Church Voices

Recently there’s been a big dust up in the ol’ blogosphere amongst theology nerd bloggers about the Reformed view that everything God does is for the sake of his glory. You can go here if you want to get the blow by blow. John Piper has been the primary Reformed thinker leading the charge on the side arguing for God’s motivation being for his glory, and in support of his position posted 50 proof texts from scripture.

I’ve been a father for 9 months now, and that 9 months has taught me a lot about God. The metaphor of God as father is one that is found throughout scripture, and is one of the most powerful. After experiencing fatherhood for nine months I can’t imagine trying to cast God as doing everything for his glory. That strikes me as perhaps the furthest thing from the mind of a father.

I know this isn’t a very academic argument, and would probably get me an F if I used it as the basis for a paper, but if we’re going to take the metaphor of God as our father as seriously as scripture seems to, we may have to ditch the God doing everything for his own glory theology.

This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. This 33 year old woman wants Cheaters to check out her boyfriend because he seems to be more distant than he was. One of her evidences that she thinks he’s cheating is that she walked in on him when he was alone with his porn. She then goes on to say that she’s tried to be everything he sees on his pornographic movies. As the show progresses, we find out that they live together, he smokes marijuana, oh, and she’s a Christian. At this point, I went “Yuuwaaahhh?!?”

Turns out he’s cheating on her with her cousin. The show then goes to the woman so she can be debriefed on the situation. The woman has her Aunt there for support (the Aunt also goes to church). Cousin…Aunt…uh oh.
 So the two women start fuming and they go with the Cheaters staff to confront the guy and the cousin…on Wednesday night…when the Aunt and woman are supposed to be in church.

In the van the host is facilitating the chase/meeting/confrontation and attempts to console the woman and her Aunt. At one point he says “Your faith doesn’t keep you from having these emotions, it’s what you do with them.” I would have liked to have heard what else he would have said but they find the boyfriend and cousin.

The woman and her Aunt catch up to the boyfriend and cousin at a carwash. The woman runs out of the car and begins yelling and cussing out her boyfriend and cousin. Then they’re yelling for a good 5 minutes how they should all be in church. All of them…with each other.

More cussing. She starts spraying the guy with the hose yelling “You need to be baptized m*ther bleep.”

More “Go to church.”

The show ends with the woman not sure what to do but still “loves” the boyfriend, the guy is sorry and wants back in and believes she’ll take him back, and the cousin doesn’t care about the woman and says she saw him first.

I should not have to point out how, specifically, wrong every part of this (except the efforts and comments of the host) are, so I won’t. If you don’t know what’s wrong with this picture, please contact me directly and I’ll share with you about sin, what God did for you a couple thousand years ago, and how He wants you to respond to Him.

If only I could show this on a Sunday morning.

After talking to Brant Hansen on this podcast I’ve been doing some thinking about the state of the church in America, and though there may be big churches the death of the megachurch will occur.  Or at least the typical structure of them as exemplified by the typical baby boomer megachurch (in this case I’m not defining megachurch simply as greater than 1,000 members).  Essentially these churches are a top-down model heavily influenced by the structure of corporations.  That means there’s a lot of passiveness on the part of members and lots of leading on the part of paid staff.  Paid staff set up programs that are attended by members.  Members sit down and are taught at.  The shape and structure of the church is wholly decided and enacted from the top.

To give you an idea of this type of thinking, I was discussing the possibility of a church website being a wiki (a wiki is just a website that anyone, or at least lots of people, can add to it, and change) with a guy who is familiar with the inner workings of a megachurch. The idea would be that many, most, or all members of a church could add to and modify the website on a continuous basis. He told me it would never happen, that the church leadership would never be willing to give up that kind of control over such a public instrument.  We shouldn’t view this as a single incident, but indicative of the philosophy of boomer megachurches. 

There’s two problems with this philosophy.  The first is that our society is moving away from a centralized, top down model in everything.  People aren’t content to be told what to do by the powers that be. A recent study by Newsweek found that 65% of people aged 14-21 are interested in starting their own business.  Or consider, for a moment, the various internet darlings like myspace, facebook, and even ebay which have de-centralized networking and garage sales respectively.  Their success has come by allowing their communities to shape their sites.  People are more interested than ever in actively shaping their world (whether its electronic, or otherwise).  Businesses, communities, clubs, and other groups that successfully allow the rank and file to take part in shaping what they do are becoming more common, because they’ve started to become wildly successful.  Boomer style megachurches can’t do that.

The second problem is that the top-down style of megachurches let a lot of resources go to waste.  Essentially, unless your skills, interests, abilities and passions mirror the direction the church leadership has decided to go your gifts go to waste.  This leaves you passively following, or back to church hunting.  Churches that manage to create a community that shapes and forms what the church is going to look like will be more successful than churches that don’t.  And by success, I mean any measurement you want to use.  But, not only are they putting all of their resources to work (or at least more of their resources) they also create a church full of pastors.  Instead of having a church with a few pastors and everyone else cheering them on and supporting them, the entire church will be filled with pastors looking for opportunities to minister. 

I could be wrong, I have been in the past (heck, just a month ago I managed to predict every major fight on a UFC show wrongly) but this is more than just a guess on my part, this is the way society is going, contrasted with the way a specific type of church is.  While terms like "the death of megachurches" is dramatic, I doubt that death will mean they simply stop existing, I believe in many cases, as the leadership changes the boomer style megachurch will shift to become different, more closely mirroring the de-centralized communities I’ve described here.

This has been said before, probably by many people, but I believe it is worth repeating.

If you want to be a witness for Christ, you need to earn that opportunity.

Part of the role and work of the Holy Spirit in the church was/is to give credibility to the message of the Kingdom of God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ through miracles.  People listened because they saw evidence of the love of God in their lives.

Dave Stone at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, KY recently related how they did that as a church by encouraging their people to participate in the local Aids Walk.  Their leadership was the third largest donor in the walk.  You can tell a sinner they are going to hell, but the question is, Are they listening?  When you tell a sinner you care about them, and then you show them you care about them (or vice versa),  then they will listen when you tell them God cares about them and how he showed it.  This is why “friendship evangelism” is so popular and beneficial.

Hating on sinners is never convicting to the sinner.