In our last post, we contrasted the glaring contradiction between how the early church cared for the poor and the church today. Though the early church was known throughout the Roman empire as radical lovers of the poor, this is certainly not the case for the church today. Christ has given His church the responsibility to share His gospel, described as “good news to the poor”, with all people, yet today’s church has lost sight of this call. What steps must the church take today to realize that its message truly should be good news to the poor?
If the answer to this dilemma was conducting a periodic serving event, this would be an easy problem to solve. Church-sponsored serving projects at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen every few months are certainly a step in the right direction, and short term mission trips are to be applauded. Yet these types of endeavors, although of value, fall far short of the lifestyle of serving that Christ desires for His followers. Though these occasional events make us feel good about ourselves, how much lasting impact do these things accomplish in the world around us? Too often, the sporadic church-sponsored serving event does little but further insulate us from the plight of the poor by appeasing our consciences in the midst of our materialism. Steps need to be taken in today’s church to build a lifestyle of serving in its members that far transcends the sporadic serving event that characterizes our efforts today.
Nor can the mission of the church to serve the poor be fulfilled by mere charitable giving. Instead of individuals in the church housing, clothing, and feeding the poor themselves, these functions have increasingly become the domain of the various institutions and parachurch ministries that dot the Christian landscape. Our “providing for the poor” has been reduced to food drives at the church, where members bring the raw materials and the institutional employees do the dirty work of distributing. In this scenario, the churchgoer is able to feel good about his participation in “ending poverty” while sparing him the uncomfortableness of a one-on-one encounter with those in need. Similarly, independent charities can serve the same function to the wealthy suburbanite as the occasional serving event, as they appease our consciences while insulating us from the suffering of the poor. In both cases, the institution does the dirty work while the individual simply throws money or goods at the problem. Yet as Martin Luther King said, “true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.”
Christ’s intent for His followers is not the performance of sporadic acts of charity that serve our consciences more than the poor for whom it is intended. Neither should the church be a faceless distribution center where the poor receive what the rich have dumped. Sadly, this common approach leaves no one transformed and forms no radical new community. Rather, the church needs to remove itself, in words of Shane Claiborne, from “distant acts of charity that serve to legitimize apathetic lifestyles of good intentions but rob us of the gift of community.” Christ’s call to the church is that its members would not only open their wallets to the needy, but their lives, their hearts, and their homes to them as well.
As Shane Claiborne once said, “the problem is not that we don’t care about the poor; it’s that we don’t know the poor.” How true this is. Sporadic acts of charity and donations are wonderful things, yet these practices are limited in value because they are incapable of building relationships with those in need. This is the biggest limitation to traditional models of compassion ministries: they fail to build relationships with those in need. God’s kingdom is primarily spread by His followers loving one another; these loving relationships prove to the world that Christ’s message is true (John 13:35, 17:23). If in fact God’s kingdom is built by His followers “loving one another” in the context of relationship, how can we spread the good news to the poor without doing the same? As Paul says in I Corinthians 13, “though I give all my good to feed the poor, if I have not love, I am nothing.” This is what compelled the early church to bring the poor into their homes; even more than meeting their physical needs, they sought to demonstrate the love of the Savior first hand to those in need. Spreading the kingdom in the face of poverty is not by done by random or distant acts of charity; it is spread “like a mustard seed,” through one life at a time and through one relationship at a time. For the church is called not only to meet the needs of the poor, but to build loving relationships with them as well.
In our next post, we will explore the concept of the "good soil" on which today's church must be built if it is to again prosper in our day.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Caring For The Poor: The Early Church vs. Today's Church
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus asks His followers, “What are you doing more than others?” (Matt. 5:47). Centuries later, this question still haunts the church. In our last post, we discussed how little, if any difference exists between the lives of today’s “Christ followers” and the world around them. Yet in the early church, a striking difference between them and the world around them would be readily apparent. In the eyes of any first century Roman, the difference between the “followers of the Way” and the pagan world around them would be clear and unmistakable; in no area was this contrast greater than in their love and care for the poor. How ironic that in the church-activity saturated lifestyle of today’s American Christian, time spent with the poor is conspicuously absent. For more than any other description or characteristic, serving and caring for the poor defined the life of an early Christian.
The early church was known throughout the empire as the selfless ones who took it upon themselves to feed the poor, house the oppressed, and care for the underprivileged. The list of persons supported by the early church was enormous; they cared for the elderly, widows, orphans, prisoners, those who suffered shipwreck, and those who lost their livelihoods due to their faith. The common descriptor of the first century Christian was that of caring for the poor, marginalized, and oppressed as they would their own family. Even the pagan skeptic Julian confessed, “the godless Galileans feed not only their poor but ours as well.”
Throughout the pages of the New Testament, we see that serving and providing for the poor was to be the guiding principle for Christ’s followers. Providing for the needy was the main mission of the early church to those outside their community (Gal. 2:10). The first official church ministry was to feed the poor (Acts 6:1-6). In fact, the Bible teaches that the poor are the primary beneficiaries of the good news of the gospel (James 2:5). When asked what the gospel meant, John the Baptist responded: “anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none” (Luke 3:11). Similarly, James tells us what the Christian faith is when boiled down to its essence: “Pure religion is this: to visit the orphan and widow in their affliction” (James 1:21). In some of the most terrifying words of the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers that those who will inherit eternal life are those who provide food for the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and visit the sick and the prisoner (Matt. 25:34-40). Clearly, the abundant teaching of the New Testament is that the gospel is good news to the poor.
The early church took these teachings seriously, and attempted to live them out as an integral part of their worship. As they did so, they did not settle for merely meeting their physical needs of the needy, but by welcoming them into their homes, feeding, clothing, and housing them as they shared with them the good news of Christ. For in the early church, the gospel was indeed “good news to the poor” (Isaiah 61:1).
Yet how different things are today. This ethos of providing for the poor has been long lost in the church today. Though today’s American Christian might agree in theory with the church’s mandate to serve the needy, their actions too often speak otherwise. For the vast majority of us, serving the poor has been reduced to an occasional church-sponsored serving event rather than a lifestyle of serving the disenfranchised that characterized the early church. In a survey done by Shane Claiborne, he asked participants who identified themselves as “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Not surprisingly, nearly 80% agreed with this statement. Later in the survey, he asked that same group of self-identified strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2% said that they did. Though many of us sense the importance of coming to the aid of those in need, few of us actually get around to doing it. Today, we’ve come to believe that caring for the poor among us is merely an attitude of the heart rather than a choosing of a lifestyle.
But how can it be any other way in the face of our American schedule? Take our already crowded day timers, add Sunday morning church, add weekly small group meetings, add volunteering in the church to the mix, and there’s little time for anyone outside of one’s own family, let alone for the needy. Combine the craziness of our schedules with the middle class neighborhoods in which most of us live, and our contact with the poor and needy among us is a rarity that few believers ever have the opportunity to engage in. It is a special event that must be scheduled, usually weeks to months in advance, shoehorned into an already jam-packed schedule. The net result is a church that has a heart for the poor, but no hands for the poor, insulated from the needs of the world in our detached Christian ghettos.
So what must the church do to begin to address its mandate to care for the poor? We will begin to explore this in our next post.
The early church was known throughout the empire as the selfless ones who took it upon themselves to feed the poor, house the oppressed, and care for the underprivileged. The list of persons supported by the early church was enormous; they cared for the elderly, widows, orphans, prisoners, those who suffered shipwreck, and those who lost their livelihoods due to their faith. The common descriptor of the first century Christian was that of caring for the poor, marginalized, and oppressed as they would their own family. Even the pagan skeptic Julian confessed, “the godless Galileans feed not only their poor but ours as well.”
Throughout the pages of the New Testament, we see that serving and providing for the poor was to be the guiding principle for Christ’s followers. Providing for the needy was the main mission of the early church to those outside their community (Gal. 2:10). The first official church ministry was to feed the poor (Acts 6:1-6). In fact, the Bible teaches that the poor are the primary beneficiaries of the good news of the gospel (James 2:5). When asked what the gospel meant, John the Baptist responded: “anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none” (Luke 3:11). Similarly, James tells us what the Christian faith is when boiled down to its essence: “Pure religion is this: to visit the orphan and widow in their affliction” (James 1:21). In some of the most terrifying words of the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers that those who will inherit eternal life are those who provide food for the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and visit the sick and the prisoner (Matt. 25:34-40). Clearly, the abundant teaching of the New Testament is that the gospel is good news to the poor.
The early church took these teachings seriously, and attempted to live them out as an integral part of their worship. As they did so, they did not settle for merely meeting their physical needs of the needy, but by welcoming them into their homes, feeding, clothing, and housing them as they shared with them the good news of Christ. For in the early church, the gospel was indeed “good news to the poor” (Isaiah 61:1).
Yet how different things are today. This ethos of providing for the poor has been long lost in the church today. Though today’s American Christian might agree in theory with the church’s mandate to serve the needy, their actions too often speak otherwise. For the vast majority of us, serving the poor has been reduced to an occasional church-sponsored serving event rather than a lifestyle of serving the disenfranchised that characterized the early church. In a survey done by Shane Claiborne, he asked participants who identified themselves as “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Not surprisingly, nearly 80% agreed with this statement. Later in the survey, he asked that same group of self-identified strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2% said that they did. Though many of us sense the importance of coming to the aid of those in need, few of us actually get around to doing it. Today, we’ve come to believe that caring for the poor among us is merely an attitude of the heart rather than a choosing of a lifestyle.
But how can it be any other way in the face of our American schedule? Take our already crowded day timers, add Sunday morning church, add weekly small group meetings, add volunteering in the church to the mix, and there’s little time for anyone outside of one’s own family, let alone for the needy. Combine the craziness of our schedules with the middle class neighborhoods in which most of us live, and our contact with the poor and needy among us is a rarity that few believers ever have the opportunity to engage in. It is a special event that must be scheduled, usually weeks to months in advance, shoehorned into an already jam-packed schedule. The net result is a church that has a heart for the poor, but no hands for the poor, insulated from the needs of the world in our detached Christian ghettos.
So what must the church do to begin to address its mandate to care for the poor? We will begin to explore this in our next post.
Monday, April 12, 2010
What Are You Doing More Than Others?
As Jesus challenged His followers in the Sermon on the Mount, “What are you doing more than others?” (Mt. 5:48). Jesus’ intent was that the lives of His followers should be defined in dramatically different terms than the world around them. But is this really the case today? Line up ten strangers on the street and ask them, “What actions characterize Christians compared to those who are not Christians?” Responses will vary, from “they go to church” to “they pray before they eat.” Some answers might have political connotations: “they oppose abortion” or “they are against homosexuality.” Some answers may be downright negative: “they judge others more than most.” In the public’s eye, these are the types of things that define a Christian.
Though most of us have never attempted such an experiment, we instinctively know that these answers would characterize our findings. Jesus has called his followers to live radically, to “turn the world upside down” with their love for others and for one another. Yet to many outsiders, believers today are known not as passionate lovers but as right wing activists and members of a Sunday morning social club. But it was never Christ's intention that His church should be a people just like everyone else save for their political leanings and church attendance. The very essence of our very lifestyles should run in marked distinction to the rest of the world around us. Yet sadly, this is not the case for most believers today.
As the King James Version puts it in I Peter 2:9, followers of Christ should be “peculiar people.” That doesn’t mean we should weirder than the surrounding world, but that quite simply, our lifestyles should be different. Look at any Christian’s day planner and ask yourself how it differs from your average non-churchgoing suburbanite. Many of the calendar entries will be the same: work, soccer practice, music lessons, perhaps even a date night on weekends. In the vast majority of cases, in fact, the day timer will look exactly the same as nonbelievers except for one exception: church. Add Sunday morning church attendance, small groups at the church, midweek prayer meeting, and youth group activities, and the already harried schedule of the average suburbanite is ratched up to superhuman levels for the Christian. Nearly all Americans will admit they’re too as it is, but it seems that far too many Christians seem to believe that honoring God means continuing more of the same and adding church on top of it all. If the “life in all of its fullness” that Jesus intended for us means merely adding church events to the world’s overbooked schedule, that is a sad state of affairs indeed.
Face it: our lifestyles look exactly the same as the world’s, and this is beyond dispute. As Shane Claiborne says, “Christians pretty much live like everyone else; they just sprinkle in a little Jesus along the way.” However, the early church stood in marked contrast to the world around them; the difference in lifestyle between those early believers and the pagan culture around them was evident to all.
In our next post, we will turn our attention to the early church as we seek to understand what the church should be known for today.
Though most of us have never attempted such an experiment, we instinctively know that these answers would characterize our findings. Jesus has called his followers to live radically, to “turn the world upside down” with their love for others and for one another. Yet to many outsiders, believers today are known not as passionate lovers but as right wing activists and members of a Sunday morning social club. But it was never Christ's intention that His church should be a people just like everyone else save for their political leanings and church attendance. The very essence of our very lifestyles should run in marked distinction to the rest of the world around us. Yet sadly, this is not the case for most believers today.
As the King James Version puts it in I Peter 2:9, followers of Christ should be “peculiar people.” That doesn’t mean we should weirder than the surrounding world, but that quite simply, our lifestyles should be different. Look at any Christian’s day planner and ask yourself how it differs from your average non-churchgoing suburbanite. Many of the calendar entries will be the same: work, soccer practice, music lessons, perhaps even a date night on weekends. In the vast majority of cases, in fact, the day timer will look exactly the same as nonbelievers except for one exception: church. Add Sunday morning church attendance, small groups at the church, midweek prayer meeting, and youth group activities, and the already harried schedule of the average suburbanite is ratched up to superhuman levels for the Christian. Nearly all Americans will admit they’re too as it is, but it seems that far too many Christians seem to believe that honoring God means continuing more of the same and adding church on top of it all. If the “life in all of its fullness” that Jesus intended for us means merely adding church events to the world’s overbooked schedule, that is a sad state of affairs indeed.
Face it: our lifestyles look exactly the same as the world’s, and this is beyond dispute. As Shane Claiborne says, “Christians pretty much live like everyone else; they just sprinkle in a little Jesus along the way.” However, the early church stood in marked contrast to the world around them; the difference in lifestyle between those early believers and the pagan culture around them was evident to all.
In our next post, we will turn our attention to the early church as we seek to understand what the church should be known for today.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
What Does It Look Like To Be Missional?
In our last post, we examined the call of the church to bring the message of Christ to our culture and truly “incarnate Jesus” to a watching world. But in a practical sense, what does it look like for us to live out this “missional-incarnational” mandate that He has given us? Rather than hiding the seed of the gospel in our “barns” on Sunday mornings, how do we begin to sow these seeds in the world at large?
First, we must learn how to bring church to the streets. What would happen if we took the kingdom of God to where society lives and where life happens instead of keeping it cloistered in special buildings that few care to visit? To begin to embrace this missional mandate, many churches’ influence would increase simply by moving out of their buildings and instead meeting where people already are at! The church must increasingly find ways to infiltrate the culture at large, and this begins by first gathering together in society’s common meeting places. In so doing, we create “spiritual spaces” in the midst of everyday life: in coffeehouses, in bars, in parks, on football teams, in school cafeterias, and workplace lunchrooms.
I think of a church in California meeting in a parking lot at 3 a.m., attempting to reach out to the second shift workers whose schedules alienate them from present forms of church. I think of believers attempting to hang out in a coffee house that is frequented by occultists, spreading the light of Christ in a dark place. I think of a family that started a basketball ministry for junior high students in a city park, sharing games, a meal, and the message of Christ with those kids who attend. I think of a church music ministry who has opened recording studios in the community in an attempt to build bridges with local musicians. These all are efforts to move the church from a fringe Christian subculture to an integral part of the community at large.
But simply meeting in a new location doesn’t make a church missional. The church must also define success in ministry differently if we are to embody the missional example of Jesus. As one says, this means “getting a new scorecard.” The church must move beyond the mindset that measures ministry success by traditional markers such as buildings, dollars, and weekly attendance, and instead must embrace more missional benchmarks that gauge success by the transformation of the community outside the walls of the church. Better indicators of missional effectiveness and the health of a church body, for example, are hours spent praying for the community, the number of school children being tutored in after-school church programs, and hours spent by members with unbelievers. How often do community leaders call the church asking for advice? How many underserved people have been provided meals through the church’s efforts in a given month? Rather than counting the percentage of the church involved in small groups, should we not be considering the number of unbelievers in attendance each week as a better indicator of the body’s health? Until we “recalibrate the scorecard” in this manner to better evaluate our effectiveness, the traditional focus on money, numbers, and buildings as the benchmark of success will hamper our outreach efforts.
Finally, each member of today’s church must recognize the importance of their role in solving the “missional crisis” of the 21st century. It is incredibly easy to dismiss a discussion of missional living as mere ivory tower church strategy for pastors, irrelevant to the average Christian sitting in the pews. Yet once we come to grips with the fact that every Christian is called to be a church planter, these objections quickly fade. When confronted by the fact that most of our individual lives as believers are virtually devoid of missional impact, the church’s problem at large becomes our problem individually as well. When will each one of us begin to take our call to the fields of harvest seriously? It is incumbent upon all of us to respond individually to the missional deficit of our day. Clearly, if the church is to truly become missional in our day, a radical reworking of church as we know it is in order. It is up to each member of the Body of Christ today to take this mission seriously, to truly imitate Jesus by taking His good news to the streets. It is time for average, everyday followers of Jesus like you and I to realize our calling to the fields together. It is our time to become a radical church indeed.
First, we must learn how to bring church to the streets. What would happen if we took the kingdom of God to where society lives and where life happens instead of keeping it cloistered in special buildings that few care to visit? To begin to embrace this missional mandate, many churches’ influence would increase simply by moving out of their buildings and instead meeting where people already are at! The church must increasingly find ways to infiltrate the culture at large, and this begins by first gathering together in society’s common meeting places. In so doing, we create “spiritual spaces” in the midst of everyday life: in coffeehouses, in bars, in parks, on football teams, in school cafeterias, and workplace lunchrooms.
I think of a church in California meeting in a parking lot at 3 a.m., attempting to reach out to the second shift workers whose schedules alienate them from present forms of church. I think of believers attempting to hang out in a coffee house that is frequented by occultists, spreading the light of Christ in a dark place. I think of a family that started a basketball ministry for junior high students in a city park, sharing games, a meal, and the message of Christ with those kids who attend. I think of a church music ministry who has opened recording studios in the community in an attempt to build bridges with local musicians. These all are efforts to move the church from a fringe Christian subculture to an integral part of the community at large.
But simply meeting in a new location doesn’t make a church missional. The church must also define success in ministry differently if we are to embody the missional example of Jesus. As one says, this means “getting a new scorecard.” The church must move beyond the mindset that measures ministry success by traditional markers such as buildings, dollars, and weekly attendance, and instead must embrace more missional benchmarks that gauge success by the transformation of the community outside the walls of the church. Better indicators of missional effectiveness and the health of a church body, for example, are hours spent praying for the community, the number of school children being tutored in after-school church programs, and hours spent by members with unbelievers. How often do community leaders call the church asking for advice? How many underserved people have been provided meals through the church’s efforts in a given month? Rather than counting the percentage of the church involved in small groups, should we not be considering the number of unbelievers in attendance each week as a better indicator of the body’s health? Until we “recalibrate the scorecard” in this manner to better evaluate our effectiveness, the traditional focus on money, numbers, and buildings as the benchmark of success will hamper our outreach efforts.
Finally, each member of today’s church must recognize the importance of their role in solving the “missional crisis” of the 21st century. It is incredibly easy to dismiss a discussion of missional living as mere ivory tower church strategy for pastors, irrelevant to the average Christian sitting in the pews. Yet once we come to grips with the fact that every Christian is called to be a church planter, these objections quickly fade. When confronted by the fact that most of our individual lives as believers are virtually devoid of missional impact, the church’s problem at large becomes our problem individually as well. When will each one of us begin to take our call to the fields of harvest seriously? It is incumbent upon all of us to respond individually to the missional deficit of our day. Clearly, if the church is to truly become missional in our day, a radical reworking of church as we know it is in order. It is up to each member of the Body of Christ today to take this mission seriously, to truly imitate Jesus by taking His good news to the streets. It is time for average, everyday followers of Jesus like you and I to realize our calling to the fields together. It is our time to become a radical church indeed.
Monday, March 29, 2010
The Missional-Incarnational Mandate
In our last post, we contrasted the prevalent model of attractional church with the missional mandate that Christ has bestowed upon His people. Many have better termed this model exemplified by Jesus the missional-incarnational model after His attempt to reach mankind through His incarnation. In His attempt to bring His message of love to us, God actually became one of us to meet us in the midst of our fallenness and sin. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases John 1:14 in The Message, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” At the incarnation, God chose to send not a representative to us, but came Himself in the form of a humble man, with “no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him” (Isaiah 53:2). In so doing, He demonstrated sincere affinity and identification with us in His attempt to draw us to Him.
It is this same missional-incarnational approach that we as the church must adopt in relation to our culture today. As Jesus said in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” Just as Christ stayed not at a distance but “moved into our neighborhood,” so we as His followers must incarnate Christ to a watching world by being directly and actively involved in the lives of those we seek to reach.
Yet too often, the church prefers to be sequestered and removed from our culture, believing that mission starts in the barns rather than the fields. We’ve built for ourselves some very nice barns we meet in on Sunday mornings, with their high quality sound systems, heated baptistries, and Disney inspired kids areas, but as Neil Cole points out, such an approach to evangelism is as foolish as the farmer who builds a barn and calls the crops to come in. God never intended for the seeds of His love to be stored in barns on Sunday mornings, but seeks for us to sow His message in the fields at large, dirtying our hands in the soil of those far from Him.
We all likely agree with these concepts, but have you and I both missed this call to the fields? Christ has commanded us to “go, and make disciples of all nations”, but has this missional mandate fallen on deaf ears? After his extensive polling of American Christians, George Barna reported that the typical American Christian will die without leading a single person to Christ in their lifetime. Sadly, I must completely agree with the validity of Barna’s conclusions as I look at my own life and the lives of other Christians I know. The fact is unarguable: without drastic changes in my life, I fear that this lack of fruit will be my fate and perhaps yours.
We must not postpone our obedience any longer. We must act, and quickly, if we are to be the “salt of the earth” as Christ has called us to be. He has called us to be agents of His grace, peace, and light to the world, the “sent ones” who change the landscape of our culture through the message of His love. By God’s grace, may we realize this noblest of callings our Leader has given us.
In our next post, we will explore what such a missional-incarnational approach might look like in our day.
It is this same missional-incarnational approach that we as the church must adopt in relation to our culture today. As Jesus said in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” Just as Christ stayed not at a distance but “moved into our neighborhood,” so we as His followers must incarnate Christ to a watching world by being directly and actively involved in the lives of those we seek to reach.
Yet too often, the church prefers to be sequestered and removed from our culture, believing that mission starts in the barns rather than the fields. We’ve built for ourselves some very nice barns we meet in on Sunday mornings, with their high quality sound systems, heated baptistries, and Disney inspired kids areas, but as Neil Cole points out, such an approach to evangelism is as foolish as the farmer who builds a barn and calls the crops to come in. God never intended for the seeds of His love to be stored in barns on Sunday mornings, but seeks for us to sow His message in the fields at large, dirtying our hands in the soil of those far from Him.
We all likely agree with these concepts, but have you and I both missed this call to the fields? Christ has commanded us to “go, and make disciples of all nations”, but has this missional mandate fallen on deaf ears? After his extensive polling of American Christians, George Barna reported that the typical American Christian will die without leading a single person to Christ in their lifetime. Sadly, I must completely agree with the validity of Barna’s conclusions as I look at my own life and the lives of other Christians I know. The fact is unarguable: without drastic changes in my life, I fear that this lack of fruit will be my fate and perhaps yours.
We must not postpone our obedience any longer. We must act, and quickly, if we are to be the “salt of the earth” as Christ has called us to be. He has called us to be agents of His grace, peace, and light to the world, the “sent ones” who change the landscape of our culture through the message of His love. By God’s grace, may we realize this noblest of callings our Leader has given us.
In our next post, we will explore what such a missional-incarnational approach might look like in our day.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Attractional vs. Missional church
In our last post, we explored the “crisis of relevance” the American church faces today in both attendance and influence. For the church to remedy these failures, what must our response be? Quite simply, the church’s age-old model of “attractional evangelism” must be exchanged for a more organic and Biblical model.
What is the attractional model of evangelism? As one might expect, the attractional model of church concentrates its evangelism efforts on trying to attract unbelievers to the church. Most pastors today spend their entire week wracking their brains, tweaking their sermons, and improving their programs in an attempt to make the church’s ministries attractive and relevant to those outside. Yet this attractional model is always built on the idea that if the church makes its services interesting enough and compelling enough, unbelievers will be drawn to Christ. The weakness in this approach, however, is that unbelievers must come to the church if they are to find Christ, a “bitter pill” that many are unwilling to swallow.
This attractional model that the church has long operated by must be replaced by a missional model if the church is to remedy its “crisis of relevance” today. The missional model simply attempts to take the good news of Jesus to the culture where people are at, rather than waiting for them to come to the church. A missional model of church, then, will often not take the traditionally recognizable form of a church with its Sunday morning service in a special building set aside for that purpose. Rather, it seeks ways to bring its community into the midst of those outside the church. The missional model often rejects the traditional Sunday morning expression of church as a service one goes to (witness the expression “go to church”), but believes the church to be a body that one experiences in the context of daily living.
In centuries past, the attractional model was quite adequate and effective, as church was the center of culture, church attendance was enforced by the state, and all were assumed Christian by birth. Yet in today’s multicultural and postmodern society, the effectiveness of this model has long since passed. The idea of “throwing a party and expecting the world to come to it,” an accurate summary of the attractional model, is fraught with difficulties today for several reasons.
First, the attractional model expects unbelievers to engage us on our turf and become one of us if they are to hear the message of the gospel. In fact, some have said that the attractional model might better be termed an extractional model, as new converts are expected to be uprooted from their existing lives to join a Christian subculture on Sundays. The attractional model requires those who would hear about Jesus to come to the church and engage us in our cultural zone if they are to follow Christ. For most unbelievers, such a proposition is very alienating to say the least. To expect those who “don’t like church” to come to Christ through such a model is folly in the highest degree. Should we not rather take the gospel to them rather than force them to come to us?
Second, the attractional model is not the New Testament model of evangelism. From Jesus to Paul to the early church, we see an active missional model embodied, with the good news being brought to those far from the Father in the midst of their cultural setting. From the church’s earliest beginnings, an active missional model was embodied and practiced as the early believers took the message of Jesus to the streets, engaging the culture on their turf and in their terms with the Gospel. Such a model was common even to the life of Jesus, who repeatedly crossed cultural barriers to take His Kingdom to tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles, and demoniacs, to name but a few. Most importantly, Jesus refused to assimilate these new followers into the Jewish subculture from which He came, but rather sent them back to their own people and culture to share what He had done in their lives.
Clearly, the “come and see” approach to evangelism that is so common in our day must be exchanged for a model more in line with that practiced by our Leader. In our next post, we will explore further what the example of Christ teaches us about what it truly means to be missional in our day and age.
What is the attractional model of evangelism? As one might expect, the attractional model of church concentrates its evangelism efforts on trying to attract unbelievers to the church. Most pastors today spend their entire week wracking their brains, tweaking their sermons, and improving their programs in an attempt to make the church’s ministries attractive and relevant to those outside. Yet this attractional model is always built on the idea that if the church makes its services interesting enough and compelling enough, unbelievers will be drawn to Christ. The weakness in this approach, however, is that unbelievers must come to the church if they are to find Christ, a “bitter pill” that many are unwilling to swallow.
This attractional model that the church has long operated by must be replaced by a missional model if the church is to remedy its “crisis of relevance” today. The missional model simply attempts to take the good news of Jesus to the culture where people are at, rather than waiting for them to come to the church. A missional model of church, then, will often not take the traditionally recognizable form of a church with its Sunday morning service in a special building set aside for that purpose. Rather, it seeks ways to bring its community into the midst of those outside the church. The missional model often rejects the traditional Sunday morning expression of church as a service one goes to (witness the expression “go to church”), but believes the church to be a body that one experiences in the context of daily living.
In centuries past, the attractional model was quite adequate and effective, as church was the center of culture, church attendance was enforced by the state, and all were assumed Christian by birth. Yet in today’s multicultural and postmodern society, the effectiveness of this model has long since passed. The idea of “throwing a party and expecting the world to come to it,” an accurate summary of the attractional model, is fraught with difficulties today for several reasons.
First, the attractional model expects unbelievers to engage us on our turf and become one of us if they are to hear the message of the gospel. In fact, some have said that the attractional model might better be termed an extractional model, as new converts are expected to be uprooted from their existing lives to join a Christian subculture on Sundays. The attractional model requires those who would hear about Jesus to come to the church and engage us in our cultural zone if they are to follow Christ. For most unbelievers, such a proposition is very alienating to say the least. To expect those who “don’t like church” to come to Christ through such a model is folly in the highest degree. Should we not rather take the gospel to them rather than force them to come to us?
Second, the attractional model is not the New Testament model of evangelism. From Jesus to Paul to the early church, we see an active missional model embodied, with the good news being brought to those far from the Father in the midst of their cultural setting. From the church’s earliest beginnings, an active missional model was embodied and practiced as the early believers took the message of Jesus to the streets, engaging the culture on their turf and in their terms with the Gospel. Such a model was common even to the life of Jesus, who repeatedly crossed cultural barriers to take His Kingdom to tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles, and demoniacs, to name but a few. Most importantly, Jesus refused to assimilate these new followers into the Jewish subculture from which He came, but rather sent them back to their own people and culture to share what He had done in their lives.
Clearly, the “come and see” approach to evangelism that is so common in our day must be exchanged for a model more in line with that practiced by our Leader. In our next post, we will explore further what the example of Christ teaches us about what it truly means to be missional in our day and age.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Failure of the American Church
There's no denying that the American church faces a crisis of relevance in this day and age. Currently, attendance at American churches today is rapidly dwindling. According to George Barna, the number of adults in American who no longer attend church has almost doubled since 1991, even though the adult population has grown 15% over that time. Adult church attendance in the USA is at only 18% and is dropping lower each year. By the year 2025, the church will have lost half of its market share in the United States. Clearly, interest in church these days isn’t what it used to be.
But why? Amid today’s culture with an unprecedented openness to spirituality, should our churches not be bursting at the seams with new attenders? Sure, some of our churches might be still be growing, but the vast majority of that growth today comes from transfers within our same Christian subculture rather than from new conversions. Why are so many interested in spirituality today, but so few are interested in attending church?
Dwindling attendance isn’t the only problem besetting the American church today. Despite the church’s best efforts, the cultural chasm between itself and contemporary culture grows larger with each passing year. Barna’s recent research shows that the major influencers of American culture today are law, music, movies, TV, internet, family, and books. Among the second tier of influencers, schools, peers, newspapers, radio, businesses appear. Consistently, surveys show the church appears among those institutions with little to no influence in today’s culture. It seems that the gap is growing larger between a godless culture and an insulated church who isn’t quite sure how to respond.
In the face of such a dire situation, the church instinctively responds by simply tinkering with the same model it’s always used; attempts are made to improve the sermon’s relevance, expand the children’s programs, rev up the worship band, and add more outreach events, for instance, in response to this dilemma. Yet in the face of its rapid decline in influence and a fluid, postmodern society, is simple tinkering on the old attractional, “come to us” model of church still the answer to our ills? Is more of the same still the answer, or is an entirely new paradigm of church needed in our day if we are to bridge the ever-enlarging gap between ourselves and the culture around us?
We will explore this answer in our next post.
But why? Amid today’s culture with an unprecedented openness to spirituality, should our churches not be bursting at the seams with new attenders? Sure, some of our churches might be still be growing, but the vast majority of that growth today comes from transfers within our same Christian subculture rather than from new conversions. Why are so many interested in spirituality today, but so few are interested in attending church?
Dwindling attendance isn’t the only problem besetting the American church today. Despite the church’s best efforts, the cultural chasm between itself and contemporary culture grows larger with each passing year. Barna’s recent research shows that the major influencers of American culture today are law, music, movies, TV, internet, family, and books. Among the second tier of influencers, schools, peers, newspapers, radio, businesses appear. Consistently, surveys show the church appears among those institutions with little to no influence in today’s culture. It seems that the gap is growing larger between a godless culture and an insulated church who isn’t quite sure how to respond.
In the face of such a dire situation, the church instinctively responds by simply tinkering with the same model it’s always used; attempts are made to improve the sermon’s relevance, expand the children’s programs, rev up the worship band, and add more outreach events, for instance, in response to this dilemma. Yet in the face of its rapid decline in influence and a fluid, postmodern society, is simple tinkering on the old attractional, “come to us” model of church still the answer to our ills? Is more of the same still the answer, or is an entirely new paradigm of church needed in our day if we are to bridge the ever-enlarging gap between ourselves and the culture around us?
We will explore this answer in our next post.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)