I was talking to the lead Pastor at our evening service and was offering him unsolicited (it's always unsolicited with me) advice. My basic reaction to the service, teaching, music and ambiance was 'great', but something's missing. That something was a purpose beyond the worship activity. I think evangelical churches spend so much time trying to attract congregants that they end up being too consumer or 'service' focused - what can we do for you? Why are we the best choice for you?
It seems to me that the most important element of a congregation isn't what it feeds on (the service and teaching) but what it does - I analogize it to Dogs - is the congregation a pack of show dogs, hunting dogs or guard dogs? They all need to be fed with nutritious dog food but what kind of pack are they? What is their purpose?
Purpose is important because as anyone whose ever owned a hunting dog knows, what we do is more important to us than what we consume - a hunting dog will play fetch to the point of exhaustion, and frankly so will we if we are doing what we are meant to. Without that purpose a church quickly devolves into a constant series of consumerist 'bitches', treated more like the Target than the Way.
The response I often get to this critique is very generic "well we're here to reach the lost, you know, preach the word, etc. etc.". To which I answer: "precisely how?". To me the generic response is worse than no response because it fails to define the congregation in terms that give it distinctive purpose relative to all of the other 'good' things one can be doing. Particularly when you talk about specific, well defined congregations will distinctive cultures it seems to me to make more sense to define a specific purpose than a general one. And by defining such a purpose one makes clear what members of that body do for the Kingdom on a regular basis. With that in mind I have come up with a list of what I consider to be a cool set of 'purpi' for an upscale urban congregation like mine:
1. Think tank/launch center: our church is doing lots of new things, establishing new site congregations, changing worship styles and so one. The hard thinking and planning for these activities tends to be held close to the vest with a limited number of pastors and 'good old boys' (elders). Why not define the congregation's purpose as leading this effort? It could have three core purposes: benchmarking/best practices - identifying the best of what other congregations are doing, market testing, and new site launch. The key is to make this a congregational purpose and attract all who would seek out that role to it.
2. New Media. Our Church is a very strong teaching church but it does a horrible job of leveraging all of its teaching into reusable content. The opportunity is to focus the congregation around utilizing new media to capture the best of the Church's content and spread it far and wide.
3. We Testify. The congregation is filled with people with unique and compelling stories about their faith walks. What if it was focused around telling and capturing these stories. The stories could be leveraged in combination with #2 to form a leveraged message that could be shared far and wide. In some sense it would by like the NPR living history series, but focused on a history of faith.
4. The intellectuals path back home. Our community is a rather intellectual one with lots of academics and other people who consider themselves too sophisticated for belief. In a real sense their training, expertise and culture have led them to the point where they find themselves out on the end of a limb, lost and not knowing what to do to get back home. We could focus, perhaps in combination with 3, on helping them do so.
5. "We're the Odds". Our service is filled with the misfits that don't fit in the other parts of the Church. We could turn or characteristics into a virtue - focus on pursuing different types of unique groups for fellowship. This wouldn't be focused on dysfunction but on difference for example: Scottish Highland Games reenactors, not Al Anon, not divorce recovery but midgets. (Is that politically incorrect? I don't know PC).
Anyway the point is to engage the congregation, all of us, into a grand crusade - to get all the huntin' dogs hunting. The biggest obstacle to this is the professional staff's desire for control, to make sure that everything looks good, because by engaging a lot more people in a more externally focused enterprise the 'pros' are going to lose their pinpoint control over the product - the look and feel of the service may vary more, may be less slick as people get less focused inside and more focused outside.
I don't know what the answer is, I just know that we all need a purpose bigger than ourselves and God will give us that if we ask for it.
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