Church Walls
Disclaimer: I am going to warn you now that this is sort of a rant on how I believe the modern Christian church butchered how we are supposed to teach the Gospel. From this I hope you take some information that is relevant to you. Maybe you agree with it, maybe you don’t. All I’m asking is for you to think about it. I’m just as much a part of this problem as anyone else.
I was recently talking to the pastor of my church about the acoustics of our sanctuary. My self and another sound-guy were remarking on the horrible acoustics of the room. The pastor then told us about how he had been trying to leave the building for that reason since he became pastor . He said something to the extent of. “I finally got the church big enough so we were to big, then we got the West Side Church. Then I got it big enough again and the church board convinced me to knock out the wall and expand the building.” This thought really upset me. When did church become about making your congregation big? When did we decide to make these mega churches? I’m not saying that a mega church is bad, I’m saying that the thought that we need to keep bringing people in is a bad concept. We need to bring people in, but I think we are going about it entirely wrong.
In recent church history we have started trying to bring people to church. We have come up with a great number of different ‘productive’ methods to get people inside the church walls. We put on concerts with contemporary Christian music, maybe a punk band or a R&B artist. We’ll advertise these events in public places and try to make the advertising seem as unchurchy as possible. Once they are in the church walls, we think we’ve got’em. If they are inside the church walls then we have a chance at ‘saving’ them. But who decided that we need to save people inside the church walls? I didn’t, Jesus didn’t. When did the church become a building? I have always learned that the church was the people, the body, all together as the living kingdom of God. We still need to get people to church, but I think that the church needs to go to the people.
When Jesus was doing his ministry very rarely do you find him inside the tabernacle preaching. Instead you find him out among the people teaching. In Luke 10 we find Jesus sending out seventy-two disciples to go out in pairs to the towns and villages that Jesus planned to visit. His instructions to them are thus, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields. Now go, and remember that I am sending you out as lambs among wolves.” Jesus sent them out into the people to teach. He doesn’t tell them to go to the towns, find the tabernacle and preach there. Instead he tells them to preach in the streets and heal the sick, telling them that “The Kingdom of God is near you now.” (Luke 10:9) Jesus has mobilized the church, He took them out of their comfortable church pews and into the streets. This is what we as a church need to do, we need to force ourselves out of our walls and into the streets. We are the church and we need to be mobile. We must build the relationships with people in our communities. I don’t think that this means doing our concerts and church services in a park, it has to be so much more.
So, I just presented a problem, and one of my biggest pet peeves about anyone who presents a problem is when they don’t present any sort of a solution. So, I’m going to try and not do that. As for me, I think to start, with we really just need to get out into the community and serve. Jesus when he was first starting his ministry he really just went out and served before he even went out and preached. He went around to people homes and healed, He showed them who He was before he tried to tell them what He was doing. As people of the church, relationships should be our first priority. We are told to “…love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind. And, Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27) We need to Love our neighbors, by our actions and our words. Sometimes it is just as simple as giving out free lemonade on a hot day to people, or doing things just to make them smile and never saying “God Bless.” It really needs to be about the actions not the words. St. Francis of Assisi said “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” When we absolutly have to we use our words, but most often we need to shut up and work. GIVE, LOVE, CARE about the people of God. I think the start can me that simple.
A few interesting thoughts… To play devil’s advocate, when mega-church pioneer Bill Hybels was asked why they took attendance in his clearly massive congregations, he said, “We count people because people count.” Jesus did forcus on the 12 (really the 3), but in this post-incarnate age of the church/Spirit, the mode by which Jesus’ message is presented and His people are gathered are fundamentally different. We see this as early as Pentecost where “three thousand were added to their number (Acts 2:41).” Several times throughout the book of Acts, numbers of how many people were joining “the Way” are mentioned (this is also the case in Jesus’ ministry in the two miracles of the fish & loaves… 5,000 and 4,000, respectively). Were the writers of the New Testament sinning like when King David took a census of the Israelites? I don’t think so. It stands to reason that if a body of believers is healthy in teching and living out the message of Jesus, it will grow. The question then is what to do about the growth. Most Mormon churches will intentionally split after reaching 600 members, so as to keep the congregations manageable and familial. If you’re Eugene Faith Center (and most healthy big churches), you plant church after church after church and you find ways to make your congregation smaller (home fellowship groups, affinity groups, mid-week services and Bible studies, etc.). Big is not necessarily a problem (neither is small)… the issue is growth/health vs. stagnation/disease.
Now with the whole Jesus in the Tabernacle (which actually wasn’t around in Jesus’ day; I will assume you mean Temple) vs. Jesus in the streets thing… It would be inaccurate to say that Jesus spent the entirety of His ministry in the streets and fields. He “taught in the synagogues, and everyone praised Him” (Luke 4:15) AND He preached on mountainsides. He preached (and did miracles) in the Temple AND in the houses of people (Pharisee and ‘sinner’ alike). I agree very much that the church needs to be mobile; I feel that the biggest issue here was that this wasn’t a program Jesus was conducting, He embodied the Word og God, the message of the Kingdom of Heaven. I would much rather have the (institutional) church do its job within its walls to “prepare God’s people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Eph. 4:12, speaking of the roles of the ministerial offices in the institutional church), so that the the church, the actual body of Christ can then be mobilized to reach the world. How upside-down do we have it if we expect people who work at churches (which, frankly, we need) to reach people outside the Church? Just some thoughts…
On most of that I agree. I don’t think we need to flip the church around and make the whole thing an outside force. It just that so often we have tried to move the people to us, and I’m saying we need to move the church to the people. The church is to be unified as one body. With this we need to have the satellites around that give us a structure to call home. The buildings them selfs are exactly were we need to get our structure. It is the place that we as the church need to be SOMETIMES, not all the time.
I think that Jesus put an emphasis on being out in the towns and doing his work there. Personally I remember more stories about Jesus ministering to people in their homes, and in the streets then I do about him ministering in the temple.
And for that, I am glad. (I am pre-emptively apologizing for the potentially trite thing I’m about to say) You probably remember those stories for a very good reasonn.