority of us hear the word “church” we immediately think of the Sunday experience, and not the collection of believers that should be working towards the continued advancement of the Kingdom of God.
My thinking has led me to want to write a couple of posts about the church, but I’ve held off for a couple of reasons. One, my friend Ernest Goodman has been writing a series of articles on the Counterintuitive Church and I wanted to make sure the direction I was going wasn’t going to duplicate or repeat things he had already written. By the way, if you haven’t taken the time to read Ernest’s series I would recommend you take the time to do it. And two, there were things I wanted to write about without being critical. I think there is a difference between offering a critique and being critical. I didn’t want to be the later. I just finished ReJesus, by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, and a quote in the last chapter prompted me to go ahead with my plan for a very short series of posts (2 or 3) on the church. Here’s the quote:
But the point is that somehow these people, most of them ministers, failed to recognize that Jesus was regularly and scathingly critical of the religious leaders of his faith community. Futhermore, Jesus’ seven messages to the seven churches in the book of Revelation (Rev 2:1-3:22) contain plenty of harshly critical comment directed at the church! To claim it is un-Christlike to criticize the church is to disregard the example of Jesus (185).
My first critique is that the church today is bi-polar. It doesn’t understand it’s purpose. It has no sense of direction. It doesn’t know who it’s intended for. One reason the church is bi-polar today is the overuse of the word missional. Church leaders use the word without understanding what it truly means. They use the word as though it’s another program, like the Men’s Ministry, Upwards sports, and the monthly ladies dinner. It boggles my mind that churches have gone to the point where missional is now listed on church websites as a quality. All the while the vast majority of these churches would never think it feasible to release their church members out into the community (on a Sunday) to impact the Kingdom. The same leadership that promotes their church as missional also begs that it’s members invite, invite, invite friends and family members to the next big series.
So which is it? Are you still blatantly attractional with your program driven church experience, pretending to be missional, or are you missional in your mindset but don’t know how to translate it to vision and action?
And maybe the bigger question should be: do church leaders today know who makes up the church and what it’s intended to be? And so that you don’t miss where I stand on the issue let me flesh it out. I firmly believe that the church is intended to be a collection of believers (both local and universal), and that the members of the church have been uniquely gifted for the encouragement, discipleship, and admonishment of it’s fellow members. I also believe that the church is the vehicle by which God will save his elect. The church is the body of Christ, his bride. This does not mean, however, that the Sunday church experience should not be welcoming to the not-yet-Christian.
In my second post I’ll explore more deeply the Sunday church experience and why many churches have gotten it wrong.
