Category Archives: Churches

Comments and questions about the church from God’s perspective, the perspective of our culture and my own experience over the past 53 years.

Churches

Member Involvement and Assimilation

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Involving members in ministry is a powerful tool for assimilation of people into the body of Christ.  However, simply  involving people in ministry does not necessarily bring about the process of maturing or discipling.’  In the past I often oversimplified Paul’s observations in Ephesians 4 to mean matching up people’s talents with specific tasks or, as Paul terms it, “works of service” (Eph. 4:11-13).

To do this without an awareness of the context of the admonition within the book of Ephesians runs the risk of rendering a spiritual service into busy work.  Any given task may be a good thing to do and it may be something someone is gifted to do but that does not mean, automatically, that they are growing spiritually in the process of doing what they were gifted to do.  Context is everything.

In fact, when we consider the primary involvement passages of Romans 12:1-8, 1 Corinthians 12-13, Ephesians 4:1-16 and 1 Peter 4:7-11 they are set in a context that goes way beyond busywork as a path to spiritual maturity.  To the Roman community it was in a setting where Roman Jews were attempting to reconcile with their Gentile brothers and sisters who had filled the leadership vacuum when Claudius evicted the Jews from Rome.  In Corinth the tension was between classes in a stratified society populated by people from benefactors to slaves.

To the church in Ephesus Paul is writing within the context of understanding how we should behave after having been recipients of so great a gift as God has given to us through His Son, Jesus Christ.  To the church in Rome towards the end of the first century, Peter is challenging the Lord’s people to care for each other in times of intense persecution.

In other words, involvement in the body of Christ is more than simply taking on tasks for the sake of staying busy.  The task must be rooted in what the church is trying to do, the spiritually developmental task of the individual who is involved and the contribution the work of service makes to the body of Christ and the kingdom.

One of the most used tools today seems to be in the realm of small groups in churches and in the organic church movement.  Indeed, many of our people are looking for personal, human connections, intimacy, accountability and so much more.  But being a part of small groups just to be a part of a small group, once again, risks missing the point of the process of discipleship; i.e., hungering and thirsting for a righteousness that transforms us into the image of Christ.

This is not to diminish the value of gift assessments and small groups.  My intention is to stress the need for giving greater attention to the context in which those gifts and small groups make sense so that those points of involvement and assimilation into the body of Christ become more than glorified busywork.


Churches

Hoping To Move To The Next Level

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Moving to the next level is one of those necessary realities of life.  For example, when our girls were young I told them to stop growing up because I liked them just the way they were. “Daddy,” they would say, “I can’t help it!”  Before long they were rolling their eyes when I would insist that they stop growing up.  By the time they were teenagers they would just ignore me.  I have to admit that I finally gave up.  It would seem that they were going to continue to grow up whether or not I approved of the process.

Who would ever take a job without hoping for advancement or looking forward to the next raise?  How could anyone envision laying the foundation for a house without any intention of moving to the next level by constructing walls, plumbing the bathrooms or wiring the lights?  Why would I insist on using a typewriter when I can use a computer?

Moving to the next level is just a part of the fabric of life.  In fact, anything in life that stays the same is probably either an inanimate object or dead.  Nonetheless, we often resist the forces of change, hoping to maintain.status quo for several reasons.  First, the quote “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” makes sense when things seem to be working. The problem is that it is not necessarily a logical extension that what works today will continue to work tomorrow.  Preventive or anticipatory perspectives that allow for the fact that things will change transforms the saying to “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” to “If it isn’t broken, fix it now!”
Second, visionary thinking allows a person or organization to strategically orchestrate change rather than to be orchestrated by it.    Holding fast to core values, why not choose to use them to guide the change process rather than to react to it?  The old saying “An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure” make great sense from this perspective and is very wise.Churches often go through these crisis transitions in areas such as, for example, technology.  There is no doubt that our culture’s demand for technological innovation is insatiable.  To speak to the present generation a church is well-advised to seek out ways to adapt to these changes.  Yet, how many battles were fought over whether to go from the overhead projector to the video projection in churches across America?  In and of itself, technology is morally neutral, perfectly capable of being used for holy and righteous purposes or their opposite.  Churches can determine that a value they have is to maintain a measure of technological relevance in order to reach each transition that is occurring in our culture or they can choose to fight over each innovation in a serial fashion.

This reality plays out at so many levels.  You canot parent a teenager in the same way you parented them when they were in pre-school.  The needed changes can be anticipated, problems prevented and innovations introduces that will bring out the best based upon core values.  In churches, you cannot administrate a church of 2,000 in the same way you did when the church was 500.  The needed changes can be anticipated, problems prevented and innovations introduced that strengthen–as opposed to threatening–core values wisely chosen.