The Glass House
Part 1: Improper Motives
A Ridiculous State of Denial
A church I was pastoring had a handful of folks and a huge, old,
building that needed hundreds of thousands of dollars of
repairs. The senior pastor would not hear talk of selling the
building, so we struggled and struggled. We begged. The
congregation existed mainly to service the facility. Saving the
building was our primary motive for church growth. This is
common across all denominations including the Catholic church:
withering congregations clinging to real estate. It is a sad and
twisted distortion of the purpose of God’s church; a church that
began and thrived in people’s homes, a church that moved and
grew and re-shaped itself to the needs of the community in which
it was located.
The church was never intended to be a fixed institution. The
biblical model of the early church was fluidity. Like Mercury in
a thermometer, the church expanded, contracted and adapted to
the environment in which it existed. It wasn’t stubbornly fixed,
dug in on a street corner. It didn’t exist merely to uphold
tradition or feed the pastor’s vanity. It wasn’t an institution.
It was an organism. It was transparent. Adaptive. Fluid,
expanding to fill spaces, shrinking to get around obstacles, and
moving about to be where it was most effective.
It was an organic, living work. A refuge for the believer and a
beacon of light to a dying world.
The healthy church is like a tree planted by the river (Psalm
1). Its roots in the community are long and deep. It knows the
people, the places, the things they do, the times they do them.
When those roots dry, the organism dies; becomes brittle and
bears no fruit. A church without roots in its own community is
an obscenity. It is in a ridiculous state of denial about its
very nature. It is an affront to the cross.
The healthy church, on the other hand, is involved, its doors
open to its neighbors. And not just for weddings and funerals,
but for dances, social occasions, after-school programs. In
cooperation with neighborhood groups, police departments, the
city council. The healthy church has key people in the legal
system and medical system on speed dial. The healthy church has
a minister on call, I mean answering the phone, twenty-four hours
a day. Has a list of emergency services and can connect its
neighbors to immediate help. The healthy church takes action.
Most of our churches today wouldn’t buy their neighbors a pizza.
Their doors are locked, windows shuttered, lights out most days
of the week. Except for Sunday worship, bible study, and a few
half-hearted rehearsals, the church stands empty, neighbors
passing by not even curious about what might be going on inside
there.
Many of our churches are simply dying off, pastors admonishing
their dwindling membership to pray. Pray that God would send
them in, Send them in, Lord, send them in. Send in the people we
routinely ignore and walk past; whose driveways we block with
our cars and whose needs we leave unaddressed. Send in the
helpless we refuse to protect. The hungry we refuse to feed. The
lowly we refuse to comfort. Send them in. This is how utterly
backward we are. This is why our churches do not grow.
Evaluating your motives for church growth requires a rare kind
of humility and selflessness many of our pastors, having failed
the character test, simply do not possess. Many of our pastors
have become vain and self-absorbed, and would rather keep riding
their shrinking base of struggling faithful than to evaluate, in
any spiritually meaningful way, the effectiveness and purpose of
their ministry or question their motives for desiring church
growth.
It is the rare pastor I’ve met who can coherently define
their ministry’s purpose for existing and identify specific, key
goals for the ministry within the community in which it is
located. Most pastors can define some canned, rehearsed, generic
sense of what their church is about, but when pressed to tailor
that definition to the specific community, the specific, literal
corner their church is located upon, most pastors choke. They
simply don’t know the immediate community in which their church
is located. These pastors drive to church, do their thing, and
drive out, having never even met the people who live, literally,
right next door.
So, all the fund raising, all the pamphlet printing, all the
pressuring of the faithful—what’s that all about? Most pastors
will tell you it’s about church growth. Many will dance around
the head of a pin talking about the goals Jesus set forth for
His church, Peter and Paul and the second chapter of Acts.
At the end of the day, if these men were truthful, they’d admit
that, in most cases, church growth is simply about money. About
increasing the base number of tithes-paying members. About their
own paychecks. About the struggle to keep the lights on.
It should be worth noting
that Jesus Himself had no lights to keep on.
He had no building fund. No Annual Day. Had no Pastor’s
Appreciation. Jesus, therefore, had no motive whatsoever for
church growth beyond the pure motivation of seeking and saving
the lost—work many of our churches relegate to an
afterthought. Peter, Paul, Timothy—these men certainly went
about the business of church growth, but not because they
themselves needed to be paid or wanted larger congregations or
bigger temples. These believers met wherever they met—in each
others’ homes, in secret, fearing persecution. These people
faced, at minimum, ostracization from their families and core
belief system. At worst, they faced death. But they did the work
of the church anyway.
Few, if any if us, face imprisonment, disowning or death. Our
tradition has become one of struggle to keep the rent paid. To
keep the lights on. Clinging to our church just because it’s our
church, just because we’ve always gone there and our mama always
went there, is inconsistent with the biblical model. Pastors
should be brave enough, be spiritual enough, to say that.
Keeping the doors open just to keep the doors open does not
honor God in any way. A barren, dry tree that produces only
leaves and no figs (the appearance of being a fig tree without
actually bearing any figs) should be cut down. That’s not my
opinion, but is the biblical, personal example of Jesus Christ.
Dead and dying churches merely take up space. They prevent
effective works from being launched because new church plants
will often avoid areas where established churches already exist.
So, your ministry of dead weight and dust prevents an effective
work from being planted there.
Vision-less pastors usually know, in their hearts, that they’ve
either run out of ideas or never had any to begin with. If your
pastor cannot articulate the next horizon, the future of your
ministry, then he is marching in place. Best case: he needs time
to go off and have his own wilderness experience, to re-charge
and re-connect with God and find his thunder again. Worst-case
scenario: he needs to be shown the door.
Churches should be led by men and women of faith. Faith inspires
vision. Vision inspires courage. Courage inspires action. Action
inspires victory.
The church that is simply marching in place, simply marking
time, should be closed down, its doors locked forever.
Even as you struggle to achieve church growth, I challenge and
implore you to consider your motives for doing so. Consider your
value, worth to and impact upon the community. And be honest
with yourself: it is possible your ministry has achieved its
purpose and God is trying to move you on to higher ground with
another ministry which may also be struggling. It’s also
possible God is trying to move you out of the way since you are
stubbornly refusing to grow, to change, to evolve or to meet any
of the community’s needs. It’s also possible your pastor has no
real vision, and he is just wandering in circles and God is
tired of that.
Bottom line: if your church is not growing, there is a reason
for it. I challenge you, first and foremost, to seek God for
that reason, and to know for a certainty that your church is in
a right place with God. Because, if it isn’t, this is all just a
waste of your time.
What follows are some common reasons your church is not growing.
Christopher J. Priest
15 June 2008
editor@praisenet.org
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