Open Door and Cheap Grace (Rethinking Church #26)

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Perhaps by now you are wondering where I am going in this series. Do I have anything good to say about institutional churches? And if not, what is the alternative? I promise that I will answer both of these questions soon. Today, however, I need to continue my critique of institutional church practices. We must rid ourselves of the notion that contemporary forms of doing church are the only and forever best ways of being the church in the world.

The church will face many challenges no matter what form it takes or what means it uses to accomplish its mission. Jesus was persecuted and his message rejected. We can expect no less. The world is never going to welcome the call to repent of its immorality and idolatry. It loves the broad way of self-indulgence and pride. It’s not attracted to the way of self-denial and self-control. Holiness holds no appeal and righteousness excites no hunger or thirst. But sometimes the church creates problems it might not otherwise face by the forms it adopts and the means it uses.

Programs that Need Money

I’ve already spoken about money at some length. However I want to mention one more problem with money-driven churches. Contemporary churches instinctively institutionalize programs that need money and lots of it. Hence it needs contributing members and lots of them. This need introduces ambiguity into the church’s evangelistic witness. We are tempted to reduce the price of conversion from “repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15) and “take up your cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34) to “come and join our nice church.” The motto of every successful retail business is “The customer is always right.” If we set up the church so that we need to attract customers and keep them happy, how can we at the same time call them to “count the cost” of following Jesus (Luke 14:15-35)?

Family Friendly Churches

Since history began every member of most families worked to support the family. For most of that time, families could work together in agriculture, home industries, and domestic chores. There were no electronic media, no schools, no soccer practices, and no music lessons. Evening meals were taken together. But the rise of the modern economy and culture brought dramatic changes to family life. Increasingly, since the end of WW II many middle class children grow up in homes where both parents work in industry and children spend their days in schools, their evenings doing homework, and their weekends in sports activities. Parents expect daycare workers and schools to educate their children while they are at work and coaches to teach them athletic skills in the evenings and on the weekends while they relax.

And on Sundays modern parents expect churches to act like the daycares centers and schools on which they rely during the week. Church leaders respond to this pattern of expectation by providing child care, age segregated Sunday school classes, and a full range of youth programs. Churches feel pressure to hire children’s ministers, youth ministers, young adult ministers, and family life ministers. They build huge complexes to accommodate all these activities. Otherwise they will lose families to churches that provide them. In the meantime, parents fail to teach their children the faith or spend time with them modeling the Christian life, which is among the top two or three essential responsibilities of parenthood. Are we helping or hurting families by assimilating the church to the pattern of busyness that is the bane of modern family life?

Guest Friendly Churches

Before the nineteenth-century revivals that periodically swept the United States after 1810, church services were not really guest friendly or evangelistic in nature. For the most part, they were for insiders, the elect. After the Civil War right up to the present, the Sunday service became a time to “invite your neighbor” or to receive “walk ins off the street.” The sermons and all other public activities betrayed an awareness that the “unconverted” may be in the audience. The constant presence of outsiders guaranteed that the church could never conduct its meetings in ways designed to build up the church to maturity in Christ. The original purpose of the gathering was forgotten.

Stage-Centered Meeting

In my experience, most contemporary churches are stage centered. People come to watch, listen, and feel. The preachers, readers, worship leaders, musicians, and singers are at the center of attention. The church experience becomes performance and entertainment. If the performance is not satisfactory we go somewhere else. Center stage in the spotlight becomes a place of honor to be sought. The stage replaces the table, the music replaces the Eucharistic meal, and a feeling of transcendence replaces Christ crucified and risen.

Next Time: Don’t despair! We can do better.

Why Church Reform is (Almost) Impossible (Rethinking Church # 25)

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Models of the Church

In every age the church takes form in the world as an association of people, and it borrows a model of organization from the surrounding society, modifying it according to needs. In the early days, the church adopted the Jewish model with the central authority vested in the apostles and elders at Jerusalem and locally in household patrons and elders that presided over the church in a particular city. Sometime during the second century, elders became priests and a single bishop asserted rule over each city.  After the church became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it began to model itself after the imperial administration. In the East, powerful bishops or patriarchs ruled over the main cities—Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Constantinople—and the surrounding districts. In the West, the bishop of Rome began to model himself after the Emperor to become the single head of the whole church and all the bishops. The church developed a huge and complicated bureaucracy to administer the imperial church.

The Protestant churches of the Reformation era in breaking with Rome became national or city-state churches. As I pointed out in the previous post, Protestant churches in the United States still preserve the basic form acquired in the Nineteenth Century. Some denominations adopted a centralized and bureaucratic administrative structure. Others remained a loosely associated family of local congregations. Still others choose some level of centralization between the previous two.

However they organize themselves formally, at an informal level certain styles characterize most contemporary churches. (1) The church as a business. Church leaders, whatever their official titles, administer the affairs of the church in the way chief executive officers and boards of directors administer businesses. Churches have products, marketing strategies, strategic plans, shareholders, customers, and hold market shares—all by other names of course. (2) The church as a school. Schools have administrators, teachers, classrooms, lectures, and curricula. (3) The church as a charitable organization. This type too must be organized to receive and distribute goods and services to its target recipients. (4) The church as a theater. Theaters need administrators, theater halls, actors, musicians, and directors. (5) The church as community center. Community centers offer gathering places for socializing, meetings of various interest groups, recreation, and organizing for political activism for one cause or another.

Two Big Problems

Reform is Impossible. Though these non-theological models and styles dominate the actual running of churches, churches still use the religious rhetoric of the kingdom of God, family of God, or body of Christ. Apparently, they don’t see the irony in this. For they don’t resemble a family at all. Nor do they hold everyone accountable to the ethics of the kingdom or work like the body of Christ. And when an individual actually urges the business, school, charitable organization, theater, or community center type church to return to the family or kingdom or the body model, the deep logic of these models absorbs, overwhelms, and neutralizes every effort at reform. I do not doubt that churches adopt these models in good faith and for practical reasons. But hidden within each of these models is an irresistible logic fundamentally at odds with the essential nature and mission of the church. All species of star fish can regrow a lost limb as long as the central disk remains, and a few species can regrow the central disk and all other limbs from just one limb. I learned from experience that you cannot reform a church by tweaking this or that program or renaming an office or an activity to sound more biblical. It changes nothing to start calling a church secretary an “office minister.”  True reform begins with abandoning the foundational logic of alien models and all their outward manifestations. The problem is in the DNA not in the name.

Assimilation is Inevitable. The irresistible logic, the DNA, of such models as businesses, schools, charitable organization, theaters, and community centers—even if they are adopted by churches—demands assimilation to the archetypical, secular form of the model. When churches look and operate like other institutions in society, the logic of the model demands that they place themselves under or be forced to assimilate to the ethics, laws, and social expectations applicable to analogous institutions. By law and social expectation our society expects all employers and public accommodations—theaters, schools, hotels, restaurants, etc.—to treat every individual equally regardless of ethnic origin, religion, physical ability, gender, and sexual orientation. This logic seems as compelling to insiders as it does to outsiders.

Until recently, most churches ordained and employed men only as clergy, and even roles open to laypeople were reserved for men. However with recent changes in public expectations, many people are asking such questions as “If women can be senators, professors, heads of fortune five hundred companies, actors, singers, world-renowned athletes, and police officers, why can’t they become preachers, bishops, and elders…since the church in all other ways looks and acts like businesses, schools, and theaters?” This irresistible logic is powerfully working its way through all churches in the western world. And, just as it will inevitably drive most churches to assimilate to feminism, it will surely drive many churches to assimilate to the gender revolution.

The pressure to assimilate to a culture hostile to authentic Christianity cannot be successfully resisted merely by stubbornly refusing to change. It can be dealt with only by uncovering and repudiating the subversive logic at play when we adopt the model of the church as public accommodation or business. It is not the church’s essential mission to provide the public with employment or places of honor or social services or social acceptability or recreation or social networking—or any other worldly good or service. I don’t think we yet realize how much freedom to pursue our essential mission we give up when in good faith and for good reasons we adopt models designed to pursue other ends. Nor have we yet realized how costly our liberation from the relentless logic of assimilation will be—nothing short of death and resurrection.

To be continued…

Should the Church Serve the Common Good? (Rethinking Church #24)

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Since the Fourth Century, the church has functioned within Western society in the role of a supporting player. It became a teacher of morals, pastor of souls, and guarantor of the overarching worldview that made sense of life and the social order. The church accompanied you through all of life’s passages with her sacraments: at birth with baptism, passage into adult with confirmation, transition into the married state with holy matrimony, and in your journey through death with last rites. And along the way she helped unburden your conscience through the sacraments of penance/absolution and Eucharist. The church was involved in education and ministry to the poor. Feast and fast days, Sundays, Saint’s days, and holy days of all sorts marked out time and gave rhythm to life.

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation did not fundamentally reorder this symbiotic relationship between church and society at large. Looking back with benefit of hindsight at the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries we can see some early indicators of the coming change, but it was not until the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries—after Darwin, Spencer, Dewey, Freud, and Marx—that the exponential growth of cities and rapid industrialization produced the beginnings of secular society in the United States. There had always been a large minority that were unchurched. But even the unchurched thought of themselves as Christian and viewed the institutional church as a social good.

The current institutional form of churches in the United States—despite all the doctrinal and organizational differences among them—derives from the Nineteenth Century, the era after disestablishment—that is, after the separation of church and state—and before thorough secularization. Churches of today do not expect to be financially supported by the government but still present themselves to society at large as serving the common good. And they expect to be treated as a social good. They want to speak to the moral, social, and political issues of the day. They wish to retain all their traditional privileges.

However in the early Twenty-first Century a significant, but disproportionately powerful, secular minority in society—especially within journalism, education, and entertainment—no longer thinks of the church as a social good. This minority is especially critical of traditional Christian morality. They no longer view the church as a reliable teacher of morality. Indeed, the church is viewed by many as institutionally sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and racist. Its critics portray it as a purveyor of hate and a hindrance to social progress.

What is to be done?

Since I am speaking in this series autobiographically and from experience, I don’t want to generalize. However, from what I see I do not think that the status quo can be maintained for much longer. Some secular progressives would like to destroy the church by using government power to tax and regulate it into oblivion. Others hope to cancel its speech with interruption and protest. But I think the greatest threat to the church’s Christian character is its own unwillingness to rethink its centuries-old role in society at large. As a whole, society no longer looks to the church as its moral conscience, teacher, pastor, and guarantor of a meaningful worldview. Consequently, the church stands at a crossroad. On the one hand, the broad road beckons. It can try to prove its continued relevance to society at large by adapting to society’s progressive morality while deceiving itself into thinking this new morality is thoroughly Christian. Or the church can give up its vain ambition to be recognized as chaplain and advisor to an increasingly pagan culture and take up its original mission as a countercultural witness to Christ crucified and risen from the dead. Remember what Jesus said about our anxious desire to survive:

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:35).

This truth applies to churches as well as to individuals.

The Importance of Fellowship (Rethinking Church #23)

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Today we consider the third component of the church gathering, fellowship. I don’t know what comes into your mind when you hear the word fellowship. Perhaps you think of a time for coffee, donuts, conversation before or after the formal worship service. Or perhaps a monthly or quarterly potluck meal after the worship hour. Or even more informally, hallway conversations before worship services begin or after they conclude. These occasions can produce fellowship, but I have something else in mind. The English word fellowship translates the New Testament Greek word koinonia, which can also be translated sharing or participation or communion. The Christian idea of koinonia is that of many people sharing in the experience of Jesus Christ and being united with each other by their mutual participation in him. John speaks of personally seeing, hearing, and touching “the word of life.” But he wants others also to experience this life and have the joy of sharing this life with them:

“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship [koinonian] with us. And our fellowship [koinonia] is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete” (1 John 1:3-4).

Paul speaks of the Lord’s Supper as a participation or sharing in the body and blood of Christ and then connects this experience to the unity of the participants:

“Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation [koinonia] in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation [koinonia] in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf” (1 Cor. 10:16-17).

The church as it is described in the New Testament is a fellowship, a shared life in Christ. Christians met often in small gatherings to eat, pray, study, and worship together. As we can see from Paul’s discussions in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, they shared in the bread and wine in honor of Christ. They knew each other intimately and were supposed love each other as brothers and sisters. Their meetings were designed to encourage and strengthen each other to live a life worthy of the name Christian. Their unity, love, and holiness served as a witness to Christ. When one of their number began living immorally, they knew about it, took it seriously, and attempted to intervene. If all else failed, they would refuse to allow this immoral person meet with them (See 1 Cor 5:1-13). And that refusal was made simpler because they met in private homes, not public buildings. The individual’s spiritual welfare and the integrity of the community’s witness were at stake.

In my life as an individual believer and as a church leader I have rarely found true fellowship in the gathering of a traditional church or parachurch. You can meet with a hundred or several hundred people once or twice a week in a big stage-focused assembly for years without getting to know anyone intimately. Few people know your struggles, needs, or interests. You may never hear others’ individual expressions of faith. Fellowship, sharing, and community take time, and we don’t have time to experience real fellowship with hundreds of people. At minimum, then, a traditional church, if it recognizes the need for fellowship, must put a high priority on getting everyone in a small group designed to promote fellowship. However, some people may need to make the small group their primary church gathering and the big church a secondary one.

I mentioned above the need to intervene in the lives of Christians who are trapped in immorality or other sins. This becomes almost impossible in a big church as I discovered as a church leader. Often my fellow leaders and I discovered problems only after it was too late to help. Also, it’s difficult to confront people with their sins if you don’t know them, they don’t know that you love them, and you have not invested time in their lives previously. And in our litigious age church leaders are concerned about getting sued for invasion of privacy. All this adds up to the secular ethic of “mind your own business.” This is not fellowship!

What would the church gathering look like if we designed it for maximum benefit in worship, instruction, and fellowship?

Next Time: Do traditional parachurch churches have a future in a post-Christian culture increasingly hostile to the Christian gospel and ethics?

The Future of the Sunday Sermon (Rethinking Church #22)

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The church gathers for worship, instruction, and fellowship. We spoke about worship in the previous essay. Today I want to consider instruction. Christianity’s understanding of God and our duties to God is communicated in a story that must be told and told again. No one is born knowing the religious stories, traditions, and myths of their people. This is true even of religions based on the cycles and powers of nature. It is even truer of Christianity, which incorporates the history of Israel—of Abraham, Moses, David, and the prophets—into the New Testament story of Jesus and the teaching of the apostles. New converts and children must taught this big story and how to live within it. No one is released from the school of Christ except by death.

Instruction is all the more important in situations where Christians are a minority and the surrounding culture is pagan and hostile. The pagan story is told in the daily activities of commerce, law, entertainment, and education. If faith is to survive we must intentionally retreat to places where the Christian story is repeated and lived. The Christian household and the church gathering are the two most important places where this takes place. And in these two places we are often encouraged to develop a routine of individual Bible reading and study.

I’ve always had a near romantic view of preaching. As an undergraduate I took courses in preaching and as a graduate student I loved my course on the history of preaching. The prophets of Israel preached judgment and mercy to the people. Preaching and the sermon have always had a place in the life of the church. Jesus taught in the fields and in the synagogues. The apostles and early missionaries preached the gospel to Jews and gentiles wherever they could gather an audience, in the synagogues of the diaspora or on the Areopagus in Athens. After Christianity became the favored religion in the Roman Empire, such bishop orators as Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine preached many times a week to large audiences of new converts eager to learn about their new faith. There were some great preachers in the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas for example, but preaching did not return to its former glory until the Reformation.

In the Protestant Reformation, preaching became the central event of the church gathering. The people needed to be taught the story and meaning of the Bible. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and others preached many times a week. The First Great Awakening in the mid Eighteenth Century, and the Second Great Awakening in the early Nineteenth Century revived and transformed preaching into its modern evangelistic form. In the view of many preaching theorists, nineteenth-century preaching reached its peak in Charles H. Spurgeon of London. Throughout all these changes, the sermon has remained the central event in Protestant church services.

At the risk of sounding like Jeremiah, allow me to express my concerns with the state of preaching and the sermon today. I am not speaking of every preacher and every sermon but of the general practice of preaching and audience expectations. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, the ideal preacher was highly educated in theology and the Bible, sermons were instructional, almost like academic essays, read word for word to the congregation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the age of Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham—things turned emotional and church music served as an emotional “warm-up” for the high energy evangelistic message. Today, if I’m not completely mistaken, the order has been reversed, with the sermon being a continuation of the music in the sense that the sermon must appeal to sentiment, begin with a clever hook, contain lots of stories, be marked by humorous moments, and be punctuated by pictures and movie clips. And of course, there a few Scripture quotations sprinkled throughout. In short, sermons need to be entertaining. Definitely not academic, complicated, and instructional.

What does this new audience expectation mean for the preacher and sermon preparation? It means that preachers spend what time they have left after doing their administrative duties searching the internet for hooks, movie clips, pictures, and stories rather than studying the Scriptures and meditating on how they apply to the people and the age. And for all that work, the modern sermon contains little instruction on the true scope and depth of the Christian faith. Nor does it really challenge the deep pagan myths that animate our post-Christian culture. Sometimes it unwittingly reinforces them.

Something has gone wrong with the church’s work of instruction. In my experience many church goers today are abysmally ignorant not only of the meaning of the Bible but even of its storyline. Hence they become easy prey for every “new” idea that hits the New York Times best seller list, the more mystical, speculative, and metaphysical the better. They unknowingly incorporate classic Gnostic, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and Native American “wisdom” into their thinking not even realizing that these ideas contradict the Christian faith at its most fundamental level. It seems to me that they embrace these ideas primarily because they are interesting, exotic, stimulate their imaginations, and resonate with the rhetoric of progressive culture—inclusion, universality, diversity, tolerance, and individual liberty. No truth, no thought, no cross, and no judgment.

Listening to a twenty minute uplifting talk on Sunday mornings will not repair a half-century of neglect. We may have to do something more radical…like beginning a serious personal study of the Scriptures or gathering with a small group of serious-minded believers to read and discuss the Scriptures. Or, reading together and discussing some great Christian writers. Or, reading astute Christian critics of modern post-Christian culture. For me, buisness as usual is not an option.

Next Time: What is fellowship?

What is Worship? (Rethinking Church #21)

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Today we move from considering the organizational structures, finances, and the clergy systems that characterize most contemporary churches and shift our attention to the Sunday gathering. What goes on at a typical Sunday gathering of an evangelical, Bible, or community church? (I am not at this time addressing the theology and character of liberal, mainline, or liturgical churches.) And why do such churches gather? I think we can place the Sunday activities of these churches into three general categories: worship, instruction, and fellowship. Ideally, these three types of activity aim at forming the church as a group and as individuals into the image of Christ.

Worship

It would be worth our time to examine all the biblical words and activities related to worship, but I can achieve my limited purpose in this essay by working from a general idea of worship. Worship is a God-directed activity that attempts in thought, word, bodily position and movement, or symbolic use of elements of creation to express a fitting response to the being, character, and action of God—in expressions of admiration, gratitude, and submission. In worship, we place before our minds the greatness, goodness, beauty, generosity, and love of God. We don’t need to think of these qualities as general characteristics only. For God demonstrates these qualities in the wonders of creation, in acts of salvation and judgment experienced and told by the prophets and poets of ancient Israel, and most of all in the life, words, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In worship we express awe at God’s greatness, gratitude for his generosity, praise for his excellence, longing for his presence, and amazement at his love.

Strictly speaking, worship is an individual act. It must come from the heart and express the true thoughts and affections of the individual worshiper. Certainly the presence of others of like faith can enhances our worship. We find others’ expressions of worship resonating with our own and increasing our sense of God’s presence and glory. Hearing others sing, pray, praise, witness, and explain the scriptures can enhance our perception of God’s presence, praiseworthiness, greatness, and love. Some are gifted to articulate in words what we can only feel. Many eyes and ears can perceive and many voices can express what one cannot. Hence corporate worship can be transformative. But the transforming power does not derive from the number of people praising God but from the vision of God that together we see. And for worship to be authentic and transformative, each person must see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears, and express their own hearts.

I understand completely the desire to attend worship at a large gathering in a state of the art facility to be lead in worship by talented professionals. The music is excellent, the lighting is perfect, and the stage presence of the worship leaders is impressive. The worship flows smoothly. Sound fills the room. Just seeing a sea of people standing to sing and raising their hands gives one feeling of confidence and spiritual power. But as someone who served as a church leader in one role or another for thirty years, I ask myself about the cost in financial resources and volunteer time to make this event happen. Is it worth it?

More importantly, does this impressive event accomplish the purpose of corporate worship better than less elaborate and costly gatherings? If the purposes is, as I stated above, to encounter God’s greatness and love and express our wonder and gratitude, all with the goal of transformation into the image of Christ, I don’t see any decisive advantage. Twenty believers gathered in a living room can accomplish the same goal. No doubt the large gathering, because of its greater resources, can do things a small group cannot.

But the reverse is also true. In an assembly of 2,000 people, 1,950 will be completely unknown to you. You will sit in rows looking at what is happening on stage. The senior pastor is like the celebrities you see on the screen. You feel like you know them, but you’ve never had a meal with them. And they don’t know you. In a small gathering you can hear from everyone, you can learn their stories, see their faces, and hear their voices. There is no stage, no spotlight, and no microphone. You know their names and the names of their parents and children. You know their concerns. You grow to love them in the concreteness of their everyday lives, and you are available to each other throughout the week. Worshiping with this church is really transforming.

Of course, these two models are not mutually exclusive. You can choose one or the other or combine them. Whatever you choice I hope you will measure what we actually do as churches against the essential nature and goal of church. I get the attraction of the big church in the matter of worship. But what about the other two reasons for gathering, instruction and fellowship? Next time we’ll think about that.

The Church and the Clergy System (Rethinking Church #20)

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I ended the previous essay by listing some advantages of the practice of hiring a staff of highly educated professional ministers to organize, lead, and teach the church. As I noted, however, this practice makes sense only in parachurch churches. In fact, they cannot function otherwise. Today I want to consider the problems with the clergy system—the system not individual ministers.

The Spiritual Life of the Clergy

I’d like to believe that most people who enter the professional ministry do so because they feel a divine call and want to serve the people of God. They have a warm personal faith and want to serve the Lord freely and happily. However, entering into an employee/employer relationship with a church introduces a new dimension. You now become dependent and responsible to a church and its leaders. You are no longer free to speak, write, and serve as you please. Your time is not your own. Your family is not your own. Every job comes with restrictions and responsibilities, but this job entangles itself with your relationship to God. Even if your employer-church never asks you to say, refrain from saying, or to do anything that violates your conscience, how do you know whether or not, without being aware of it, you are trying to please the church when you should be endeavoring pleasing the Lord? And most insidiously, after a few years ministers are tempted to think of their ministry as they would any other job, a means of livelihood. If paid ministers are not careful, the work they began freely and joyously in response to a divine call will become a heavy burden. Spiritually exhausted and embittered, they look for a way out.

The Clergy/Laity Divide

The ideas of the ordained clergy and the paid ministry are not identical, although they often overlap. The New Testament makes a distinction among various functions within the church, and some possess a kind of authority. Jesus chose the twelve apostles for a special ministry. Their central claim to spiritual authority was their unique relationship with Jesus. They were chosen by Jesus and witnessed his teaching, miracles, and death with their own eyes and ears. They also witnessed the empty tomb and the risen Jesus. The core of their unique authority, then, was their first-hand knowledge of Jesus. Paul came later and rests his authority on having been chosen and called by the risen Jesus. No one can take the apostles’ place or challenge their knowledge of Jesus.

Apostolic witness and authority functions today only through the apostolic teaching, which is contained in the New Testament. No human being living today possesses any spiritual authority to speak in God’s name or make judgments about another person’s status before God except as they are faithful to the original apostolic teaching. No person owes spiritual obedience to another human being except as they trust that their counsel articulates the apostolic teaching. In my view, the spiritual authority of a person accrues today not by a ceremony called “ordination” conducted by an authoritative church body but by a life demonstrating deep knowledge, faithfulness, sincere love, wisdom, and holiness. In short, no one claiming “clergy” status possesses spiritual authority within the church—I am not speaking about parachurch churches, which operate by parachurch rules—to demand obedience from “lay” believers. Only if their lives demonstrate those qualities mentioned above do they have any spiritual authority at all. Even that authority is rooted the persuasive power of their words and lives.

Why do I insist on breaching the wall between clergy and laity? Clergy often give airs of having special access to God and use their supposed elite status to maintain power and privilege for selfish and quite worldly reasons. Sometimes the “laity” are quite content to let clergy play their game because it gives them an excuse for spiritual laziness. Let’s get clear on this: perhaps industry and the economy work better by instituting a complete division of labor, but not the church. Every believer is called to the virtues of faith, hope, and love. The Spirit works to transform everyone into the image of Christ. All Christians have a responsibility to use their lives in service to the Lord. We’re all in our own way preachers, evangelists, missionaries, pastors, and counselors. Everyone is a theologian, for you must not allow others to think for you. No one is allowed to hand their conscience over to another human being!

Clergy and the Mission of the Church

As I pointed out early in the series, the essential mission of the church is witness to Jesus Christ in life, word, and deed. The work of the church is helping people come to deep faith and be transformed into the image of Christ. One of the greatest temptations paid minsters face is coming to view the mission and work of the church through the lens of their own self-interest. The church can do its work and pursue its mission without seeking to become large, wealthy, famous, and powerful. However, the private interest of the clergy would be better served were their church-employer to become large, wealthy, famous, and powerful. Indeed, it almost seems that the big, parachurch model of church and the clergy system are congenital twins. We cannot imagine one without the other.

When faced with decisions about the direction the church should take, can paid ministers choose options that facilitate the church’s true work and mission but go against their private interests? Even if, as individual believers, they wish to pursue only the essential work and mission of the church, the swift current of the clergy system sweeps them downstream, no matter how hard they swim for the shore. How hard it is for clergy to seek first the kingdom of God! With human strength alone it is impossible, but with God all things are possible!

The Clergy System (Rethinking Church #19)

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It is time to rethink the idea of the church as an employer of ministers. We will examine this issue from the perspective of the spiritual life of the minister and from the church as the employer of ministers. We will consider the spiritual advantages and disadvantages of the paid ministry.

This is Personal

As I said in the previous post, this issue is personal for me. I served in the fulltime ministry for eight years. I received a divine call into ministry as a college student. Based on that call I changed my major from Chemistry to Bible. To better prepare myself for a life of church leadership I spent four years in graduate school working on a Master of Theology degree. Many friends in my own generation entered the ministry and served for many years. Many of my heroes are preachers and missionaries. And now that I have been teaching theology for thirty-one years in a university that grants two degrees specifically designed to prepare people for fulltime ministry—M.Div. and MS—I have scores of former students in fulltime church ministry.

I share this background because I want readers to know that I do not doubt my original call into the ministry or my decision to accept it. Nor do I wish to make any negative judgment of the fine men and women who serve in churches all over the world. Quite the opposite, I want to encourage them in their work and support them in whatever ways I am able.

The Divine Call

Throughout the history of the people of God in the Old and New Testaments and the history of the church from the First to the Twentieth Century, some men and women have felt compelled by a divine call to speak, preach, teach, and serve in the name of the Lord. Such prophets as Elijah, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel and the priests deriving from family of Aaron and the Levites were called into special divine service. Some of these people lived from tithe offerings from the people and some supported themselves. Jesus called twelve apostles for the special ministry of preaching the gospel to Jews and consolidating the fledgling church. Paul received a call from the resurrected Jesus to preach to the gentiles. In some cases, the apostles and other Christian missionaries, teachers, prophets, and elders received economic help from other believers (1 Cor 9:3-18).

Paul lists the central functions designed to help the church grow and keep it strong: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Eph. 4:11-12). The church cannot thrive without these services and functions, but not everyone is gifted and called to the same role. Paul devotes a whole chapter of 1 Corinthians to the theme of unity and diversity within the body of Christ. I will quote just three verses: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many” (12:12-14). Some people find themselves gifted and called to teach, preach, and minister in leadership. They devote themselves to study, prayer, and practice to prepare themselves for service. Thank God for his gift of these people to the church!

But we must distinguish between God’s gifting and calling of men and women into the service of the Word and taking a job with a church as a paid minister. The two may go together but they are not bound by necessity to do so. Hence my admiration and praise for people gifted and called into ministry does not necessarily translate into admiration and praise for the clergy system as it now stands. You can accept a divine call to evangelize, teach, and preach without becoming clergy. And simply because you get a degree in ministry and a church hires you does not guarantee that you are doing the work of the Lord.

The Advantages of the Paid Ministry

The advantages of churches/parachurches hiring people to organize and lead ministries are obvious. (1) It would be nearly impossible for large churches to function as they currently do with an all-volunteer staff. People are busy, and most people don’t have the training they need to perform some of these functions. Some tasks require many hours a week to carry out. (2) I think modern urban and suburban professionals demand highly educated, professional, and skilled people to lead their churches. After all, the corporations for which they work demand such professionalism. (3) Relieving gifted and called men and women of the necessity of spending most of their time working in “secular” work, frees more time for doing the work of ministry. In the case of foreign missionaries, it is often legally impossible for them to work in the host country. Apart from financial support from their home country they could not engage in mission work. (4) The fourth advantage assumes that the modern church needs ministers with a high level of theological education. Without the prospect of a paid ministry position, a young person might not be willing to devote seven years of their lives to getting the college and seminary training needed for ministry in the modern world. In that amount of time they could have trained for a high paying secular career.

Notice, however, that these advantages for the most part relate to big parachurch churches operating in the ways such churches have for the last hundred years. Of course these churches need highly educated, skilled, professional ministers. But if you call into question the exclusive validity of the big church model, these advantages become less decisive. If you gather around a table, share a meal, remember the Lord in the Supper, read the Scriptures, and pray for each other, you don’t need a highly skilled speaker, a talented worship leader, an efficient administrator, or a meticulous bookkeeper.

Next Time: The disadvantages of the clergy system.

Megachurches Need Megabucks (Rethinking Church #18)

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Today I want to talk about money as a corrupting force in the life of the church. Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matt 6:24). And 1 Timothy states in clear terms “The love of money [avarice or greed] is the root of all evil” (6:10). Of course, money does not force you to love it. But it’s an effective persuader! You can make money serve you, but it often turns out the other way around. Money is a means of exchange that enables the acquisition of real goods—food you can eat, clothing, shelter, beautiful things, services, etc. These things can serve human needs and produce joy, but they can also be abused and create misery. By pooling the resources of its members a church can acquire more of these things and use them for greater good. That’s the ideal anyway. But ideals are rarely realized completely.

Parachurches Need Lots of Money

Consider the churches I designated “parachurches” in the previous essay. They organize and conduct their work in ways that require a constant stream of revenue. They purchase and maintain building complexes, making it necessary to hire janitors, make periodic repairs, and pay huge utility bills. To coordinate the activities of hundreds or thousands of people and provide programs for every age and interest group, they must hire five, ten, or even twenty-five ministers. And of course the senior minister, the CEO, oversees the other ministers and the whole operation. The Sunday worship alone requires the services of a worship minister, sound and lighting techs, some singers, and several band or orchestra members. Such an operation requires support from a large secretarial and bookkeeping staff. Even a medium sized church needs an annual budget of $500,000 to $1,000,000. Megachurches need $10,000,000 to $50,000,000 annually.

And from where does this money come? It comes from donations from members. And why do they give? I speak only from my own experience. I am sure most of them give because they believe that their churches do good things with the money. They feel proud of participating in these large-scale good works, which they could not accomplish by themselves. However I think additional factors are at work.

Some churches teach explicitly and others imply that giving to a church is a Christian duty or even a quasi-sacrament. That is to say, giving is considered a meritorious work or a kind of bloodless sacrifice, a required act of worship distinct from the practical purpose for which the gift is to be used. Or, we think of our gifts as membership dues. We attend church services and enjoy the pageantry, the inspiring music, and the uplifting message as we sit comfortably in a state of the art facility. We benefit from the work of scores of staff and volunteers. And we feel guilty if we enjoy all these things without helping to pay for the them.

Pass the Collection Plate

But money exerts a corrupting force. Churches have earned a reputation for constantly soliciting donations, a reputation nearly universal among outsiders but also common among loyal members. Churches need to meet their annual budgets. The staff’s livelihood and the viability of many programs depend on it. Many churches “pass the collection plate” every Sunday. Passing the plate to the person sitting beside you without making a donation can be a bit embarrassing. You imagine that everyone notices your stingyness, especially the “deacons” who are standing at the ends of the rows to receive the plates.

The church seems to be of two minds on money versus people. The church sign says, “Everyone is welcome. Come as you are.” But do they really mean it, or will it be a “bait and switch” operation? Do churches want to grow because they want everyone to know Jesus? Or, do they wish to keep the income stream flowing? Because churches have organized themselves in ways that require lots of money, the good news of the love of Jesus and God’s forgiveness gets mixed with a less noble message.

People Got to Get Paid

I want to speak next from personal experience. I served as a paid minister for eight years as a young man. I entered the ministry because of what I believed, and still believe, was a divine call to which I could not say no. I responded in obedience to God. But when I became an employee of a church my duty to God got confused with the expectations of the church. The two are not always the same! I could no longer be sure of my motives. I learned a bitter lesson: if your service to God becomes also a means of livelihood on which your family depends—mortgage, childcare, health insurance, car payments, school loan payments, and retirement savings—the joy of ministry often departs. You begin to think about salary, benefits, and working conditions! You begin to think about who has power over you and who does not.

On the other side of the equation, later in life I served as an elder [a volunteer lay leader] in a church where a part of my duty was supervising the ministry staff. In that role my partnership with the ministers in the work of the Lord was made joyless by having to deal with their requests concerning salary, benefits, and working conditions. Money is indeed the root of all evil!

If you have been following this series you know that I favor small group churches over parachurch churches. We could go a long way toward removing the corrosive effect of money if churches met in homes, took no collections, made no budgets, owned no common property, and had no employees. I don’t think I am naïve about this. There would still be occasion for greed and envy, shame and pride, because of economic differences among individual believers. But at least the church would not be always seeking donations to run its operations.

Next Time: What about the clergy?

Cards on the Table (Rethinking Church #17)

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It is time that I remind readers of my objective in writing this series. I am not writing a church history or a complete survey of church doctrine and practice. There are many related questions that I cannot address if I am to stick to my original plan. My aim is to reexamine my place in churches of the type I have attended all my life. It is the type my students and friends attend. These churches hold with varying degrees of intensity to evangelical theology and piety. They are mostly non-denominational, or at least they have a great deal of local control. I believe that many others find themselves in similar situations and are also in the process of reexamining the ways they embody their Christian faith in church life. Hence my hope is that others will benefit by thinking along with me.

Cards on the Table

I have come to believe that most organizations that call themselves churches are really ministries of the church or parachurch organizations. They are inspired by the New Testament vision of the church as the body of Christ and motivated by its mission of witness to Jesus. They do much good work—ministry to families, children, teens, singles, and seniors. They provide large meeting places where hundreds or thousands of believers can meet to experience worship and teaching at the same time. They establish homeless ministries, teach English as a second language, create prison ministries, provide daycare for working parents, and much more. But in many cases, the church’s essential nature, activity, and mission are obscured by concerns that could better be dealt with through parachurch organizations devoted to these matters. And by adding these features to their agendas and organizing themselves in the ways necessary for accomplishing these tasks efficiently, churches transform themselves into parachurches.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to the existence of parachurch churches. In fact, I believe they have an important place, and I support their existence. But I object when these institutions claim to be identical to the essential church and imply that to participate fully in the people of God you must join this type of organization and give lots of money and time to it. This is not true. You do not have to join a parachurch church to be a good Christian and participate fully in the body of Christ. A church can be everything that the church is supposed to be, do everything it is supposed to do, and work effectively toward fulfilling its mission with a few believers meeting in a home or under a tree. This type of church needs no common treasury, no employees, no property, no government entanglement, and no professional clergy. I do not want to idealize the small house church as purely and simply the essential church, acting only in the essential ways, and having no goals other than the essential goal of witness. However I am clear that it is closer to that ideal than the complicated and expensive organizations that we usually call churches.

Many big, parachurch churches realize that meeting in very large assemblies, though having many advantages, cannot facilitate the intimacy, friendship, and deep community that can be created in regular meetings of small groups. But parachurches tend to view their “small groups ministries” as adjuncts to the larger church. My dream is to see this priority reversed. You do not have to be a member of a parachurch to be a faithful Christian, but if you want to do so, think of it as an adjunct to the small church where community in Christ really happens. This reversal would of necessity require parachurches to repurpose themselves as organizations designed to facilitate small churches getting together periodically to encourage each other and cooperate on larger projects. This reversal is unlikely to happen, I understand, but from now on I plan to treat the parachurches I attend in this way.

Next Time: The Church and Money—A Very Sad Story.