I’ve been thinking about the "focus" of most churches. "What do we say that our focus is and what is our actual focus?" This has been the question in my mind. The answer is somewhat frightening. Most church organizations(and I can’t give you a statistic on this but I would guess it to be close to 98% of us) put most of their energy into their worship service for the week. That’s been the norm for so many years that we don’t even notice it. "Did you go to church last week" or "I missed you at church" usually means that you weren’t in the Sunday service. My question is "Should the Sunday service be the largest focus of our ministry?"
In today’s world everything is about "the draw": What do you have that will attract people to your organization? Advertisement. We’ve learned it well from Wall Street. The way to sell a product is to package it in an attractive way. Give it glitz, shine, and make sure that it’s cutting edge. The church has adapted this concept in a big way. The only question for most ministries is "What do we add the glitz to?" The easiest answer is to gloss up the most group oriented activity that we have. Sunday worship. Turn on the lights, increase the multimedia, make the messages into a series (like a weekly sitcom), and make sure that people hear songs that they hear on the radio. "We have to do it this way" most of us say "otherwise how are we going to draw the unchurched? They have to come here to receive the message of Christ!"
It sounds a bit silly, but it’s true. We’ve turned the worship of a holy God into a theatrical production so that people will come to our church instead of going to see a movie. The problem has been one that has built itself over the past few hundred years. It also happens to be our own fault. Years ago the body of believers drew themselves into buildings and hid from society. Oh, we said we were "reaching out to the community" but in all actuality we were building our own protective walls to hide behind. Our buildings looked different from the rest of the world so we had to have some way to "entice" people to come inside. Why? Because you can’t have a church without numbers! And the more "new converts" you convinced to join your hidden clan the better your church looked. You were successful (and in some circles you were called healthy).
Maybe it’s time to take what we call the "worship service" and turn it back into what it was really designed to be: A time when believers came together to worship God and celebrate what they had been doing in ministry all week. Now that would be different! We stop focusing on drawing everyone into "the service" and concentrate on existing in the awesome presence of God’s glory. We quit making the pastor’s message into some sacred cow that can’t be touched and we start hearing about the blessings that our lives actually are and even might be. We take time to share the hurts of our community so that all might come to healing. We read God’s Word and examine it to know it better instead of creating a series based on Ipods. The word relevance is going the way of "extreme, contemporary, and even postmodern". I just want to be a part of a church that is "REAL".
I’m not quite sure exactly what it looks like, but I sure would like to pursue it……
Andy
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