Oklahoma clergy have been assigned to read “Restoring Methodism“ by Drs. Molly & James Scott in preparation for a retreat with them in late September. Given that I was previously from a different area of the country, I happen to have attended the Scotts’ seminar before and am familiar with their arguments and recommendations.

In re-reading the book during some idle moments today, I noted one argument that I’m unsure is valid.

On page 31, the Scotts write about why it is important to restore Methodism to its roots and originating practices:

Restoration is the answer because it is unthinkable that God would abandon the institutionalized churches in America, as they compromise the vast majority – up to 90% – of the Christians in this country.

I am unsure this as “unthinkable.” God has done this before.  God had abandoned the Chosen People to decades of attrition (the 40 years post-Exodus), disowned the stubborn nations (Jeremiah 3:8), and allowed its assimilation into other cultures (Pharisaic Judaism v. Roman Hellenism).  God also allowed the destruction of the Temple and the Jews found much meaning and refocus in the Diaspora that they wouldn’t likely have found otherwise.

God has done this before, taken away what we thought was “too big to fail.”  Can we really dismiss the horrifying thought that the Church as an institution has a time limit as well?

Perhaps the Scotts meant that numerical decline is not in God’s plan for the Church. That’s a valid interpretation, I think.  But Jesus had multitudes following him, was an icon for church growth…but after his hard sermons, he was left with 12. Failure, right?

Further, the Scotts counter their own argument themselves on page 53:

It was not unusual for Mr. Wesley to examine a Society with 800 members and leave them with 400 members.

So it is OK for the institutional church to shrink but not be destroyed? But isn’t restoring Methodism about reversing the shrinking trend? Huh.

To be clear, I’m not advocating a burn-it-down-and-start-over reform…this blog would be called “Reformatting Christianity” if I did. I’m as committed to righting the institutional church as the next pastor.

But I do have to assume that it could be God’s plan that the church burn to the ground and be risen from the ashes in a fiery Phoenix. And I have to wonder how best I could be an instrument of grace in the interim.

God is sovereign. Let’s not place anything (even the unthinkable) beyond God’s possibilities, and seek instead to be instruments of God’s grace no matter what may come next.

Thoughts?

One of the phenomenon that I didn’t plan to study but has increasingly become a part of the HX critique is Wal-Mart churches: churches that spawn multiple campuses that are near-clones of itself.  Now that I’m pastoring in the Plains, Lifechurch.tv is all around me: three of its 12 campuses are within an hour’s drive of me.  The pastor is simulcast via digital streaming or DVD to all the campuses.  While each have their own local flair/personality, the pastoral headquarters operates all the satellites…much like Wal-mart headquarters operates all its Wal-mart stores that drive the smaller chains out of business by its well-honed machinery.

Wal-mart Churches are churches with multiple locations, like a franchise.

In our conversations, we’ve focused on what happens when a big well-financed church moves into a rural area, as well as the dangers of planting Wal-mart churches in gated communities, but so far I’ve left out UM churches either by my own bias or lack of material to comment on.

Until now.  Rev. Adam Hamilton is the pastor of the largest UM congregation with several satellite campuses and an online campus (he is also a Methoblogger along with his online associate pastor…impressive).  However great Adam is for theological conversation and the church, I felt a deep sense of foreboding when I read Adam’s eNote this past week:

Resurrection Blue Springs?  

Two months ago the leadership of North Springs United Methodist Church in Blue Springs, Missouri (located on the north side of I-70 between 7 Hwy and Adams’ Dairy Parkway) contacted our church to ask if we would have any interest in allowing their church to become a campus of The Church of the Resurrection like Resurrection West and Resurrection Downtown. They are an 18-year-old congregation with about 150 committed members who have been unable to grow and who have struggled to become the church they hoped to become when they began.

Further conversations with the District Superintendent, the head of Congregational Development for Missouri, and others convinced us that the Missouri Annual Conference and its bishop supported this idea. We explored the demographics of the community, looked at the debt obligations on its current building, sought to understand what would be involved in adopting this congregation, and we considered the potential of this location, building and people as a new campus of Resurrection. Recently the North Spring’s Church Council voted unanimously in favor of this idea. Last week our Church Council voted unanimously in favor of moving forward with further conversations.

In a few weeks ahead, I’ll share more about this with you during weekend worship and invite you to vote on this proposal.

Let’s be clear: these campuses clearly lead people to a relationship with the Body of Christ. I’m not doubting the integrity of the pastoral or lay leadership of these campuses.  I’m not critiquing the ends; I’m fearful of the means and what this might mean for the kingdom.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this…

What happens if we put the pieces on the table without any religious terms?

• A struggling (or at least flat in growth) entity decides they are unable to compete in their area of specialty
• Facing extinction or reduced viability, they contact a larger, more established corporate entity and offer to be absorbed
• The corporate entity accepts and absorbs the initial entity into the whole, retaining some local customs but decisions ultimately come from the corporate head.

In short, this local congregation has decided to bring in the creative talent of a corporate church to (presumably) lead its worship. Resurrection has a fantastic staff and tightly crafted message and (since they have multiple locations) they already know how to bottle, transport, pop open and enjoy.  So from the small church’s perspective, why not get really good worship in their space that might jump-start their community?

I would posit this is a connectional church phenomenon (ie. Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, etc).  There’s an attraction to retaining a United Methodist identity.  Thus, outsourcing the worship message to another UM church or even becoming a satellite of a UM church will most likely be a connectional-church phenomenon rather than a non-denom outsourcing to Willowcreek or something.

I could see a lot more of this happening as local churches that struggle to grow and yet have great ministries decide to focus their energy on their active ministries and outsource their worship to a corporate church. I’m not saying this is going to happen with Blue Springs/Resurrection, but I wonder what might happen if more churches decide to turn their worship, the heart of the Body of Christ, over to the professionals (who do GREAT worship, let’s not kid ourselves, but disturbing nonetheless).

Resistance may be Futile.

I can see the temptation. I’m a clergyperson who crafts worship, curriculum, and ministry every week and I wonder how I would respond if we did this.  If we gave over our worship time to a corporate church (in whole or part), then look at the benefits:

• I could spend more time doing discipleship ministries (my primary interest) and less time preaching/leading worship. More time = more effective.
• The preaching would be less personal in message but more tightly crafted by fantastic worship leaders.
• People already watch TV all the time, they can clearly be mezmorized by handle a streamed message.
• The parish can accept ministers with more gifts in discipleship/congregational growth rather than simply great preachers/worship leaders.

So yes, I can see the temptation to do this. The benefits are clear.  But what might the concerns be?  Since this is my first pass at it, I don’t have any data to call on for support, but there’s a few inklings that I have on my heart:

• Dude, you just outsourced the primary thing that separates the church from the world: worship of Jesus Christ. Outsourcing the theological task just doesn’t seem right to me, no matter how great the product is you are buying.
• I can see more denominational splintering as multiple churches align themselves with various charismatic preachers, so in one town you have the Adam Hamilton UM church and the Tom Harrison UM church and so on.  These sort of alliances can only spell more schizmatic force and the temptation to influence the political process.
• Further marginalization of ethnic preachers and women. Why have the guy who talks funny or the woman when you could have a white male preacher in a bottle?  Let’s face it: the super-majority of  megachurches have white male pastors!  While Resurrection has female campus ministers to offer worship leadership, I could see this happen as congregations vote to marginalize their pastors’ leadership and ability to craft worship.

I love it when two divergent views appear on my radar within seconds of each other.

Earlier this week Bishop Will Willimon posted an article that equated clergy effectiveness with numerical growth. He was pushing-back against clergy who protest the emphasis on numerical growth in conference reports about church effectiveness, as well as providing support for church growth as a standard for measuring whether a clergyperson should be reappointed.

How do we Methodists define effective clergy? We do it with one word: growth. Effective clergy know how to grow the church in its membership, witness and mission.
…
Wesley sent pastors to those areas where, in his estimate, there were the most souls to be saved. He told his traveling preachers not just that they ought to read, but also put a number on it: at least five hours a day. Wesley also kept a close eye (with charts in the annual “Minutes”) on how much money was collected each year — for Kingswood School, for new preaching houses, for the pension fund, for operating expenses. The annual conference was invented, not just as opportunity for worship and fellowship, but mostly for the purpose of everyone rendering account and confessing their numbers.

Read the whole article as Willimon seeks to legitimize number-counting by presenting its history in the UMC.

At nearly the same time as I read this article, my facebook friend LBH linked to an excerpt from a book by Graham Power “Transform Your Work Life” that has this provocative nugget:

Where is the best place to ‘shine your light’ and be ‘the salt of the earth’ (Matt 5:13–15)? You need to shine your light where it is dark of course! For many years I made the mistake of thinking that a church’s success is measured by its seating capacity (how many people are in worship on a Sunday). The truth is that a church’s salt, its real worth, is measured by its sending capacity. God does not care how big the ‘salt shaker’ is, rather what God is concerned about is how much salt is shaken from the salt shaker, and how much light the church shines in the darkest places of society.

Let me ask you another question, if your church were to close its doors this week, who would notice that you are not in ministry any longer? Of course the members who worship in your congregation would care, but would the homeless in your area notice? Would the hungry and the abused of your society realise that you are not operating anymore? Would your closure have an impact on the sick and the elderly people in your community? How about the schools and businesses in your community; would they notice that you are no longer ministering in the community?

When Jesus said that He would build his church and the gates of hell would not overpower it (Matt 16:18), there was a clear assumption that He builds his church at the gates of hell! One of the most loving things we can do with the church is to send it to hell. We need to find the places of suffering, brokenness and need, and be the church in those places so that Jesus can build his church there.

Wow. Boom.

So which of those do you see as more effective? A church that fills its pews with numbers? Or a church that empties them in service to God and neighbor?

Of course, this type of conversation quickly turns to ridicule as people say that of course both are important.  The number-aficionados quickly say either (1) missions leads to growth or (2) only one of the above is countable and thus comparable to other churches.  Both are true but one is troubling.

I wrote the following section before but it bears repeating.  Bryan Stone, a professor at Boston University School of Theology, expands on this debate in his book Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness.

When the mission of the church becomes a mission of numerical growth, quantitative influence, and geographical spread, evangelism is easily reduced to whatever means, method, or gimmick will facilitate that mission. Conversion then becomes a lowest common denominator decision or experience that will allow a church, without too much embarrassment, to claim an individual as its own. (page 272)

The problem for church leaders, of course, is how to gauge “success” without playing the numbers game. Stone continues with something of value to us at Hacking Christianity:

Evangelism can be measured by how fully inclusive is our “reach” and how thoroughly we refuse to allow that “reach” to be domesticated by the political boundaries and economic disciplines of the [world]…the measure of Christian evangelistic reach is its openness and hospitality to the poor, the stranger, and the socially ostracized. (pp. 273-274)

But of course, evangelistic openness is not quantitatively evaluated, and church growth with Gospel integrity lacks a checkbox in any church report.  Numbers are absolutely not evidence of fruits of the spirit.  I could put on a dog and pony show with laser lights and Justin Bieber as the singer and my numbers would go up as fast as my integrity to the Gospel goes down. Conversely, I could close the church doors and say that we ought to go out and help our neighbors one Sunday morning and there’s not a single place for that type of outreach on my conference reports. None.

This post is another attempt to parallel Christian themes with Science Fiction themes for hopefully relevant conversation among nerds.

Star Wars is coming out with another MMO game in the near future…I might need a bib to catch the drool. But more interesting than the actual game is how it deals with the tension between good and evil, Jedi and Sith, particularly in the ways that the Sith critique the Jedi…with some parallels for biblical evangelism methods, believe it or not.

Table of Contents:

1. Jedi Intellectualism of using the intellect to spread the Gospel
2. Sith Emotionalism of using emotional means to the Gospel ends
3. Force Awareness of using attractional power to embody the Gospel

Read on for more!

Evangelism #1 – Jedi Intellectualism

Student v. Teacher

Here’s an interview with one of the game’s designers, with this great nugget critiquing the Jedi’s teaching pedagogy:

“If you give brash young people almost god-like powers and ask them to behave… you’re asking for problems. You’re dealing with someone in their early twenties, who has never been able to be thwarted by anything, and you tell them not to play with these Sith artifacts—of course they’re going to think they can handle it.”

Erickson leans forward to make the point. “You’re training children to deal with this power, and then demanding them to be incorruptible, and holding them to a standard that we don’t even ask from any of our own societies. We looked at these issues and said, ‘We could come up with an entire thematic run with this.’”

The Sith critique of the Jedi training has three parts:

1. Give Jedi Apprentices immense power
2. Demand Jedi Apprentices be incorruptible
3. Demand that Jedi Apprentices deny their emotions

When using the bible for evangelism, often we do something similar to the Jedi:

1. Give students a Bible, which is a source of immense power in argument and lifestyle conversations.
2. Demand students be incorruptible to doubt and do not let doubt interfere with their biblical evangelism.
3. Demand students deny emotions that don’t help spread the gospel.

Evangelism #2 – Sith Emotionalism

The Force Unleashed

Contrast this with the Dark Side pedagogy (from the same interview)

“What the Jedi call the Dark Side, and what came to be known as the Dark Side, these people believed that life should be about emotion. They believed you should be unrestrained, that the galaxy wants us to love and lust and kill and make art and cry and dream…” he trails off. I imagine him sitting on a throne, lightsaber under his right hand. This conversation started as two Star Wars fans chatting about the expanded universe, but now I’m starting to understand the draw of the Sith.

The Sith version of its pedagogy could have three parts too:

1. Give Sith Apprentices immense power
2. Demand Sith Apprentices be relentless and unfettered in their expression of that power.
3. Demand Sith Apprentices embrace their emotions to their fullest extreme.

I sense a great disturbance in the Force…

Ever have those massive projects that you wish you could undertake?  Like take a few months off work and family and be able to really tackle an issue, crunch the data….with the knowledge and enthusiasm to accomplish it?  With the world’s ever-increasing desire for good data amidst the tumult, I find myself wishing someone could do a few projects or pay me to do them.


This is, of course, disregarding solving world problems and feeding the hungry.  I’m talking about sheer data compilation and presentation of churchy stuff.

So, here we go: If I had unlimited time and unlimited resources to research churchy phenomenon, here’s three I would do.

Short version:

1. Input church attendees’ addresses into Google Earth for a zoomable tool that can examine church membership trends.
2. Correlate church growth with city/town growth for social demographic results
3. Map out the impact of the Walk to Emmaus community on local church attendance.

Long version:

1. I would map out every member of various churches in a city or town onto Google Earth.  From there we could zoom, color-code membership (we’ll put the Baptists in pink for fun), and explore social phenomenon such as if all the Methodists really live in the same neighborhoods.  This would be an immensely valuable tool for examining the impact of church membership and the real-time demographics of area churches.  It would be impossible to get such data (privacy concerns) but a cool tool nonetheless.
2. I would correlate church growth numbers and statistics with the growth of the town/city over the past 100 years.  During times of economic insecurity, did the Methodists grow?  During times of boom years, did Prosperity Gospel churches grow?  When adding on a subdivision of lower-class houses, did church attendance boom?  I think examining how societal shifts and church growth shifts correlate would be fascinating for discussion.
3. I would map out the church attendance and dedication of every person who goes on the Walk to Emmaus spiritual retreat.  Contrary to what you may think of a progressive seminary-trained pastor, I’ve been on the Walk to Emmaus, served several retreats in various capacities, and am about to give my first Talk.  So I’m an Insider looking in, not an external critic.  The expressed purpose of the Walk is:
   

   The Walk to Emmaus is a spiritual renewal program intended to strengthen the local church through the development of Christian disciples and leaders.

   The Emmaus community is sustained by “fourth day” monthly meetings of the attendees.  At one vividly-remembered meeting that I attended, a member said he had to stop attending his local UM church because he didn’t get the spiritual experience from it that he did from a monthly fourth-day meeting.  He later switched to a Pentecostal congregation.  I’ve heard this story echoed by other pastors who see members either (a) become more involved, or (b) leave the church after an Emmaus weekend. 

   While that is anecdotal, the memory spurs me to want to get the data on whether Emmaus actually (statistically) increases church involvement and whether participants self-profess an increase in commitment to local church.  I would have to wait until I see the data to actually offer criticism beyond anecdotes.

There ya go: three huuuuuge data projects that I think would be of great benefit if the data was compiled and presented in a helpful manner.

Thoughts?

Looking through my Google Reader, I’ve noticed a spike in stories on multi-site churches, or churches that open new campuses operated by the originating church.  They are not a new phenomenon, but have taken on a new form in recent years as the internet allows one pastor to be several places at once via telecast.

So take this as a gateway topic, ie. a blog post where people can share resources and opinions and we can base future blog posts off of this one.

We’ve talked about multi-site churches previously here at HX!

• Walmart Church Devours Small Churches – notes on how well-financed and trained multi-site campuses siphon from other churches.
• Saddleback’s Gated Church Community – notes on how new sites are directed towards closed groups, even those *not* in gated communities!

Here’s a linkdump from my GReader to bring more discussion!

• A schismatic Presby church in Tulsa plans a new site – interesting to note that the site of the church plant will also be sold to local businesses to create a community.  
• A USA Today article (h/t @gavoweb) on the multi-site phenomenon struck me when it said “even if people are just watching a preacher on a screen”…I wonder if embracing preaching as televised edutainment is a problem…
• Jenny Smith has notes from Rick Warren, one point which I would contest.  Warren claims moving from large gatherings to small groups, from large church meccas to multi-site parishes, is decentralization.  I disagree because the theological agenda still comes from the head…Rick Warren.
• Mark Driscoll has five reasons why multi-site is awesome (and he’s pledged 100 sites of Mars Hill).

Here’s the definition of Wal-marting.  It is my contention that it is an accurate label to give multi-site churches, as I’ve said previously. Let me know if you see some parallels to the multi-site model.

The Wal-Mart business model includes: marketing to a broad “family” demographic that includes rural as well as urban, ethnic minorities as well as mainstream, people without a higher level education, lower- or working-class consumers, as well as the middle-class; one-stop shopping based on a very large selection of goods and services; the use of intense price competition and high-technology inventory management to stimulate and satisfy end-user demand; extreme economies of scale based on big-box delivery of consumables; aggressive supply-chain management that requires producers to reduce their costs significantly to find an outlet for their goods; employment of store workers for low wages, few benefits, and little job security to reduce overhead.

Thoughts or other links?  Post them below or start conversation on this topic.

I know that blog posts about the Church and online media/phenomenon don’t get many replies here, but I post them anyways because that’s an area I’m interested in.

So here’s Internet theorist Clay Shirky (remember him from the What the Church can Learn from Wikipedia series?) talking about the the effect of amateurization and what institutions can do to respond to it…and *I* think it has parallels in the church.  Check out the video and read specific quotes after the jump:

Here’s a striking quote for me. Shirky is talking about the advance of online media options and interaction, but I think it parallels the church too:

When you open up new capability, then the average quality decreases. But that happened with the printing press. Prior to the printing press, the only written works which were obsessively copied were Plato, Aristotle, [hand]-copied by monks. When the printing press came along, the quality of the average book actually fell because now lots of people could be writers. So this is the absolutely normal pattern for new media….the way you get out of that is if the increase in abundance is so enormous that the absolute amount of good stuff increases.

[Thus I believe] we are living through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.

In short, mass amateurization of an industry certainly reduces the quality of the industry (think blogger ethics v. journalism standards), but because it’s en masse the amount of good stuff increases.  So while any idiot with a keyboard can post something online, there are brilliant people who can now reflect online too.  So while the overall quality of the written word has gone down in recent years thanks to txting, IM, and blogs…the sheer amount of good contributions have gone up…if you can wade through the garbage, that is!

I see elements of this in the Church today:

• Institutional Church v. Dime-a-dozen church startups - The institutional church’s membership levels have gone down, while non-denominational churches have popped up a hundredfold.  These churches lack tradition, established avenues of accountability, and indeed some are just tax havens in Westboro, KS.  So while institutional churches have decreased,  I suspect the absolute amount of people experiencing the Christian tradition has increased.
• Trained Clergy v. passionate local pastors – The number of seminary-trained professional clergy has gone down, while the number of local church pastors has gone up.  Local church pastors may be gifted but don’t have the full measure of church tradition and theological training under their belts.  But while seminary-educated clergy has decreased,  I suspect the absolute amount of people experiencing passionate pastoral leadership has increased.
• Local Church Discipleship v. loosely affiliated groups – On a local-church level, attendance in traditional church discipleship structures has decreased, while impromptu and sideline ministry groups has increased.  Outside of the general church structure are often groups of people that wouldn’t call themselves a group but they are doing ministry and discipleship regardless.  So while supervised, accountable discipleship has decreased, I suspect the absolute amount of people experiencing diverse reflections on their spiritual growth has increased.

In short, the Church is also reeling from the effect of mass amateurization.  At the denominational, ecclesiastical, and local church level, the rising tide of “amateur” embodiments threatens the viability of the institutional church.

Thus the question lingers…

• Will we go the way of the newspapers and struggle to survive in the face of a changing world that values ease of access above all else?  
• Or will we adapt and thrive, seeking out the best ways to use amateur input and shepherd the power and conviction through our difficulties?

More tomorrow; what are your thoughts today?

A bad.hack (read more about it here) is a manipulation of a Christian system either using illicit means to achieve an end, or achieving goals that leave the system worse off and less open than before. Read on for the hack!

Hope you have your tissues handy.  Northpoint Church has a terrible problem of being a mega-church but having only one entrance/exit to their location.  Their pastor Andy Stanley outlines the problem:

Are you tired of sitting in the parking lot for twenty minutes after church?

Do you hesitate to invite friends to church because of the complexity of getting on and off our campus?

Have you ever skipped the closing song to beat the crowds to lunch?

I’m teary.  I wish there was something they could do.

Oh, there is.

Build a $5 million dollar bridge to create a second entrance!

Well, if you answered “Yes” to any of those questions, we have some great news for you. We are about to start construction on a bridge that will connect our campus to Old Milton Parkway.

Really?  $5 million of church dollars for a bridge that will save everyone 20-30 minutes and allow the church to “grow to capacity?”  Really?

While I like to hulk-smash things when I hear of churches spending money on infrastructure rather than helping other people who are dying, we all have different understandings of the gospel and we all have different roles to play.  Fair enough and we trust in God that we are following roles faithfully and thoughtfully, diverse as they are.

But their rationale is that it is a missional value to build this bridge.  What?  Really.

If our mission is to be a church thatʼs perfectly designed for the people who already attend, then we donʼt need a bridge. But if we want to continue to be a church unchurched people love to attend, then yes, itʼs worth it. From my perspective, this is not a “nice to have” option. Honestly, I donʼt want to raise money for, or give money to, something thatʼs not mission critical. I believe creating a second access point allows us to stay on mission. That is why weʼve been working on this for nine years.

Building a bridge for the purposes of allowing more suburban people to get to church cannot be legitimately defended as a missional value.

First, the expansion is for the purposes of allowing more people to worship in their church.  A fine decision, I’m not against creating new and better avenues (in this case, literally!) for people to worship, but look at their rationale (PDF):

Currently, we can seat 4,800 people in one service using both auditoriums. But our infrastructure only allows us to comfortably accommodate around 3,500 people. Once we pass the 3,500 mark, the traffic becomes exponentially unbearable. A second access point will allow us to accommodate 1,000 additional people at 9:00 and 11:00, achieving maximum use of our existing facility.

So the problem isn’t getting more people in, it’s getting 30% more people into a particular worship service time slot that is convenient.  I would think a truly missional decision would be one of the following:

• For people in the 9am and 11am service to attend the 12:45pm service (which isn’t mentioned so it probably doesn’t have the traffic problems) or to begin an evening worship service.  But that would be inconvenient for people to change their schedules, wouldn’t it?
• For the congregation to build and move to another campus.  But a longer commute outside of the suburb would be inconvenient, wouldn’t it?  
• For people to carpool or drive in together (and a suburban megachurch with $5mil to burn probably has a lotta 2-person SUVs).  But asking people to carpool would be inconvenient, wouldn’t it?

I realize it is easy to criticize a church decision from an armchair, or even question the idea to build a 4,800 seat capacity with only a 3,500 parking lot from an armchair, but really the above are missional responses that don’t involve building a $5 million dollar bridge but do involve, oh, sacrifice.

Second, the “missional” value of bringing in more people is conflicting with the missional cost of building the bridge to the surrounding community.

This bridge will span 1,000 feet of flood plain and wetlands. It will be three lanes wide and include a pedestrian walkway. So, donʼt think cute wooden bridge. Think Haynes Bridge.

This means their decision helps people get to their attractional worship space, but actually does harm to the surrounding communities.  How is that a missional value?

Finally, I think a commenter at Thomas’s Everyday Liturgy blog put it best:

I heard that $1 can provide a 3rd world person clean water for an entire year. So instead of helping 5 million people GET water, they are helping 500 or so people AVOID it?

Well said.

I know there’s bleedings of anti-mega-churches in this post and that’s stereotypical of me.  Stereotypes are offensive because they lump people into small categories and don’t describe the individuals therein.  But if the stereotype of megachurch-goers is that they are individualistic and come for convenience rather than the cost of discipleship, and that megachurch-leaders will bend over backwards to accomodate them…then this project does nothing to shatter that stereotype.

Thoughts?

FAIL.

A few months back, to much fanfare, Lifechurch.tv launched a free video teaching website which could beam preachers and teachers’ videos directly into your living room to be digested alone or with a small group.  The expressed purposes of the VideoTeaching.com website were fourfold but one in particular stood out to me:

Develop your ministry.
You might be bi-vocational or maybe you’re planting a church. Either way, video teaching allows you put more energy into reaching your community by freeing you from weekly message preparation.

In other words, by replacing the custom message crafted by a church leader with a cookie-cutter one (although doubtless a great cookie), then church is good.  It’s ok if the church leadership is busy…just offer them a great message from a far-away pastor who knows exactly what you need.

I know I’m being snarky, but in all seriousness, I worry about reliance on broadcast to replace the personal nature of pastoral ministry.  It’s like people are coming for a meal and get the same thing wherever they go.  That’s the beauty of fast food franchises like McDonalds: you get the exact same food wherever you go.  It is comforting, but its not that great for you.

I fear this is the beginning of franchise churches: ones that offer the same stump message regardless of who is receiving it.  I get annoyed by this from preachers on a preaching circuit too.  As much as I like Shane Clayborne and Tony Campolo, in most of their preaching engagements they rely on the same schtick.  It’s a good sermon, it inspires the soul, but it gets repetitive if you’ve seen them twice.

I love the rest of Andrew’s posts, but this next-to-last one rubbed me the wrong way.  It’s one thing to encourage bottom-up groups (as I mused about in What the Church Can Learn from Wikipedia); it’s another to have bottom-up meetings with a top-down message crafted by a person thrice or more removed from their situation.  While Andrew undoubtedly was focusing on a single church adding another service, which is a more personal connection that I applaud, the application of that approach leads to a slippery slope towards franchise churches that get the same message beamed to them every week from on high.

I guess I’m struggling with how grassroots churches can work with a top-down broadcast medium.  I worry that if more and more churches turn to the ease of boxed videos like VideoTeaching.com, if more and more mega-churches create tentacles like WalMart churches, then Christianity becomes a franchise and christians seeking room to grow become disenfranchised.

While one can argue that preaching and even the bible are top-down broadcast mediums, they are understood as more personal than a third party’s opinion.  Even guest preachers, if they are good, are prepped beforehand by the church’s pastor or laity on their congregation’s struggles.  And if you think convincing a board on a local church to try a new ministry is hard, try doing it to a corporate church board.

This is one of those posts where I don’t have a solution at the end.  I’m just worried for the future when ease of use of homogenous materials becomes seductive, when small groups wrestle with sermons thrice-removed from their context, and when eight churches in an area are plants from one mega-church.  If it has happened to food chains, banks, and other industries, we must be mindful of it happening to churches too.  We don’t need more homogenous outreach…it works and is effective (like franchises), but I fear on a large scale that franchised outreach leads to more disenfranchised Christians than it inspires.

Thoughts?

Last week the English language surpassed 1 million words.  While we want to blame the internet, the 1 millionth word was “web 2.0″…which is pretty old term in internet-speak. 

I suspect the 2 millionth word will come much quicker.  In a column in the Tulsa World on June 21st, Michael Overall writes that we now have multiple words or variations of words to describe one specific meaning.  For instance, high English “novice” gets shorted to contemporary English’s “newbie” gets shortened to text-friendly “n00b”.  There.  Now we have three words to describe one subject, and three different groups (perhaps even generations) which will use them.

Overall’s point is that the typical high school dropout recognizes 30,000 words, Rhodes scholars recognize 50,000 words, and the rest of us fall in-between.  But with the growing number of words, when will we get to the point where we are no longer able to communicate with each other because we use completely different vocabularies?

Likewise, the number of Christian denominations grows by an estimated 260 per year, and there are an estimated 40,000 denominations today.  While some lament the body of Christ being sliced up in this way, competing in inter-necine ways for believers, perhaps just as language is diffusing our experience of God is also necessarily diffusing so different groups can experience God in their language and systems of meaning.

But are we growing in understanding of God or dispersing our experience into a million different slices, not all recognizable to the other?  At what point might denominations become completely anathema to each other as their language and systems are unrecognizeable to one another?  Or has it already happened?

No real answer, just a musing.  But there’s an important point to be made that Overall missed in his article.  He said that Shakespeare used 31,534 words in his plays and laments, and laments that people do not read them anymore and get the breadth of human language.  But it is more important than just simple breadth: Shakespeare coined his own terms, created his own words, and we are using them today. 

Today perhaps we are Shakespeare 2.0, and we are creating new experiences of God and calling God by new or renewed words that will benefit all of humankind.  Perhaps in an uncoordinated way we are assembling a new work and body of Christ, fragmented as it may be, that is beautiful and evocative in its expression and embodiment. We will use old words and new words, but perhaps together we are creating a body of work and dreams that will inspire people down the road.

Thoughts?


NOTE: ORLY is internet-speak for “Oh really?”  You are welcome.