This
is something long overdue. I’d
temporarily set aside doing blogs because of the continuing problem of
paralysis in my hand due to the stroke I suffered on April 20, 2008. In fact
the last blog I wrote was January 22nd of this year and coincidentally it was
similarly themed to this. I’m continuing on with the subject of churches, church
growth, and evangelism and I’m trying to kind of combine those topics into one
blog and look at them as though they were one subject, which I believe they
are. At the very least the topics are interrelated.
Another
thing that’s different about this blog is that I’m approaching it from a
different way of writing it. I’m using voice transcription software called
Dragon Naturally Speaking© and this is a real challenge for me. I’m one of
those people who writes better typing as they think. In other words, my thoughts seem to flow more
easily directly from my head to my keyboard. The idea of going from my head to
my tongue is a new concept for me as a writer. I’m able to do it easily enough
as a teacher, as a lecturer, as a preacher and in general conversation but as a
writer this is a new concept for me. This is something I’m having great difficulty
teaching myself to do even with a Facebook IQ app telling me that I’m smarter
than 98% of the population with an IQ of 148, this difficulty is probably going
to be reflected in the end result of this document.
Let
me first try to define the problem as I see it. In my immediate community there
are a half a dozen or so churches whose worship services follow a very similar
format. I call this format the “Field of Dreams” format. Let me explain what I
mean by that. You remember the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams? The tagline for that movie was “if you build it they will come.”
Now
let me translate that into form and function. What the “Field of Dreams” church
is doing is creating fantastic new programs, defined by exciting emotional
worship music in a concert type venue, four color advertising with which they
anonymously flood their community. Then they sit back in their “Field of
Dreams” (buildings) and wait for the unsaved world to come to them. As I’ve
said I called this “Field of Dreams” church. They call this the “Seeker
church.”
What
you end up with is a half dozen churches within a 5 mile radius who are
basically doing the same thing just packaged slightly differently. Every 6 to
12 months a group of people that make up any given set of members of any given
Seeker church congregation will tire of their particular group of Seekers, get
up and migrate to another Seeker church just like the one that they left. When
they get to this new Seeker church, many of them; not all but many of them will
once again be converted, baptized, and be assigned a position in their new
church as new converts. They will be replaced at the church that they just left
by a similarly sized group of people that left another Seeker church in the
community performing the same pew swapping ritual they just did.
In
6 to 12 months it’ll happen again, and this migration will continue throughout
the community every 6 to 12 months. There will be a change of congregations of
basically the same people moving to a new Seeker church going through the whole
program of conversion and baptism, become recounted as new converts, and each
of the Seeker churches will call this process church growth.
I’m
calling this musical pews because no real growth has taken place. All that’s
happened is a sizable portion of the community has revolved like the spinning
barrel of an old time handgun and moved from one place to another and gone
through all of the steps again. Don’t get me wrong. Along the way there have
been some new genuine conversions, but mostly it’s just a migration.
Now
how does this happen? I believe it’s a misunderstanding of the great commission
and I’d like to try and explain why I come to that conclusion.
I
believe when God says things, He says what He means and He means what He says.
For example if He gives you a list; let’s say, as an example, in the list of
gifts of the Holy Spirit that Paul details in Corinthians an with minor
differences in Ephesians, there is a reason that that list is given in the
order in which it’s given. Paul even explains that the last gift in the list is
there because it’s the least important of the gifts. Another example of this is
when God sets out steps to do something, and he gives an order to those steps.
Let’s take the Great Commission for example, as it is given in the book of Acts.
We’re told in the book of Acts “daily were added to the church those who were
being saved.” (2:47)
Now
there are two things happening in the sentence, apart from the fact that both
were ongoing processes, and the order is of great importance. Be in very
careful not to miss them.
Number
one: new believers are being added to the church daily.
Number
two: those new believers are being added to the church after they have been
converted, again, a daily occurrence for the first century church in Jerusalem.
Do
you see the importance of what’s happening in Acts when compared to what’s
happening in today’s Seeker church? The order in Jerusalem is that new
believers are welcomed into the church after their conversion. New believers
are welcomed in to participate as fully vetted members of the family of God,
welcome to worship, participate in the Lord’s table, be part of the family
because they already are! This question
of before and after is critical, and that’s what the Seeker church is getting
wrong.
The
Seeker Church/”Field of Dreams” church operates on the premise that if you
build the building, design a great program, and have a band that can sing the
K-Love Top-100 by memory, lost people will come seeking the truth where you
are. Here is your first problem. The Bible says that there none who are righteous,
(Romans 3:10) and none who seek after God (Romans 3:11). How can you have a
church based on the premise that there are seekers when the Bible says that no
one is seeking?
The
second problem is a little more complicated. It presumes that the Bible was
written for everyone, and it’s not. The Bible is written for the Church. The Church
is made up not of the building where people worship but of the worshipers
themselves! The Bride of Christ. Those
who have committed their lives to Jesus Christ as Savior. They have repented of
their sins, they have asked him into their life as Lord and Savior and accepted
him as such. That’s the church, and it is to this group of people that the
Bible was written, not the rest of the world.
The
book of Acts rendering of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:119-20) works this
way. The members of the church, from the preacher to the janitor, go out into
the world, and communicate the Good News. That’s what the word Gospel means –
Good News! They evangelize the world. When they are successful in spreading the
good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ: the death burial and resurrection of
our Savior and people become born again, where they live, then they are to
expand out into the rest of the world. That’s the message of Acts 1:8! Don’t stand around waiting, GO GET THE LOST,
and when you’ve found, converted and baptized them, then welcome them into the
church. That’s what the verse and emphasis that daily were added to the church
those who were being saved means. That
is the order. It doesn’t say daily those
who were seeking the church, found it and got saved after they were added to
the church. The “Field of Dreams” model is simply not in harmony with the
biblical model.
The
problem then is that the Seeker church, no matter what their programs, no
matter what music, no matter how loud or soft they play, it no matter how many
screens they show it in however many campus satellite facilities they use, no
matter what graphic tee of the week they’re wearing, or what hip new English
translation of the week they’re preaching from, an evangelistic model that
continues to expect the world to find you instead of you going out into the
world preaching the gospel is going to continue to result in exactly what it
has resulted in. As wise old preacher friend of mine used to say: “if you do
what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always got”, and for the field
of dreams church, church growth is going to continue to be nothing more than a
rotation of the same group of people moving from church to church to church to
church. And as they get to church to
church to church to church, and as they continue to be reconverted and re-baptized
and re-101’d and re-102’d only to move on to a new place and do it all, all
over again in another 6 to 12 months, the church continues to be a nursery when
it should be a seminary!
Church,
we’re getting it wrong. We need to take another look at the direction that God
gives us through the Holy Spirit in the words of Dr. Luke in the book of Acts
and go out in to the world 2 by 2 as Jesus commanded us (“And He called
the twelve to Himself, and began to send them out two by
two,” Mark 6”7a) and preach the gospel to
Jerusalem Judea Samaria and on to the uttermost parts of the earth and when we
see conversions, then bring them into the church and train them. Disciple them. What Acts is talking about is
how one on one personal out in the real world face to face evangelism was how the
first century church could proclaim, ”daily were added to the church those who
were being saved.” That’s still how a church grows. Not by having blocks of
born-again people moving from congregation to congregation to congregation and
get reborn and get re-baptized every six months to a year.
I
trust you will take another look at Matthew 28 and the Great Commission and
that you will re-read the first three chapters of Acts and you’ll read through
them prayerfully, and just as prayerfully consider how you’re doing church. Rethink
the “Field of Dreams” Seeker church and really think about why you’re not
reaching your community for Christ. The end is coming. It’s closer than we
think. Jesus could return tomorrow: are you ready? Is your Church ready? Is
your community ready? My community needs Jesus, and I want to see it turn to
Jesus Christ. Who is willing to help me? Let’s commit ourselves to work pray
and see our communities turn to Christ and see revival sweep our land before
Jesus returns.
