I teach as an adjunct faculty in theological graduate schools & other ministry training programs. I teach classes such as small groups ministry and church multiplication as well as other classes. Depending on the class, I'll present a variety of strategic options for students to sort through. Just one of those options is to leave out heavy infrastructures and to approach church more organically. Occasionally, simple-organic church positions are classified (by others) as anti-church building and conventional wisdom is heartily defended, and as a seminary professor, I applaud the opportunity for vigorous debates in academic venues.
However, allow me to take a moment to step away from good facilitation and professorial objectivity and just say a little something about our religious edifices. The DOW went down 634 points today. This is a pile-on in the midst of a very slow recovery from a deep & damaging economic recession. Job reports are no longer in the negative, but they are not as positive as they need to be. We have more tough days ahead of us.
Our church buildings are expensive. When the market tumbles, businesses suffer, and as a result so do those in the non-profit sector whom they support. Missionaries are hit hard by changes in church budgets. I am one of those, and I'm trying to walk in faith rather than think about the grim economic forecast. Youth ministries, homeless ministries, and other charitable work will likely suffer as well. Today, at a community center, a karate teacher was let go for budgetary reasons, and a parent cried because of the difference this class was making in her son's life. Everyone on staff knows that this is one of this center's highest quality programs, but bottom-lines over quality programming means it gets cut. Churches, as organizations, often follow the same bottom-line logic. Why? Because we generally run our churches as organizations rather than as families.
Are the organic church folks anti-building? Okay truthfully some are, but definitely not all. Am I anti-building? No, as an urban missionary doing organic church planting, when I visit friends and colleagues in local urban church buildings, I actually feel a warm sense of nostalgia. In short, I'm not anti-building. I want the whole church to flourish which, ironically, is exactly why I followed the path to a more organic expression.
...But do I think that we might need a values check in the church in North America. Yes, without apology, we absolutely need to take a second look at our value system. When missions or orphanages or homeless ministries are cut from the budget so that we can spend hundreds of dollars a month on air conditioning, yes, there is a problem. I know it's hot outside, but it's really hot in India or Cambodia where believers are sitting on dirt floors in homes to hear from God's Word, and they have "no debt outstanding except the debt to love one another."
This is not meant to be a rant or a guilt trip, and I doubt I have many readers for such a new blog anyway. But it is a plea. It is a plea to reconsider our values and to allow the Gospel to shape them in fresh ways. It is essentially taking a moment to ask why we must defend these structures so rigorously when they strap the church with debt, cost us people-centered programs, cut into our missions budgets, and require so much energy from leadership.
Ironically, at a time when debt is being discussed in our society's politics, the church has fallen into corporate debt for the sake of building bigger despite the stark warnings in Scripture about debt. I'm afraid that our big buildings can truly be such great blessings that we fail to consider the other side of the same coin.
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