One big issue with church today is where, when, and how we meet. So as we think about reinventing church, there are several questions that need to be asked.
What if the meeting times, places, and format were different?
What if the best time for a church to meet is not on Sunday morning?
What if the best place to meet is not in a building?
What if the best format is not song, announcements, songs, prayer, sermon?
What if believers realized that church has nothing to do with the building on the corner?
What if we didn’t have the financial black hole of a building?
What if when we had “service” we actually did some service?
What if our only “service” of the week was service? (Meet. Eat. Teach. Serve.)
Ministries
What if we started ministries based on what spiritual gifts were present in the church, not based on what the church down the street was doing?
What if we didn’t feel like we had to offer all things to all people?
What if we had fewer ministries, and did not expect people to be involved or present in all of them?
Church Planting
What if our goal for church planting wasn’t to plant churches, but to make disciples?
What if our goal wasn’t to get a crowd together, but to change the world, to turn the world upside down?
What if our way of “doing church” was so simple, basic, memorable, easy, reproducible, that anybody could do it, no matter how long they have been a Christian, or how much they know, or how much training they don’t have?
Jeremy,
More good stuff. Someone’s been looking very closely at the Book of Acts, haven’t they? And whaddya know, it’s culturally relevant!
We use a big drawer at home to keep our bread in. From time to time I look in there and find old, stale, moldy, stuff that was barely food to begin with: made in a factory, with all the life-sustaining nutrients sucked out of it by corporate food-processing and popular taste.
Do I need to say what that reminds me of?
Believing with you that we can do better,
steve
I agree with all of these points but especially
“What if the best time for a church to meet is not on Sunday morning?”
Sunday is the one day off a lot of people get, and a lot of them don’t feel like waking up at 7 to go to church so they don’t, and there are always people falling asleep or too tired to really learn anything from the sermons
The church I attend offers a 9:30, 11:30 and 6 pm service for sunday, and sometimes saturday night services. I think it is a good idea for all churches to consider either multiple services or maybe give out a survey to the congregation asking what time works best for them to see what time would work best for most people or something like that.
What if Christmas was celebrated in July as well, and the Resurrection brought joy EVERY meeting whether on Sunday or not? What if Communion was remembered at each meal, as was His instructions to the Disciples?
What if the ONE baptism of Ephesians 3 was the baptism of the Holy Spirit of I Cor. 12:13 and not some ritual in a bath tub?
Jeremy,
But…but…but…we’ve never done it that way before!
Seriously, good questions, and important ones. I think there are some pretty forceful biblical answers to a number of them, especially the one about the contents of the church service.
I’m in the process of hashing through this now, but one of the basic components is out of Hebrews: the idea that when the church gathers in worship, she enters into heaven, into the Holy of Holies in the heavenly tabernacle, and in that place she offers new covenant sacrifices of praise and performs new covenant priestly intercession for the world. If this is in fact what Hebrews is saying — and it is — then that has a major impact on what ought to happen in church.
What ought we to do in the Holy of Holies? Pre-eminently, praise and pray. But there is also, on the Tabernacle model, a place for hearing a word from God, and for sitting down to eat at His table, just as the Hebrews once ate of the peace offering.
And as you know, if Hebrews is making major points about Christian worship, that means Leviticus is going to be much more important than most people think…fun stuff, but very challenging to implement.
Good questions — keep ’em coming.
***
Jim,
The Corinthians were free to eat meat offered to idols from the market (as long as nobody made a big deal about it), but not to eat in the idol’s temple — same meat, but the setting made a difference. Likewise with the cup of blessing and the table of the Lord, which Paul directly compares to the table of demons. They were not dying because of the way they ate in their houses, but because of the way they abused a corporate ritual with a particular loaf of bread and a particular cup of wine. They did not become guilty of the body and blood of the Lord sitting at home partaking of coffee and strudel in an unworthy manner.
The one baptism of Ephesians 4 is Christian baptism, of which Jesus is the prototype. That prototype for Christian baptism unites water and Spirit, and what God has joined together, man ought not to separate — which the apostles did not, even with Gentile converts.
The answer to your set of what ifs is that having lost a biblical understanding of ritual and the importance of concrete acts and relationships, we become preoccupied with ideas, which is to say, we become gnostics — which is to say, we become what the (conservative Protestant) American church largely is today. With all respect, what you’re proposing is not the remedy, it’s the plague from which we already suffer.
His forever,
Tim