Yesterday,
Monday, something weird happened. Not
totally weird but something just a little different. I went to work. To make sense of this let me give you a
little background. When my mom when into
labor my dad was away preaching a revival.
Dad got back just in time to see mom into the delivery room. I was born on Saturday. I missed church the next day, but I was there
the following Sunday. I lived in a
preacher’s home for the next 17 years.
Then I went to a Bible college and after four years there I moved into a
parsonage. For the next two plus decades
I worked in the church. Then six years
ago, I left the pulpit and became a church consultant. From July of 1962 till January 2019 I have
lived closely connected to the institutional church. Yesterday, I began working in a secular work
place.
I
have held fulltime secular employment from time to time, but that was always as
a bi-vocational minister. I have served
churches or church plants that could not pay a living wage so I did secular
work, but it was always in the context of the institutional church, as a way to
make ends meet. It also was done in the
hope that I could become mono-vocational.
This is different. I am not pastoring a small church that can’t pay
me. This is a volitional choice to move
from the career path of being a minister.
I have begun working in a career that has no ministry applications, nor
as a way to develop a church ministry position.
What
I am doing and saying is descriptive of my personal attempt to be a
disciple. It is by no means an attempt
to be prescriptive of what everyone or anyone else ought to do. Some may wonder what has become of me. Let me tell you what has not happened and
then I’ll tell you why this has happened. I have not left or renounced the faith. I am still deeply committed to our Lord. I have not become a heretic; I remain
completely orthodox as a believer. I am
not in a marriage crisis; our relationship is as strong as it has ever
been.
The
painful conclusion that has crept over me is that the ministry of the church
keeps getting in the way of the Ministry of the Gospel. Let me explain it with a bit of antidotal evidence. Last year, I did a non-scientific survey of
about 40 churches. I pulled up their
online bulletin and counted the announcements placing them in two
categories. The first was events,
activities, or programing that was exclusively or primarily focused on those
people who are already members. The
second category was events, activities, or programing that was exclusively or
primarily focused on those people who are not already members-outreach or
evangelism. I tried to be generous with
the subjective evaluation giving the benefit of the doubt whenever I
could. The result was that 90%-95% of
the function of the church was to provide something for Christians to do. Less than 10% of the announced action of the
church was about proclaiming the Gospel to a lost world. I know this is far from a definitive and
authoritative study. But if you are
honest, in your heart of hearts you know this is true.
This
summer a huge tree fell in my yard. The
trunk was almost completely hollow. In
that trunk was a fantastic collection of nutrient rich mulch. As the tree shed leaves and twigs many fell
into the hollow truck and began to decay.
It was teaming with earthworms and made a rich type of potting
soil. The tree began to grow roots from
the inside of the trunk into this rich potting soil. It was literally feeding on itself.
This
is my path and I cannot call for others to take it. But I can ask you to question whether the
great bulk, the committees, the conflicts, the well-intentioned dragons, the battles
over music and style, the demand for sacred entertainment have not made the
church its own worst obstacle to its calling and mission? Is the ministry/operations of the church
getting in the way of the Ministry of the Gospel? I do not have all the answers in fact I may
not have any. I am not sure I have the
right questions. What I do know is I
can’t go back, so I must go on. Please
keep me in your prayers.
Blessings on this new endeavor. You will figure it out. Whatever the it is, Brother.
ReplyDeleteThank Mary
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ReplyDeleteThank you Charlie for sharing a piece of your journey. Although I have never been in vocational ministry, I have experienced bits of the hard road you describe. Like you, I have no comprehensive answer-for-everything that unites all loose ends. But I have come to different conclusions than you. I do not think that our problems lie with an ever increasing conflict between the ministry of the gospel and the ministry of the church. Instead, I think the problem lies in our understanding of those things and their intrinsic elements. I believe (and perhaps I am mistaken about this) that our ecclesiology is all wrong. We have come to believe that the purpose of the local church is to spread the gospel. Maybe it is, but I see no biblical evidence for this at all. We point to the great commission as a mandate for the church, but that mandate was given before the birth of the church, and directed to individual disciples. Of course, it is valid to argue that the mandate extends beyond those disciples to us individually, but it is also valid to argue that the church itself is rarely (if ever) tasked with that duty as a collective mission. The overwhelming portion of Paul’s letters, or even the other letters of the new testament, are not characterized by calls to evangelism. Instead, they are marked by calls to holiness, worship, faith, communal living, sacrifice, recognition of church as a unified body of Christ, and an abiding in the vine and its corresponding development of the fruits of the spirit (among other things). Acts 2:36-47 gives a view into the early church and its birth. Nowhere in that description is evangelism of the lost mentioned as an organized collective mission. The passage tells us that “the promise” is for all who God calls, and that God added to their number daily, as the people lived out a community of faith. I suspect that as the people lived out that community, developed their gifts, and functioned as a part of the larger body, that they individually spread the gospel with the unbelieving people in their own circles. Likely, there was a spiritual impetus to do so, and that impetus was reinforced and discipled by the faith community - the church - those that had been called out of the world. I have come to believe that this focus of reaching the lost as the primary collective mission (or even as a mission of high collective importance) has pigeon holed the church into a numbers mentality. It has created unhealth by fomenting competition and balkanization between local bodies. It has caused personal development to diminish. We have lost discipleship. We have forsaken personal evangelism and made it either a collective responsibility, or the responsibility of a “professional.” The modern churchgoer may think to himself, “I don’t have to spread the gospel. My church will do that with program x, y, or z.” Although the true church is often housed within the institutional church, the institutional church looks nothing like the church of the new testament. The structures are different, the hierarchies are different, and the missions are different. Of course, God can work in whatever way he sees fit, and he frequently works in ways that I don’t or can’t understand, but rarely do I see someone truly coming to Jesus because of a church’s collective focus on evangelizing the gospel. More often it is born out of spiritual relationships forged by individual Christians obeying God’s unction on their redeemed lives. Or by God pulling them out of the world and into a community that is ready to disciple them. It seems to me, therefore, that the purpose of church is to be a community that reinforces a life of spiritual growth, and that the natural result of that is a reaching out to the lost world.
ReplyDeleteMike:
ReplyDeleteVERY well said. The church through out history has tended to look like the dominate culture. The structure of the Roman Catholic church looked (looks) very much like the Roman Empire. Looking at the northern European principalities and you might see some aspects of the Protestant reformation. The Restoration Movement a uniquely American fellowship in the past and in more traditional settings looks a lot like American democracy (house/senate/president = deacons/elders/preacher) The dominate culture of America today is consumer/entertainment. Can we see that working its way into the church? God can use the most unexpected messengers, including and ass, but we need always be looking for the best way to be the disciples of our Savior.
Thanks for reading and writing
Charlie.
I have been on the same trajectory since 2010, from a similar epiphany. Great words … thanks.
ReplyDelete