“Imagine someone is looking for a church,”writes Rev. Erik Parker, a Lutheran blogger. “They are looking for a church with a commitment to following Jesus at its core and they show up at a social commitment church. It would be like showing up for a soccer team that stopped playing soccer years ago, and who instead gathers for coffee and donuts with friends and family.”
Most of us probably know congregations like this. It’s easy to become inward looking—concerned more about how we feel than how newcomers feel; concerned more about our buildings than about building a community where people experience God’s love through our deeds.
“As churches try to understand why all the attempts to attract people back to church haven’t yielded better results,”Parker writes, “I think it is because the core foundation that brings most church communities together is fundamentally at odds with what people who are looking for churches are seeking today.”
As Andrew Faiz says in his essay on Missional Church this month: “The model of church we’re all comfortable with, and comfortable in, with our own comfortable pews and comfortable habits—is known as ‘Attractional.’ As in, ‘Hey, look at us, we have good stuff for you inside our fortress.'”
But that’s the love-our-church model, not the love-Jesus model. Both models are important, in different ways.
One church may focus on doing things so that worshippers feel good about the experience. That’s OK. That’s a maintenance model.
Another might focus on a ministry to aging members who have historical roots in the church. That’s OK, for them.
For example, take a church in Lake Nokomis, in the Minneapolis metropolitan area of more than four million. In seven years, no one had joined the church. There were no children. They had 30 people on Sunday where once there had been 300. The endowment fund could keep them going for maybe another two years. What to do?
On the first and third Sundays of the month, they have a traditional service. On alternate weekends, there is a Saturday evening contemplative service, but Sunday is a sabbath—a rest from work and formal worship.
One member, quoted in a story about the church, said she settles down with a cup of coffee and reads the Sunday New York Times. “The whole thing.”(That must be one mammoth coffee!)
The point is that the way we build a Christian community will vary from place to place. Permission to experiment! Try different things. As Parker says: “It isn’t that a church has to choose between being a community or following Jesus. One doesn’t exclude the other.”
“Where two or three are gathered, there am I.”That’s what he said.
