Live.Awake

Being Excellent Christians

// February 12th, 2007 // Church Life

I believe CS Lewis got it right (enlarge the image to see the quote). I do webdesign as a side business. Most of what I do is for churches and other Christian businesses and organizations. The thing that I see over and over again is that the Christian Church has largely been convinced that how we do things doesn’t matter. It’s only what we do that matters. How we present ourselves to the community (and therefore their perception of us), how well we do things internally, and even how wisely we spend our tithe dollars seems to be an abysmally low priority. We quote things like, “What Would Jesus Do?” and say “Jesus wouldn’t care about our website or whether or not the parking lot is paved” as mantras against the prevailing winds of those left-leaning “seeker-sensitive” churches we have heard about.

Do you think that Jesus was a great carpenter or a shoddy one? I suspect that Jesus never once made anything that wasn’t of the best quality, and I assure you that His reputation as a craftsman came long before His reputation as the Messiah!

Now before you go tossing me into the lion’s den with the rest of the seeker-sensitive crowd, understand what I’m saying here. I’m not what most would call “seeker-sensitive”. I do not believe in compromising or watering down any of our core values. However, I am seeker-aware and seeker-friendly. The Gospel is offensive enough. I just want to make sure that if someone in one of our church services is offended, that they are offended at the Gospel and not us. To look at it another way, we must be willing to remove every obstacle in our liturgy that interferes with the hearing and the presenting of the Gospel. It’s that simple.

Let me tell you a story that an old co-worker told me about an experience she had visiting a church. She and her husband had long been strong Christians and she had recently received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. She spoke in tongues, but her husband did not. However, he was open to the idea and they were both looking for a church together hoping to find something to which they could both belong. They visited a church and everything seemed great during the musical portion of the worship service. Then the pastor stood up for the sermon. He began speaking in tongues. He then began delivering the entire message in tongues! Point after point went by and still no English. She looked at her husband and he was already standing to leave. They slipped out the back door and never set foot in a charismatic type church again. Can you blame them?

This is why Paul said in I Corinthians 14 that he would “rather you prohpesy than speak in tongues…”. He was not demeaning tongues at all. He was establishing a principle for how we should treat people in our services that either are not saved or do not understand. The goal was that they would say “God is here”, not to have them slip out the back door in embarrasment and confusion. Had most of us been in the Corinthian church at the time we would have complained to Paul and said, “How can we compromise on the power of God!” or “These new people just don’t understand the anointing (implying that the rest of us actually do…).” or maybe “I’d rather offend them than the Holy Spirit.” This belies not only a deep misunderstanding of what the spiritual gifts are for but also a shallow view of the very heart of God.

We’ve replaced the part of the Great Commision that says “Go ye into all the world…” with “Go ye into your local church body…” We have forgotten how the heart of the Father rejoices when one of His “little ones” comes home. So we act like obese children sitting on the soft couch of our sanctification watching the lost world through stained-glass windows. When one of them does dare to venture into our midst, we are grossly unprepared and therefore unhospitable. We make no effort to put our best foot forward to the world, thus digging the divide between “us” and “them” deeper and deeper.

I think it’s time that we begin to re-evaulate not just what he do, but also how we do it. Are we putting up uneccessary barriers to people? Is it easy or hard to become an authentic part of the culture of our church? What does our signage, building, paint color, church bulletin, dress, website, business cards, Sunday School, etc say about us? And is that what we really want to say?

How has your church dealt with this issue? Or has it? Let us know in the comments.

A Case in Point …

[tags]church, growth, CS Lewis, seeker sensitive, seeker-sensitive, evangelism, gospel, God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, spiritual gifts, church structure, apostle Paul, Christ[/tags]