I’m going to continue the series about planting Eikon Denver next week, here’s a thought for the weekend.
Recently I was reading my friend’s blog (JR Rozko)…and a blog post about the problem of church shopping and it playing into Christian consumerism. You can read that post here. He finished the post like this:
It can be argued that Christians, at least those of the evangelical persuasion and who have been shaped by modernity, shop for churches based on whether or not they “preach the gospel,” or “believe the Bible.” Therefore, these churches get evaluated based on peoples experience of attending a handful of worship services.
Conversely, younger Christians, who are more shaped by postmodernity are more inclined to shop for a church based on whether or not it is actually attempting to live out the gospel and seeking to enter the story of Scripture. The only way to evaluate a church using these criteria is to actually enter into community – to get to know, have conversations, and share life with the people who make up the community.
To me, it seems that this is not a good postmodern strategy, but is actually more in keeping with biblical faithfulness of what it means to be the church- that we want to attract people to how we live and not what we say. Some would say, “We need modern churches to reach modern people and postmodern churches to reach postmodern people.” It seems to me that this runs the risk of taking our cues from culture rather than from the gospel. Incarnation, in my estimation, is not an attempt to play by the rules of culture, but to enter into culture and subvert it with the ways of Jesus. Ok, please, your thoughts.
I really liked this discussion and responded on his blog. I’ve been thinking about it more and more since then, and thought about writing a post on it. But then I thought to myself, “Self, that’s just silly. You wrote a half-way decent response. Just post that instead and save yourself some time.”
So consider this re-posting of my comment an effort to save some time:
I think the question of church structure has to be brought up in this discussion.
The fact of the matter is that our culture shapes people in such a powerful way that pretty much everyone is going to evaluate whether they “visit again” or engage deeper with the community based on what they see in the worship service. More and more, as people are shaped in our consumeristic society, that’s how they will respond, post-modern or not. I actually think it matters very little what we say in the service to offset this fact. As the person on the stage we might say, “This service is just one expression of the wider community. We invite you to come into community with us and then decide if our community lives out what we say.” That sounds good, but practically, that’s just not how people think. They think to themselves, “based on what I just saw in this worship service and the people I’m looking at, would I want to hang out more? Did I have a good time? Did they do worship in the way that I like worship?”
Most people don’t walk in and think, “Well OK, I’m going to listen to the teaching from scripture this morning, but my real decision is whether people live it out in this community. So I’m going to be patient, I’m going to dive deeper, and I’m going to allow for the discernment of the Holy Spirit.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many people with that level of maturity when they are checking out a new church for them/their family!
For me, the real problem here is that our churches have made the Worship Service the front door to people “visiting” the community and our primary vehicle for mission…whether they intend to or not. What is it that Churchill would say? Something along the lines of, “We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.” With the church, we’ve built the church structure and that structure is now forming us.
If we make the worship service the front door, the first touch of our community, just expect people to evaluate the community based on whether they like the worship service or not. That’s how they walk into the service, shaped by culture to be a self-centered consumer, and that’s what we’re giving them to evaluate first. Not the texture of our lives, but the “event” that is the worship service.
We can’t be surprised that people church shop! That’s how the structure is built. But if we want people to engage with, experience and see the incarnated teachings of Jesus in the community and do what the writer of Hebrews says (judge a teacher/community based on how they see them living, “consider the outcome of their life”), we’re going to need a structure that’s built for that.
As it stands now, we’re built to get exactly what we’re getting.
Did you ever see my reply to your comment? For some reason it doesn’t appear to be showing on the page itself but does appear in my admin page. Weird. Anyway, here was my reply to your comment on my post…
Yup, couldn’t agree more. This is perhaps the unintended benefit of the church losing its cultural centrality. More and more, inviting someone to attend a church worship service with you will make just about as much cultural sense as inviting a straight friend to go to a gay bar with you (this is a hypothetical “you” obviously). Like it or not, increasingly, the “front door” will simply be meaningful relationships as opposed to a specific sub-cultural event like a Christian worship service. The more we try to head off this evolution of things at the pass the better in my opinion.
JR–weird. I never did see your comment.
Completely agree about meaningful relationships being the “front door” (though I feel like with what we are even talking about, the analogy “front door” is unhelpful). Which is why it’s never been more crucial to make every-day, missional life part of what it means to be a disciple and teaching people to do that. If we don’t do that, we’ll never head it off at the pass.