(Note: This blog entry is based on
the text for The One Question Church Leaders Should Never Ask Congregations They
Serve, originally shared on March 1, 2021. It was the ninety-fourth video for
our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What is the one question that church leaders
should never ask the congregations they serve? Today we will consider that, and
the one question that Church leaders should always be asking.
Sally and I have now received our second
shots of the coronavirus vaccine. So far, so good. We are grateful for all who
made this possible, and we look forward to the day when the world will have been
prepared to enter the new normal.
A new vaccine was approved over the weekend,
and the others are ramping up production. Businesses are starting to reopen,
under varying levels of safety protocols, and youth sports, one of the Church’s
chief competitors in the United States, are starting to make a provisional reappearance.
Yet, we still see people ignoring all the basic
behaviors like wearing masks, now doubled masks are recommended, washing or
sanitizing their hands, practicing social distancing, and so on. It’s still
just as one of our doctor friends said earlier in the pandemic, “I feel like
the whole class is not being allowed out for recess because our or two kids won’t
follow directions.”
We subscribed to a magazine called Group”
when I served as a pastor at a church in San Dimas. It was written for leaders
of youth groups and I remember one issue because of its cover. It was black and
with white lettering and the cover story was, “The One Question You Should
Never Ask Your Youth Group.”
That was that era’s version of “clickbait”
and I immediately turned to that article.
Like “clickbait” it took a minute to find
what that “one question” was, but I found it.
It was, “What do you want to do?”
It was a breath of fresh air. The article encouraged youth group leaders to
be leaders, to trust the value of their education and experience and to provide
for their youth groups what they would need to be Christians now and in the
future, not necessarily what they wanted.
I suppose some youth group leaders would
need to hear that more than others.
My hero in church development, Lyle
Schaller, wrote that when most churches think of the youth group leader that
they need they think that it should be someone young. Someone hip and relatable
to the youth. Someone with whom the youth, generally high school youth, could
relate. Someone who could live on pizza and Mountain Dew (😊). Someone who can speak young people’s
language, even if it’s just a beat or two behind.
Schaller said that this was not the case.
The best youth group leaders are parents, or recent parents, of teenagers. I
think that that is because they have some experience in youth leadership, know that
they won’t necessarily be liked (and don’t need to be) and know they won’t’ be considered
hip by most of the kids in their group and are OK with that. They know, though,
that they will be respected even if that’s only in the future, and that they
will contribute to people’s lives at a crucial time in their development.
I think that a similar article could be
written about leadership in the church in general. What is the one question a
church leader should never ask the congregations they serve? “What do you want
to do?”
What congregations need are church leaders
who will lead, who will trust their education and experience (whatever their
age) to provide their congregations with what they need, not necessarily what
they want.
My best teachers and professors, and all
those without formal titles from whom I learned, were not necessarily my
favorites. The most important things to know often are the most difficult to
learn. Leaders know that.
In isn’t just youth groups, but whole
churches, who have learned that church membership is a product of the free
market. Churches have been so desperate to grow and attract the “right” demographic
that they have engaged in Entertainment Evangelism (yes, that’s a thing), the
homogeneous unit principle (ministry to the right birds because “birds of a
feather flock together”), “dumbing down” the worship service itself, removing
anything negative or possibly offensive (like the cross), and whatever else
will produce the numbers and “success” that is self-validating and praised by
the world.
This has produced a generation of people who
expect the church to entertain them, to pander to their felt needs, to provide
a comfortable community of people with their same values and lifestyles. When
they are bored, feel challenged, or when they feel they are no longer made to
feel that they are the center of the world just the way they are, then they feel
justified in moving on.
When people go looking for a church, they
often say that they are “shopping for a new church.” One of my colleagues said
that when people visited the churches he served and said they were “shopping
for a new church”, he wanted to say, “Well, I hope you find a bargain”. The greatest
benefit for the least cost, that’s the Church as an social exchange.
I once was at a workshop at the Crystal
Cathedral in Garden Grove in its hay-day and had a red-faced argument (well,
the other guy was red-faced) with a guy who had been a Lutheran Church-Missouri
Synod pastor but had joined the staff of the Crystal Cathedral. He insisted
that, if the gospel was correctly presented, it should not offend anybody.
I’m pretty sure that Jesus offended a lot of
people, that the words “repent and believe in the good news”, among the first
words of Jesus as he began his public ministry, offend some people.
I’m pretty sure that our proclamation that
there is only one God offends some people.
And I’m pretty sure that, if they thought
about it, the cross would offend some people, especially the one that depicts
Jesus on it. As I mentioned last time, the cross was deeply offensive to the
larger culture when the Christian movement began. The cross was a punishment
for the worst of the worst, for crimes like treason, and for those of which the
Roman Empire wanted to make an example. And Christians believed that the one
God had come to live among mortals and died on one.
That was a disgrace, not a religion, as far
as the Empire was concerned.
I remember reading some time ago that we
have not found the remains of a single church built in a cross shape or with a
cross in it until the third century.
Today, as Fr. Nicky Gumbel has said, it
would like us wearing little electric chairs around our necks.
Yet, we in effect, and sometimes literally,
asked our congregations, “What do you want to do?” for so long that we no
longer have anything real, or transformational to offer.
That was, in fact, the model that was taught
when I was in seminary: the pastor as enabler. Our role was not to lead, but to
enable the leadership of the members of the congregation. The problem was that when
we ask people what they want to do, then we no longer have a church.
The one question (well, maybe two) that we should
be asking our congregations is, “What is the Holy Spirit calling us as a congregation
to do, and how have we been gifted to do it?”
Most of us would be embarrassed to be asked
that question because we think we should have an answer, but the truth be told,
we don’t. Any spiritual explanation is difficult in our materialist culture
because it cannot be defended with a material proof, and we have accepted that
as meaning there is no proof.
Most people would respond with a stunned
expression and would mutter something vague about just loving everybody or
serving the community, because that’s all they have been told.
Or it’s the words we use to describe what we
want to do to make out desires sound more religious.
I don’t think very many would have any idea
of what the Holy Spirit is, or what it does. Or its power.
Who are we as a church?
Do we have any mechanism for proclaiming the
message, repent and believe in the good news, or for following up with those
who respond positively? At all?
How will we live into a better future?
We will only be able to answer the only
questions worth asking when we have a mechanism for confidently proclaiming the
message and for following up with those who respond positively.
We will move away from asking “What is a
church supposed to do?” and imitate what other churches have done. We will no
longer ask “What do people inside or outside our church expect our church to
do?” and will ask, “What has the Holy Spirit called and empowered us to be in
order to become a vibrant Christian community?”
Church leaders do not serve their
congregation’s wants; they serve their needs.
They do not work for a congregation, work
for God.
Church leaders are not servants of the
congregation, doing what the congregation says. They are servants of God, doing
what God has called, equipped, and sent them to do by doing what God says.
Church leaders are not family chaplains;
they are servants of God in the Body of Christ at one particular location.
Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth, the
Corinthians, a church located in a port city with a lot of trouble with its
behavior and need for repentance, the 1st letter, the 3rd
chapter, starting at the 1st verse:
*1 Corinthians
3:1-9
There are lots of way to grow churches. Most
of them are the equivalent of forced feeding with chemical fertilizers.
But there is only one way that people come
to Christ and become Christians, only one way that the Body of Christ grows and
reproduces, and that is through God’s action in the work of the Holy Spirit.
May the work of God ever flow to make our churches real, may we ever seek God’s work in movement of the Holy Spirit, and may that living water be the only answer to the question of what we as the Body of Christ, are to do, for it is God that gives the growth. And therefore, we can say that we belong to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment