Full Contact Christianity

It is common in more conservative circles to think of the American church as ineffectual, diffuse, bumbling, incompetent. I have come to believe this is a comforting lie, and that the truth is far less flattering: the American church is terrifyingly competent at getting nearly anything it really wants. I know that sounds preposterous, but hear me out. 

Maintaining a typical American church is no picnic; starting one even less so. Even well-established churches die, and many, if not most, church plants fail within 3 years. But show me any major city in this country that doesn’t have a handful of hip, urban churches with that industrial coffee shop vibe. Show me any major suburb that’s not home to a few suburban megachurches that look like a mall or an airport concourse. The American church wants those things, and we make sure that we have them. 

Within most churches, the weekly worship service is a major priority. Go visit; sit through a service, then pull aside a church staffer. “That was amazing!” you say. “Would you mind telling me how you do it?” Ask the right person, and they can tell you, down to the literal nuts and bolts. After all, the Sunday service isn’t happenstance; they make the same thing happen every single week. 

• They know exactly what tasks need to be done, by when, in order to pull it all off. 
• They know what skill sets are needed to accomplish each task. 
• They have identified people who have those skills, hired them (or installed them in volunteer positions), and empowered them to carry out their tasks. 
• They make sure to provide those people with what they need to get the job done. 

We all know what this looks like. If a microphone cord goes bad, or a speaker goes out, they’ll replace it. The office manager orders the right kind of paper to print the bulletins. The PowerPoint (Keynote, if you’re really cool) slides will be carefully crafted and ready by Saturday so they can be loaded into Pro Presenter. The sound techs have an established rotation so there’s always someone on duty, and a backup in case of illness. The musicians will have the set list and be ready. The ushers who take up the offering will know who they are. The greeters will have been reminded to arrive 20 minutes early. And on and on….

I’m not knocking any of this. It’s a prodigious, brilliantly-coordinated effort, and a metric ton of work. Bringing it all off smoothly every single week is one of the great unappreciated labors of the modern church, and it’s not even considered some sort of extraordinary accomplishment. It’s just our baseline expectation — after all, it’s literally what we pay our church staff for, right?

…and that’s exactly my point. You want to know what it looks like when we really want something to happen? That’s what it looks like. We are absolutely competent at getting what we really want. 

Hold that thought.

Now go back to that same church staff, and ask them if they care that their kids grow up continuing to know and love Jesus. “Of course!” they will say. So then ask them “How do you make sure your kids don’t walk away from the Christian faith?” Inquire as to the plan. Ask the same set of questions that you asked about the service: 

• What tasks need to be done, and by when, in order to accomplish the goal?
• What skill sets are required to execute each task? 
• Who has those skills? Who is empowering those people to use their skills?
• What do those people need to get it done? Who makes sure they have what they need? 

You know as well as I do what’s going to happen. You’re going to get a deer-in-the-headlights look, a stammering recitation of some platitudes, and a quick exit from the conversation. And then we wonder why it’s getting sort of hard to find a 22-year-old who’s still Christian.

Someone will complain, of course, that discipling our kids is a multifaceted and organic process much harder to map than simply putting on the Sunday production, and so it is. But it’s also our primary job. All the more reason to have a plan, yes? Jesus never told us to make a Sunday morning stage production; He commissioned us to make disciples. So why is it we’re so competent at the one, and so helpless at the other?

Pastors are leaving the church in droves. Why? This week, I spent some time reading one man’s answer. It would be worth your time to skim his account. As Rev. Lang articulates his reasons for leaving, not just that particular church, but the pastoral vocation altogether, I find myself sympathetic. There’s a lot in the article that I don’t agree with, and some of the things he says cause me to wonder if he’s called to the pastorate at all; good shepherds have to be tough, and I don’t think he is.

But his list of the seven proficiencies expected of a pastor really struck me. That’s true in most churches. I don’t have any trouble seeing why ten years of his job left him burned out. I’m surprised he made it that long.

You know what’s missing in it all? Any sense of what biblical shepherding ministry actually is. Rev. Lang tells us why he stepped into the role which church culture defined for him, and why, some years later, he stepped out of it again. That’s worthwhile information for a church to absorb, but one of the things it’s missing is, well…the Bible. There is no such biblical position as the one his church asked him to occupy. He shouldn’t have been doing that job; no one person should have been doing that job. More importantly, no church should be trying to hire one person to do that job.

I’m hoping that the masses of men leaving the ministry will provoke some soul-searching in congregations. We need — all of us — to be stepping into the work of the ministry. Every Christian should be a disciple, and every disciple should be a disciple-maker at the level they’re able to be. Those who are called to equip congregations to do that work are the leaders we need. More and more of them are bivocational, in part because it gives them greater freedom to do what they’re actually called to instead of getting sidetracked into various backwaters of institutional trivia. Back when I was on staff at a mid-sized church, I used to keep track of how much time I spent on different activities. When I left that position, I continued keeping track for a while. You know what happened? Fewer people wasting my time, and more disciple-making.

This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself “pastoral ministry?” It’s not. For any young man who finds himself in the unfortunate position of being hired to do that job, I recommend that he resign forthwith and get involved with a ministry where he can heed the Bible’s counsel rather than flouting it as a necessary condition of his employment.

I talked in a previous post about the tendency to weasel-word our mission statements so we can pretend that whatever happened is what we were aiming for all along.  There’s a second issue also in play in our evangelical culture of ineffectiveness.  When we do aim for something definite, we often aim for the wrong thing.  Often a good and glorious thing — but God didn’t tell us to aim for it.

For example, we focus on planting churches, but where does the Bible ever tell us to plant churches?  It doesn’t.  The closest we get is Paul’s instruction to Titus to appoint elders in all the churches — which is not church planting; it’s organizing the churches that are already there.  Jesus said He would build the church: “On this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”  What He told us to do is make disciples: “Go and make disciples of all the nations….”

The evangelical church in America is pretty good at building churches, but has forgotten how to make disciples.  In fact, we’ve gotten so bad at disciple-making that at least one major ministry operation I’m aware of gets paid handsomely to travel around the country and teach churches how to do it effectively.  They’re pretty good at it, too.  I’m glad they do what they do, but I can’t overemphasize the absurdity of the situation.  A church that doesn’t know how to make disciples is like a library where the staff can’t read or an army where the soldiers don’t know how to shoot.  It’s crazy — this is the primary mission Jesus gave us.

What are these pastors and their flocks doing, if they’re not occupied with making disciples?  They’re building churches.  When we focus on building churches, we tend to get preoccupied with marketing, building programs, group dynamics, corporate papers, committees, and all the appurtenances of 21st-century organizational structure.  In the process, we lose sight of the priority of making disciples, and we end up not making very many…if any. 

There’s a very compelling built-in motivation to focus on building the church organization rather than on making disciples.  Building an organization is a process we understand and have some control over.  Send out x number of mailers to get y number of responses, do demographic surveys, run some focus groups, meet the felt needs of the community, buy some radio spots, etc.  There are definite action steps to take, and far more often than not, they work.  The hard part is getting the money to do what needs to be done.  

Making disciples is a lot cheaper, but it’s a slippery, messy process.  We have to trust God to operate in other people’s lives, and we have to be willing to accommodate what He is doing rather than try to program it to our convenience.  Disciple-making doesn’t work in semesters, or 10-week series.  It doesn’t confine itself to Wednesday nights from 7 to 8:30.  It’s about inconvenient phone calls, spur-of-the-moment painful conversations, dropping everything to attend to a crisis. It requires being present, involving people in your life, getting elbow-deep in theirs.  It doesn’t just end at a pre-defined point; disciple-making creates relationships (and obligations) that last for years.  

Churches are a good and glorious thing.  If we focus on making disciples, we will eventually have churches — Jesus said He would build His church, did He not?  But we have to trust Jesus to do it His way while we do what He told us to focus on.  That’s really uncomfortable for us.  

There are a lot of other areas where similar loss of proper focus has occurred.  The “worship wars” of the 80s and 90s were about whether we ought to sing the old hymns or the newer spiritual songs.  Paul says twice (Eph. 5:19 and Col. 3:16) that we should do both — and sing psalms, too.  We focus on social justice programs for third-world coffee farmers and Albanian victims of human trafficking because Jesus said we should love our neighbors — but we don’t even know our literal neighbors’ names, much less tangibly love them.  I could go on, but you get the idea.

But if we focus on the things God told us to, and those things are messy and impossible to program or control…then what do we do?  What does that look like?  Stay tuned….

*****

Prayer Exercise

“God, what are my real priorities, the things I really focus on?  Not just the things I would say on paper, but what I really do?”

Take some time to list them out.

“Father, is there something You want to adjust in my priorities?  What is it?”

Wait in silence and see what God will say to you.