Earlier tonight, I promised myself I wasn't going to post this post. I told myself that it wasn't worth it, that I should put aside this emotion for another time when my thoughts were more coherent, more put together rather than the idyllic mess of a jigsaw puzzle they seem to be in currently.
I worship at a large church, it is one of the larger churches in my area and it is one of the larger congregations in my area. With this comes a title of responsibility, but also a large amount of pomp and display. We run services that are perfectly fine, sometimes they are even excellent but you know what I have noticed, we often go home not even worrying about the impact that a service had on someone, or even worse, on our community.
When you reach a certain size, I'm not sure what size that is, people can't keep track of the relationships, people can't keep track of the impact that we are having on each other. We see so many people attending the services, having a good laugh and enjoying each others company that we assume the church must be doing well, we must be having a desired effect, we 'just gotta be'!
It is this 'near-enough is good enough' kind of feeling that I want to talk about. It surprises me that people can slap themselves on the back and congratulate themselves on a good show when we just aren't having the effect. This isn't a church issue though, its a universal thing. It happens at almost every church I have ever been to.
In the church I attend, we have a gathering of around 200-250 depending on what time of year it is and how busy people are. The church is situated in a town of 11,504 people with towns of over 3000 people surrounding it on either sides.
In our town alone, we influence on any given Sunday 2% of people. That's not a typo, that is not 50%, its not 20%, not 10% and its not even 5%.
It is 2%.
Christianity is called to make disciples of the nations, we are called to be a light to the world but right now, we are too often being light to the corner of a well-lit room. Sure, you are having an impact, sure we are doing something but is it really what is needed?
If we want to make headway in the towns we live in, the cities we work in and with the people we love the most, we need to change the way we do 'Christianity', period.
We have to make connections
If you had to nail down one thing Christians the world over were good at, what would it be?
I would take a stab and say 'making friends with other Christians'. This makes sense of course, we make friends with the people who are nearest to ourselves and the like. Biblical friendships are amazing, loyal friendship and we should seek them out .. but if we only have connections to Christians, then where is our mission?
If we continue to do this, Christianity will fade into irrelevance. We have to make inroads into our community, we have to be known at our footy clubs, our restaurants, our social events and our pubs.
When someone desperately needs love, is a Christian there showing it?
When someone needs help, have the church made connections with them?
When someone says something about the church, is their first thought a face or is it an stereotype?
A persons first point of reference with the church cannot be 'I had to come to you'. If we are to make any inroads, it has to be 'We are coming to you'.
How are you making connections to your community?
We have to engage in cultural warfare.
If modern Christians had to be typified into a warrior it would not in the vein of Rambo or John McLane, it would not even be in the vein of Jackie Chan. It would be of a novice, a rookie who knows what is going around him but hasn't put all the pieces together yet.
We live in society which is based around visual learning coupled with online connectivity. Almost 90% of what we take in on a daily basis is visual, whilst we are moving further and further into a technological age that will be typified by never-before seen feats on the internet.
Right now, if you do not have a website, you might as well not exist. If it is not a good one, then it might as well be money spent down the drain. If your online presence could be described with words connected to 'lacking', rather than 'larger than life' then you are not fulfilling your mission.
We have an arsenal of tools at our disposal, to not use them is not only wasteful but downright negligent. A web presence can be maintained on a few hours a week and has the impact of making yourself known, it gains the use of a metaphorical megaphone into the internet community. Yet I know that most churches in my area have substandard websites and think that twitter is the noise that birds make.
For the record, that doesn't mean we stop teaching from the bible, it just means we stop preaching to the Israelites and the Romans and start preaching to Australians in the 21st century.
We have to get real with each other
This is the one that gets me the most.
Earlier this year I had the privilege of interviewing a lady in our congregation about the impact of her faith on her life and her well-being. She told me how after she lost her husband, the church was fantastic in a few things, but she told me that 'people who helped where more willing to give a casserole than to sit with me and talk'.
This really sat with me for a few days.
The church provides many things, warmth and friendship as well as teaching and spirituality, but if we are not directly applying the word to our heart and opening up connections, friendships and places where we can actually express how we are going on then the church might be holy, but it is not helpful.
I've done it more times than I can ever remember, but when someone asked me how I was and I answered 'Yeah, I'm doing alright' even though I was breaking inside, it furthered that gap. Every time someone goes home with a broken heart that hasn't been shared, it breaks the community we have.
There are legitimate reasons not to share many things, but we have to be willing, we have to make those connections and we have to model raw emotion to each other if we ever want to make an impact on our community.
Right now, there are people looking for exactly what the church has but they can't find it because they don't feel they can share what is on their heart. They don't have someone they can unload onto.
When life falls apart, they don't see the faces of friends at church, they only see strangers and hecklers.
If we started giving testimonies, sharing how our life fell apart but God brought it back together ..
If we were real in our friendships and gave them time..
If we shared when life was overwhelming ..
We might just make an impact on this culture that we are called to make disciples of but we have to ..
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