Category: church

Church on Christmas?

I was surprised to read that some columnists (like this one) are complaining that some churches are choosing not to have services on Christmas day. Even (gasp!) Willow Creek has decided not to open the doors on Christmas. What’s the big deal?

The columnist I linked to says that not having church on Christmas means: 1.) We love things more than we love Jesus. 2.) The church is compromising. 3.) The church is hypocritical. 4.) Non-christians think we are compromising and hypocritical. 5.) The family has become more important than Jesus.

All this because of skipping one service. This leads me to ask the question, what is the purpose of a church service, anyway? According to this guy, we go to show the world that we are self-sacrificing world-haters who would rather attend church than see our families. In his defense, he also says that a church service is an opportunity to “gather with God’s people for worship.” A noble endeavor, of course, but is that it?

To me, it depends on whether the purpose of Christianity is to facilitate church services, or whether the purpose of church services is to facilitate Christianity. I fall into the latter camp. I attend church for the same reason I take my car to the gas station — it’s an opportunity to fuel up. I gain spiritual energy through fellowship and corporate worship, helping me to live the rest of the week as Jesus would have me do. Missing one week doesn’t drain my tank, and some services (you’ve been to them, too) don’t exactly overflow the tank, either.

I didn’t decide to follow Jesus so that I can attend church services. I attend services to help me follow Jesus. Church is not what we do on Sunday morning. Church is when we talk with our friends, when we gather with our families, when we live out our Christian faith in our everyday lives. I don’t know about you, but I definitely will be “attending church” on Christmas.

Pot and kettle

I saw this posting, and it reminded me that people are the same, no matter how they define themselves.

To summarize the post, this woman apparently describes herself as emerging, and is looking for a job in a “culturally relevant church”. She found a job description which seems perfect for her. (You really need to read that job description. Wonder if we could use it here….) Then she finds out that this particular community does not accept women in the lead teaching position, and watch the fur fly.

She and the folks on her blog proceed to take this church apart, in unflattering, ungenerous, and (dare I say) unChristian ways. Apparently, Ms. Pittman has already determined what an emergent, culturally-relevant church believes, and the ordination of women is on the list.

Others who respond agree with her in the most uncharitable terms, post email addresses of the church staff, predict they’ll “never emerge” (is that a goal, anyway?), and in general buffet the church for not thinking the same way they do. Sounds like something the modern churches would do.

One staff member from this church responded to the posting, trying to describe his church’s situation, but he was roundly dismissed as being disingenuous (read: lying), and the flogging went on.

If you skip down to the bottom, the third-to-last post (this morning, anyway, from Anonymous at 1:52pm) says more or less what I was thinking: this group of emergents is no different than the groups they are emerging from. In our zeal to get the world (or the church) to see our point of view and do something about it, sometimes we forget the big picture, which is to continue to look like Jesus in the midst of it.

Whether the issue is ordination of women, or incense in the service, isn’t one of the main points of the emerging discussion to “broaden the tent”, as it were, and allow more freedom of expression — not just different expressions — into the church?

What do YOU want to do?

Read this great post from Tim Schmoyer, and then think what a wonderful world it would be if your pastor asked you the question that Tim is posing.

The question, in case you didn’t bother going to the site is this (my paraphrase): “Church Volunteer, what ministry are you drawn to, and what passion is God wanting you to pursue in that area?”

After picking yourself up off the floor, you may just find your heart’s desire. I am convinced that God plants hopes and dreams for ministry into our hearts, and it’s up to us — and our church families — to draw it out, refine it, and plug it into the overall ministry of the Spirit of God in the world and in our church. Too many times we ignore or bury the desire, thinking “I guess it’s not God” or “it must be the wrong timing”. Those are, of course, the correct response for some desires, but it’s not always the response, and (quite literally) for God’s sake it shouldn’t be the default response.

One of my favorite verses is Ps. 37:4, but we ignore this! If you have been delighting yourself in the Lord (loving Him, being loved by Him), he will place desires into your heart! Yet we say, “it must be just me”, or, “I didn’t get a sign from God about it,” when it was God all along.

I was speaking with a friend of mine in the children’s ministry. I asked her to give her opinion about some directions in the children’s area that I was pondering, and her initial response was that she didn’t think much about it because the children’s area wasn’t where her interests really lay. So I probed a little and asked her what she did care about, and it was like releasing the floodgates! Ideas, hopes, and passion flowed out of her for a totally different area — but it was an area that our particular church hasn’t been addressing, so it has lain dormant. But where God has planted passion, I’m sure He is making plans to carry it out. I look forward to seeing what God has in mind for the desire He has given her.

So, ask yourself the question. What desires has God placed in your heart?

How do you measure success in Church?

There has been a recent verbal conversation I have had with several people about how to define success in a church. Is it always growth in numbers? Is it spiritual growth, but how do you measure that? It seems we get into a trap of comparison with other churches here too. They have built a new building before us or a bigger building. Or they added on before we did. And then we wonder what they are doing and what we aren’t. Do we need to copy it.

Here is a thought from my youth pastor friend in Colorado Springs. His church is in the city, so he has some more urban issues to deal with than our traditional Jo Co church. I told him about our conversation about defining success in a church and asked for his thoughts. Here they are:

“Success” in ministry is an interesting situation.
I think there are seasons in ministry. Sometimes there is incredible harvest in terms of reaching new people for Christ. This youth ministry went from 50 to 180 in about 2 years; that was right before I came. Then the realization set in that we had a lot of students who needed to be discipled; so we weren’t so worried about growing the numbers because we had to deepen and grow spiritually those students we already had. For me, just getting a student through high school can be considered a
success.

I thought the ‘seasons’ comment made perfect sense. It isn’t all about numbers, but we have to be able to recognize where we are at any given time.

Is it really either-or?

I’m getting tired of the constant use of either-or to describe whether someone is emergent. The latest is this article, which gives seven layers (stages?) that a church can go through on the path to emerging. Some of them are laugh-out-loud funny, some make me squirm uncomfortably, but the last one makes me mad.

I guess the pinnacle of emerging is the discovery that the Bible talks about injustice, poverty, and compassion. So apparently, the non-emergent churches out there are NOT aware of the biblical emphasis on social issues until they have reached the emergent plateau, and can call themselves an emerging church.

Setting aside the seeker churches (which, it seems to me, tend to view themselves as IN the mission field, and therefore keep their money and attention inside the church), this claim rattles me. Do we really have to be emerging in order to care about social issues? Are we really that blind to them until we have formed community groups, become concerned about conversations instead of conversions, have church in a bar, and grow goatees?

Of course not, and let me give you two examples, from opposite extremes. The first is my brother, Kevin. He left his professional career to devote his life to inner city kids. He and I have briefly discussed the emerging phenomenon, but it doesn’t touch the group he works with. You can imagine that their mission field is too busy avoiding crack dealers, trying not to get shot, and wondering who their daddy is to worry about whether the church is culturally relevant. Kevin’s gospel is two-fold: Jesus loves you, and stay in school. Kevin isn’t postmodern, emerging, or anything else along those lines. However, he is greatly in touch with social issues, and got there without an alternative community group. He did, however, once sport a goatee.

Which brings me to me (although I never went the goatee route). I also do not feel like I’m postmodern, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site. And I haven’t left my cushy white-collar job to live in the hood. However, my wife and I have given loads of money away to churches and organizations whose mission is to tackle these social issues head on: sometimes with the gospel, sometimes by meeting felt needs. It is so ingrained in me not to blow the trumpet and tell you the precise amount or percentage I’ve given away, that even at this point I hesitate to tell you. The point of doing so would be simply to say that I also did not attend a postmodern convention or start a service with an “x” in the name, before I felt convicted by God to start giving this money away.

So let’s not make the mistake of assuming that non-emergent churches don’t care about social issues, and that all emergent churches (and people) do. It just may be that our emergentness (which is a word I think I just made up) and our compassion have nothing to do with each other.