The Road Less Traveled

I've been in the ministry for a long, long time, and when I first got involved I had two directions to choose from. The road I took was the road of reinventing the church with a more contemporary style, which was, in essence, a band-aid approach; replacing pews with chairs, and hymns with choruses was really a poor substitute for what I should have been doing. What I should have been doing represents the other road. I'll call that road the road of discipleship. That is, taking young, eager believers and teaching them the ins and outs of Christianity; helping them to become mature believers, then teaching them to reproduce their lives in the lives of others

The road I chose caused me to believe that fixing the external problems in the church would lure unbelievers to the church in droves. I thought that when they saw that they didn't have to wear a suit and tie, or sing outdated hymns, that would cause them to want to attend. And while that is somewhat true (the best lies are believable lies) it avoided the real problem- dead churches. Or as someone said, "You can dress up a corpse, but it's still a corpse." All the high-tech bells and whistles and modern music won't revive a dead church.

On the other hand, a mature believer doesn't need bells and whistles. A mature believer only needs Jesus. It's like the American prisoner of war in Japan in WWII. He regularly volunteered to clean out the latrine because, he said, nobody bothered him while he was there, waist deep in human excrement. It was there, he said, that he could worship God in peace.

If that man could worship, up to his waist in sewage, I suspect he could also worship without Power Point or Media Shout or the latest chorus. I suspect he was a mature believer who somebody, at one time or another had trained in the basics of the faith, creating a foundation that did not depend on externals, but on the internal indwelling of the Holy Spirit and a rock-solid grasp of the Word- two things he didn't get from sitting in a church filled with theatre style seating. And I'm not bashing any of those external things. They're all terrific! But the hungry and hurting people of the world need more than that.

My first clue came too long ago when a group of twenty-something girls in my new members class asked why we never sang any of the old hymns. And now, after years of telling church after church that modernizing their building and their worship would fix all their problems, I now see the fallacy in that thinking. What I now see as critical to the survival of the church, or any church, is to return to the basics of teaching people the basics, or, as Vince Lambardi once said to his failing team, "Gentlemen, we're going to get back to the basics- this is a football!"

The latest "trend" in Churchworld is servant evangelism. It's a great trend! Like contemporary worship, it will go a long way to attract unbelievers to the church. But if it isn't under girded with true discipleship, it will end up as just another fad.

Find a seeker, or a new believer, and begin investing your life in them. Then teach them to go and do the same with someone else. That, my friend, will change the church. That will change the world. Too bad I didn't listen years ago when somebody told me that.