A move of magnificent stupidity!

I recently attended my son’s graduation from boot camp, known as “Pass and Review”.  It was a wonderful occasion and filled with moments of great joy, pride and fun.  Seeing my son take part in these ceremonies was thrilling.  I also had great pride in walking behind my son-in-law, who at the request of my wife wore his uniform.  I enjoyed watching the seaman come to attention and say, “Good morning, petty-officer,” as he passed.  He acknowledged their respect and I simply smiled as a proud father (in-law).

But there was one moment of magnificent stupidity in the day.  It happened as we were in line to enter the base.  At the gate there was a pedestrian entrance with a moderately long line.  The line moved steadily but not fast.  When you entered the gate you presented your ID and your ticket.  Then you proceeded to a table where all bags were checked.  Then you moved forward to be checked with a wand.  It was efficient but not fast. To the right of the pedestrian entrance was an automobile traffic entrance/exit that was being used by the employees of the base.  The cars pulled up to a guardhouse at the gate, occupants flashed an ID and then moved on.  That line moved much faster.  I should also mention that there were no cars in the exit lanes.   Also, in the general area were a number of guards. All wore uniforms, body armor, had side arms and several had M-4s held in a cross-chest ready position; every indication that security was taken very seriously.  

Apparently, frustrated by the slow progress of the line and seeing the traffic move more quickly a lady in the line broke ranks and started running in through the exit lane toward the guardhouse.  Stop for a moment and get this picture clearly in your mind.  Can you see lots of guards, guns and one person running the wrong way in?  Okay, let’s go on.  One guard near the guardhouse puts one hand on his side arm holds up his other hand and begins repeating the command, “Halt”.  Another guard comes from her left and behind with his rifle in the down ready position, but walking fast, knees slightly bent and in the posture to bring his weapon to bear.  After about the third or fourth “Halt” she stops and the guard commands her to go back the way she came.  As she comes back the guard with the rifle comes up and says, “Don’t ever run onto a military base!  If we were in the Middle East, where I just served, I would have shot you.”  She returned to the line looking more bewildered than chastened. 

What we are talking about is a massive case of lack of situational awareness that led to a move of magnificent stupidity!  We are all capable of such acts of magnificent stupidity in our own spiritual walk and ministry when we lack situational awareness.    When we are not careful to keep track of our condition and what is going on around us we may end up sashaying into a deadly situation.  Here are five questions about our situation that might keep us from acts of magnificent stupidity: 

1. What is the situation with my personal devotions?  Not my study for teaching or sermons but an opportunity to be convicted by the Holy Spirit?
2. What is the situation with my favorite sin?  We need to admit that we all have one temptation that is especially strong for us.
3. What is the situation with my spouse?  If your marriage is on autopilot you are running in the exit gate.
4.  What is the situation with your leaders?  Ignoring a problem in leadership will assure that the problem will get worse. 
5. What is the situation with my accountability life?  Show me a disciple who has no one to hold him or her accountable and I will show you a disciple that is a target.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a beginning point to develop the situational awareness to keep us from acts of magnificent stupidity.  As a friend of mine used to say, “Jesus told us to be harmless as doves, but never dumb as a donkey.” 

Shooting in Mayberry

Thursday afternoon two Sheriff’s deputies were gunned down while they ate a late lunch in a little Chinese restaurant in Trenton, FL.  If you wanted to find a place more like the mythical Mayberry from Andy Griffin fame you would have a hard time doing it.   Trenton is just down the road from my house.  From my house to the scene of the shooting all you do is turn right out of the driveway, go 11 miles and turn left into the China Ace restaurant. 

Trenton is the county seat of Gilchrist County, the only place in FL with only one traffic light in the whole county.  This is rural, agricultural, country-living America in its pure form.  Folks are small town warm and friendly.  In the local drug store Theresa, the manager, knows the customers by name, their kids, their ailments, and who needs more help than they let on.  I recently needed 5 books from the store for a book tour event.  I went and picked them up at the store, told the girl at the counter I would replace them and walked out with nothing more than a, “See y’all later”.  The newspaper is owned and run by a husband and wife team that does the reporting, set up, advertising sales, delivery and run the office.  When the Trenton Tigers played for a state football title a couple years ago, 2,400 of the 2,100 residents drove down for the game.  Trenton is the kind of town where you can imagine the town drunk only gets tipsy.  Trenton is more like Mayberry than any place you can imagine; at least it was. A man known as a recluse and as being a bit odd demonstrated the expansiveness of evil.  

We want to pretend that we can find a safe place, that in small town America with a church on every corner we are safe.  Evil is there.  We hope that in our churches we will find a haven of innocents.  Yet we find evil there.  Surely in our families we can be secured from evil.  No, the invasion of evil has moved into the sanctuary of home.  Evil has convincingly told us that it does not exist.  That people are basically good and that with education, jobs, self-esteem, enlightenment, laws, gun control,  (you name the social plan) and man’s inherent goodness will prevail.   So far it hasn’t worked.  By the way, I have it on good, indeed, on Divine authority that it never will.

It is time for the church to being speaking frankly and honestly about the prevailing nature of evil in the individual’s heart.  We don’t need a program, a sermon, or even a comment about the evil of some social malfunction.  That is to play into the hands of evil itself.   Dietrich Bonheoffer once wrote:  “The great masquerade of evil has wrought havoc with all our ethical preconceptions. This appearance of evil in the guise of light, beneficence and historical necessity is utterly bewildering to anyone nurtured in our traditional ethical systems. But for the Christian who frames his life on the Bible it simply confirms the radical evilness of evil.”

The problem for John Hubert Hightower was not that he was lonely, had low self-esteem, had employment issues, owned a gun, or any other social theory of his dysfunction.  His problem was an evil heart.  Jesus said, “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceeds the evil thoughts…” ^{Mk 7.21 NASB} Because only the new life, available by our participation in Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection can cure evil; the world can never effectively deal with malevolence.

Mayberry doesn’t exist any more, if it ever did, and it is time for the church to stop pretending that it can.  It is time that we spend less time trying to solve social problems, address fears and phobias, worrying about appearing relevant to the world and become passionate about our message, which by the way is intensely counter cultural.  Here is that message, “We are sinners and it is killing us.  We have to be changed from dead to living and that is only by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Is the way we are trying to grow the church the reason the church is in decline?

We all want our churches to grow.  I know of no preacher that actually wants their church to be stagnating or in decline.  Nevertheless, the church in America appears to be stagnate.  We can debate the rate of decline or the slowing of growth, but I know of no one who would say that the American church is experiencing dynamic growth or a vibrant revival as a whole.

This is not for lack of effort.  To paraphrase President Eisenhower the “Church growth-industrial complex” has over the last couple of generations grown to be a colossus in American Christianity.  The size, number, and occasion, of “church growth” conferences, books, seminars, websites and blogs is truly staggering.  As an exercise, go to your favorite online bookseller and query the phrase “church growth”.  You may also use Google and see how many websites there are for that same phrase.   If the church is not growing it is not for lack of information, resources, or advice.

The scoreboard that we use to measure our churches and ministry is most often the number of people at given events, but what if that is the wrong score board?  Could using the wrong scoreboard be a part of the problem?  I am not opposed to large churches but our focus on congregational attendance is not something we see in the New Testament.  But it is the focus of most of American Christianity. 

In my years of ministry there was a repeating episode with which you might be able to relate.  Someone comes to me and saying, “I (We) are going to start attending XYZ church; they have thus and such a program and it really feeds me (us).”   In other words, “If you want me to continue to be a number on your scoreboard I have to have consistent sources of input that make me happy.”  I never served a church that could ever compete with mega, superstar church in town.   My sermons never had the polish of mega church preacher, our music team was never concert quality, our facilities never had a Starbucks, and the youth group was never large enough to rent a beach side conference center for summer camp.  In other words, when based on services provided, the small churches I served never could compare positively with big churches as we competed for the religious consumer. 

And that is the rub, when we use attendance as the scoreboard we end up trying to attract people to our churches so that scoreboard looks good.  But by using presentations and programs to attract crowds we end up creating religious consumers with an insatiable appetite for new, more, bigger, better shows and experiences.  And there is always a bigger show some where in town.  At some point this religious consumerism will eclipse discipleship, sound doctrine and may replace Christ with a cult of personality built around a dynamic pastor.  The pattern for most of our churches is a model of high knowledge and high entertainment coupled with low obedience.  The result is we have created connoisseurs and consumers, but not Christian workers. 

In the Gospel of Matthew there is an often-repeated word, poiew, it translates “to do”.  Jesus came “to do” the will of the Father, that was one of His constant themes.  “To do”, to be obedient, is a theme painfully absent from the life of much of the church.  Our people need not be experts and scholars “to do”.  After the Gerasene demoniac was healed by Jesus he wanted to follow Jesus.  The Lord would not allow it, but instead sent him to tell his people what God had done for him.  The man had a very low level of knowledge but expressed high obedience.

Our growth strategy of high entertainment and high knowledge while expecting low obedience and commitment, especially as it relates to the Great Commission, while not universal is wide spread in our churches and is, in my opinion, the reason the church is in decline.  We must change the very way we think of being the church.  We must think in terms where obedience regardless of knowledge level is expected to be the prevailing pattern of the life of a disciple. 

Three things growing churches understand about building space.

 Every church seems to have a coffee option.  Some large churches have full blown coffee shops.  Even the smallest of churches will have a place where there is a cup of coffee and space to talk. 

One Wednesday night I was driving back from a meeting when I saw a contrast that struck me like a brick to the forehead. I drove by a huge church building that sat almost completely empty.  I’ve been in this building and it is very well designed, decorated and furnished.  But on this Wednesday night the passengers of 6 or 8 cars occupied its 20,000 square feet.  The other building was a coffee shop. I’ve been in this building as well.  It consists of the coffee shop area, one large, and a few small meeting rooms.  In the parking lot were about 25 cars.  The area around the coffee bar was standing room only with high school/college age students.   Beyond Wednesday nights this coffee shop, which is located near a middle school, runs a full schedule from early morning till evening.  This coffee shop represents a wise application of principles that growing churches understand about space. 

When a church thinks about using, redecorating, or adding building space there are three principles that need to be remembered.

1.    Build Multi-purpose.  In the very design of the building, plan multi-use.  A way to plan multi-use is to have a weeklong calendar with each day divided into morning, afternoon, and evening.  Find ways to use space in as many of those 21 slots as possible.  A good tool to begin the multi-purpose discussion is the “7 and 5 Practice”.  The “7 and 5 Practice” simply means that this space will be used seven times each week by at least five different groups of people.  It is unwise to build any space that can only be used one way or for only one purpose.  Even office space can be used in different ways with a little creativity.  For example, one church had lockable bookcases, cabinets and desks placed in each classroom.  During the week the classrooms doubled as office space for staff members.  When the space was used for kids the staff members could lock up their personal space.  In contrast, I once served a church with a most beautiful sanctuary space-a space that was very expensive to build with soaring ceilings, an imposing stage, long pews, and sloped floors. It was only useful for worship services and typically sat empty 165 hours a week.  In the thirty years that it took the church to pay off the building it was used less than 5,000 hours. 

2.    Build with the community in mind.  Many churches take time to ask their members about how they want to utilize their building.  But churches rarely ask the community those same questions.  Don’t ask church members what they think the community wants, ask the Community directly. Here are some suggestions of people to ask:  Everyone within a mile of your church building, as well as city commissioners, police officers, school teachers and administrators, parks and rec leaders, shop keepers and even other preachers what they feel the community needs.  You will not be able to provide everyone everything, but this can help build community excitement for your church and may help build good will with neighbors.

3.    Build quality but not opulence.  There are two errors to avoid.  Many churches, wanting to get as many square feet as they can afford will build some truly hideous buildings.  Trying to get as many square feet as possible they go low budget.  One expression of this is, “We will get it dried in and finish it later.”  The problem is fatigue sets in and at some point folks settle for ‘good enough’.   I once talked with a church that was in what seemed to be a never-ending building project.  I walked into the building and to my left was unfinished space that was being used.  In the middle of the floor was a toilet; with a few other building supplies that had been there so long nobody noticed it any more.  If not the regular attenders, I can guarantee you that every visitor noticed it!  If you can’t afford to build with quality you can’t afford the project.  The less frequent, but equally misguided extreme is opulence.  It is not limited to televangelists with 24-karat gold bathroom fixtures.  It is not just pastors that get crazy.  On one occasion a simple redecoration of a kitchen turned into a $60,000 make over.  A good rule of thumb is this; build to the standards of the nicer homes in your community.  If your space is very unlike the homes in your community your uture guests these folks may feel uncomfortable.

Church buildings are tools that can help us accomplish the ministry of the Gospel.  Knowing what we are wanting to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it is vital for us to select the right tools for the job.  Buying the wrong tool is expensive and frustrating and can sometimes cause us to try to do something we don’t need to be doing.  These three principles can help us look at our existing buildings, plans for renovations and new building projects and plan to build growth into our buildings.