Full Contact Christianity

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.

Maybe that’s a good thing. 

We’ve done a couple of posts on the troubled relationship between the church body and the church corporation. The first one focused on the fact that these are two separate entities with conflicting needs. Another post addressed how to manage the two sets of needs properly.

In this post, I want to spotlight another area of conflict between the corporation and the body: vision. Inconvenient as it is for the corporation to expend its resources on the things most necessary for spiritual growth, it is even less convenient to empower the rank and file to hear and respond to God’s leading in their own lives.

They have a way of getting involved in their neighbors’ lives, their local elementary school, all kinds of things that take their time, effort, and money away from the corporation’s vision. And they make mistakes — mistakes a slick ecclesiastical professional wouldn’t make. Better they stuck to proper channels and put their effort into fulfilling the institution’s Five Year Plan.

If you’re gonna have a vision-directed institution in the manner of such churches, the very first order of business, oddly, is to kill off the vision in the congregation. Such an institution enlists its people in the vision cast by the corporate leadership, and crowds out opportunities for its people to hear God leading them, and respond to the opportunities He is giving them in their own lives. To be fair, not every church does this. But many do it half-consciously, and some churches are deliberately, ruthlessly effective at it. I’ve heard pastors bragging about it. I’ve heard conference speakers bragging about it to a roomful of pastors. (Not, happily, anyone in my city!)

But no. You can’t schedule a revival. The Holy Spirit doesn’t have a booking agent you can call. The Wind that is the Spirit of God blows where He wills. He is gloriously, thoroughly untamed. He certainly does plan…but He doesn’t do your plan.

The best churches I know find ways to notice what God is doing among their people, and support it. In small fellowships like they had in NT times, that’s easy to do — you can’t not notice what God is doing in a group that size. In bigger, corporate-model churches, that’s harder to do, but by no means impossible. The really tough problem is that it’s harder to want to do.

The body is the church. The corporation is an asset of the church, a possession. It not the church, it is something the church owns. Once we understand that, we know what to do with the corporation. Use it, just like we would use any other asset of the church: a building or a van or a sound board. It does not exist as an end in itself; its job is to serve the needs of the body.

We would find it odd if the whole church directed its energy toward the upkeep of the church van. Can you imagine? The whole church turns out on a Saturday morning to wash the van. The VBS sponsors a bake sale to get a new turbocharger. We don’t let the youth group use the van, because they always leave Cheeto crumbs under the seats.

When something like that happens, we realize that the van has become an idol. Likewise, when all our energy is being misdirected into the corporation to keep it running like a good business, things have gone awry.

And it is really easy for things to go awry in exactly that way. It turns out that the corporation can survive quite handily without indulging in the messy and inconvenient business of bringing its people into real relationships that provide fellowship and accountability. As long as the people keep attending, keep giving, and keep volunteering, the corporation hums along like a well-oiled machine. The metrics look great.

And–in our present cultural milieu, at least–many of the people have no interest in getting mired in such challenging relationships anyway. They want to be consumers of religious services, and the corporation that can provide the programs they’re shopping for will get their dollars and volunteer hours.

And so the vast majority of churches have established and well-understood patterns for taking care of the corporation’s needs, a clear understanding of who is responsible, and meaningful accountability to ensure that the job gets done. These same churches often have no established pattern for moving people into deep relationships that strengthen and feed them, do not understand the process, and hold no one accountable for doing it.

For example, I once worked for a church under the title “Pastor of Discipleship and Logistics.” During the two years I held that job, I had regular accountability and support around items like getting the bulletin done on time or ordering up on copy paper. Never once did anyone in my chain of command initiate a conversation about discipleship, check to see who I was discipling, how it was going, or if I needed support.

Not once.

In two years.

I wish I could say that’s an extreme example. In fact, it’s very common.