I went through a period of about a year and a half where my floridly bivocational work situation necessitated missing church some Sundays, and visiting a handful of different congregations on the weeks I could attend church. I had deep, regular accountability with multiple different believers and close friends during that time (as I still do), and I made worship a priority even on the weeks that I wasn’t able to get to a service. But one of the things I remember most from that time is the look of concern on pastors’ (and other church people’s) faces when they asked where I went to church and I explained that I didn’t go to the same church every single week.
Here’s how the conversation would go down: they would launch into an explanation of how important it is for a believer to have accountability and regular fellowship. I would explain that I met weekly with two different small groups of men who kept me accountable, and spend time in the homes of three Christian families for regular fellowship. They would express relief that I wasn’t totally neglecting fellowship and accountability, but usually still have some reservations. Didn’t smell right somehow.
It’s laughable, if you think about it. How many Christians do you know that have two accountability groups and close relationships with three families? I was enjoying some of the best fellowship and accountability of my whole life, and somehow it didn’t meet expectations!
Now we all know that if I’d just said, “I go to XYZ Bible Church,” the follow-up questions would have been different. They’d have asked things like “How do you like it there?” or “What kind of music is the worship?” There would have been no follow-up scrutiny of whether I was getting real fellowship and accountability at XYZ Bible Church; the bare fact of my church attendance would be satisfactory. But why is that? Don’t we all know people who are regular church attenders who aren’t plugged into any kind of meaningful fellowship or accountability? In fact, don’t we all know people who, despite regular church attendance, struggle to “get plugged in” at their church? We all know that church attendance doesn’t actually solve the fellowship and accountability problems, yet we act as if it does.
Here’s a useful tool for thinking about life: anytime there’s a visible gap between our behavior and what we say that we care about, that’s something worth paying attention to. In this case, our words say we care about fellowship and accountability, but our actions say we care about regular attendance at the same building. What’s up with that?
As we’ve been discussing, the Body and the corporation are two separate things. On the available evidence, it wasn’t my lack of body life that made people nervous. I demonstrably had more body life than many of the people I was talking to. No, they were nervous that I didn’t belong to one particular corporation.
Now, I can’t see anybody’s heart, but I have a nasty suspicion that the real source of the nervousness here is the demonstration that the status quo isn’t inevitable. Very few people are cynical enough to try to drag me to their church specifically so they can collect my tithe money (especially considering the small size of my tithe!) However, the vast majority of pastors are committed to — and reliant on — a corporate structure that depends on congregants devoting their tithe money and volunteer hours to one specific corporation. That’s how their salaries get paid.
Just by living as I was, I showed that a believer doesn’t have to be the property of one specific corporation. If believers no longer regard a corporation as a one-stop-shop, if we rely instead on the organic body around us, without regard to which corporation a particular person might belong to…that could be a game-changer. Such a network of believers is not a threat to any one specific church, but it’s a profound threat to the entire system.
Full Contact Christianity 