The invitation to discipleship is your consumer point of purchase. Having done all that singing, all that praying, all that preaching, this is the time for the congregant—saint, sinner, visitor, member, church mother, pastor—to decide for themselves where they’ll want to spend eternity. Drowning out meditative thought with up-tempo head-banger music is just stupid. There is no more important, no more vital a moment in your worship service. And this is, likely the very worst thing the black church does.
Reason 3: The Invitation To Discipleship
What the Black Church does well is pageantry. They put on a good
show. What they do worst is connect people to Jesus. In 50 years
in the Black Church, no one has ever asked me if I knew Jesus.
They ask me what church I go to. The church
connects people to each other and to itself. But, sooner or
later, many move on because there’s no anchor to God. God is
often a guest in His own House while we celebrate endlessly and
work tirelessly for the next big show: Usher’s Annual Day,
Pastor’s Anniversary. There is a rich social contract within
these organizations. Leaving feels like a divorce: it’s painful
and destroys trust. But, sooner or later, amid all the noise and
warm embraces, we find unanswered questions forming the water’s
edge between religion and relationship. We begin to mistake our
relationship with the church or pastor with a relationship with
God. Most of us, myself included, have simply not been taught
very well. The dreary task of educating people about the basics
of doctrine and the nature of God is often colorless, thankless
work performed perfunctorily by willing workers who are
nonetheless reading from a pamphlet rather than illustrating
from experience. We slog through it over six miserable weeks,
and now back to our show.
There’s nothing quite so sad as an empty church. I’ve visited a
great many empty churches. Churches with proud legacies now
reduced to a shadow of their former glory. Entire pews empty on
Sunday morning. Huge gaps in seating with people scattered into
little clusters around the sanctuary. Some churches have even
taken to roping off pews to encourage people to sit closer
together rather than scattered about.
A half-empty or, worse, three-quarters empty church will usually
have a hard time growing. The churches that grow are churches
that are routinely filled to capacity every week. People want to
be where people are. It’s like the night club syndrome. Back
when I used to club (and, I really wasn’t much of a club
person), me and my crew would cruise the clubs looking for the
hot spot. The hot spot was typically the hardest place to get
into, the place with the lines out front. Usually, if we could
get into a club too easily, or if the cover was too cheap, we
knew the place wasn’t happening.
This mentality extends to the church. People become
self-conscious and critical of churches with empty pews while
churches busting at the seams are afforded a certain positive
outlook. If you expect the service to be good, the energy is
going forward. The pulpit has your attention and cooperation,
and your positive energy fuels the worship experience.
If you walk into church expecting it to be tired, because
there’s only a handful of over-worked faithful there, chances
are you won’t be disappointed. The energy is going the opposite
way, and the pulpit, the choir, the deacons, the
ushers—everybody has to work three, four times as hard as the
packed-out church. Worship at the packed-out church is usually
good because people arrive expecting it to be good. Worship at
the half-empty or three-quarters empty church is usually tired
because that’s what people come to expect.
Thus, the prosperous church prospers, and the struggling church
struggles, dwindles, and may ultimately close its doors.
Now, here’s the harsh realty: many of them need to close.
Not because they’re small, or even because they’re tired. But
many black churches simply don’t need to exist. A quick
inventory of what the church is doing, in terms of evangelism,
spiritual growth, and community involvement, comparative to the
model established in Acts Chapter Two, will tell the whole
story. If you cannot name a single family who lives on the same
block your church is located on, your doors need to
close.
This has nothing to do with money. This has nothing to do with
head count or any of those usual benchmarks. This has to do with
effectiveness, with
whether or not your church is, in fact, a church. Too many of
our churches are not churches at all, They have been allowed to
become social institutions—night clubs and elks clubs—moreso
than a body of believers.
For God to bless your church, your church needs to be in a right
place with Him. Your church needs to be so sold out to God that
it is willing to do what God wants done and not stubbornly dig
in, clinging to a withering, fruitless branch of the tree. Jesus
cursed the fig tree that did not bear fruit [Mark 11:12-14]. It’s fair and
reasonable to evaluate your church over the previous months and
years and to soberly ask yourself if it is in fact bearing
fruit. Not how much fruit—not your head count of members
joined
(which, is often our mistake; using head counts to measure
effectiveness. God is not the least bit concerned with your head
count) —but ask God, soberly, prayerfully, about the quality of
your fruit. These people who joined your church: are they
actually saved? Do they actually have a thriving and productive
relationship with Jesus Christ? Do your members actually have
family devotion with their spouses and children? That's the
tough one—I'd guess 99.999% of our families do not, in fact,
have a daily or even weekly time of family worship. we stand up
every month and read that lie—that useless and
doctrinally questionable Baptist church covenant, and promise to
keep "family and secret devotions." Most of us do neither, and
our lives reflect that. This is, incidentally, the first of two
main reasons our children know nothing of God and do not fear
God (which we'll get into in two weeks): (1) your failure to share
Christ with them, usually because you yourself do not know
Christ and do not worship Him and do not live a life that honors
Him and your kids know it, and, (2) you keep paying that cable
or satellite bill, literally financing the garbage that is
destroying our youth right in front of our eyes.
Bottom line: we're talking about an inconsistent witness, church being marginalized to Sunday mornings. The church should exist in our hearts, should be part of our daily lives. The main reason our churches are struggling is we are not being taught this. we have far too many lousy, useless pastors, their names writ huge on the side of the church bus, but they can't even effectively communicate Christ to their own wives and children, let alone the church flock. Ministry is top-down: the rebellious godlessness of youth is a direct reflection of what is being preached in the home—nothing. The nothing being preached in the home is a direct and accurate measure of the quality of the pastor's leadership.
There's plenty of blame to go around, first and foremost to this pastor writing these words. In seeking answers to the frustrations of church growth, it is important to find the strength of character within yourself to ask God, soberly and in the fear of God, if your ministry actually has much of a purpose. If your church, and your church alone, is not indispensably effective in its community, if the very well-being of people is not directly impacted by your church, then all options can and should be on the table, including the dissolution of your church or a merger with another ministry or ministries. A merging would create a larger body of believers, who can be more effective at serving because the burden of service is spread across a wider base.
The obvious financial concerns can be eased somewhat, and all of the ministries involved can become more focused and more effective. The main objections to such mergers usually have nothing to do with ministry. Those objections are about vanity, about selfishness. Them versus Us. About money, about pastor unwilling to give up their power over the twelve people left at their church or the paycheck those twelve people finance. Churches that resist working together are usually led by people who are not allowing God to speak to them or through them, which is reason enough to allow such places to wither on the vine.
