Adult Baptisms per 100 People in Worship

In connection with my previous post on helping congregations learn from each other about doing evangelism, my friend Ron Amundson was struck by the chart below that is included in the background section of the discussion site.  So I thought I might lift it up here as well.

The chart shows the number of adult baptisms per year per 100 people in worship in a (non-representative) sample of 27 of the 107 ELCA congregations in the Saint Paul Area Synod.  (Since most of them are less than one per year on this measure, the data was actually produced by averaging worship and baptism statistics for the six-year period of 2000 through 2005.  This kind of data is publicly available, by the way, on the ELCA website. Once you find the congregation you are interested in, look for the "Full Trend Report" link for a wealth of information.)

A couple of things to note:

• Some congregations appear to have no effective evangelism (by this measure) with no adult baptisms over the six-years represented in the data.
  
• Among congregations that do report adult baptisms over the last six years, there can be a ten-fold difference in effectiveness.
  
• There is no evidence here that larger congregations are more effective than smaller ones (by this measure.)  The data suggests that the reverse is likely to be true.

So.  More food for thought.

Someone Saw This Coming

I recently came across this striking quote about people leaving institutional forms of Church for the sake of their faith, rather than as an act of moving away from faith. I first encountered this idea in Reggie McNeal's book The Present Future, but the quote below predates that seminal 2003 work by, um, a fair bit.

Multitudes of Christians within the church are moving toward the point where they may reject the institution that we call the church. They are beginning to turn to more simplified forms of worship. They are hungry for a personal and vital experience with Jesus Christ. They want a heartwarming personal faith. Unless the church quickly recovers its authoritative Biblical message, we may witness the spectacle of millions of Christians going outside the institutional church to find spiritual food.

Care to take a guess as to who said it and when? I'll post the answer in a couple of days. If you can't wait, just go ahead and Google "the spectacle of millions of Christians."

Sunday Services: the Blind Spot and Sacred Cow in Church Decline

Dave Householder has written a bracing post about the decline of the Lutherans in North America that is well worth reading. He gets extra credit for leading off with this; "This article is not just for Lutherans. It applies to most North American faith families." I expect the comments are really good too, but with 90 at last count I confess I lacked the fortitude to actually read them all!

He cites ten factors contributing to decline, including:

• Low birth rate
• Poor retention of the babies we do have
• Staggering ineffectiveness in evangelism
• Unwelcoming if not toxic parish communities
• Little or no effective use of media

Decline has been an ongoing topic of my blog. I've integrated several of his points into the "pond metaphor" where you can easily see why the church used to grow but is in decline now. I even threw together a metric for "evangelical effectiveness" that is pretty jarring to look at.

But after reading David's post I still think that one of the most significant issues is going unnamed: the inherent ineffectiveness of Sunday morning gatherings, both for discipleship and for evangelism. Yet we persist in making these gatherings the centerpiece of our faith-life culture, and investing the vast majority of our time, energy and money in maintaining them as I've discussed here. Sunday morning, large group, presentational, professionally led, property-dependent worship services are, I'm afraid, both our biggest blind spot and our most sacred cow.

And this central assumption about the way to "do church" is perhaps the most unifying feature of North American Christendom. It can't be much of an overstatement to say that we all do it that way. No wonder then, that the decline spans the decades so readily and cuts so easily across denominational lines, and the liberal/conservative divide.

Large group gatherings are not bad. But as the centerpiece of faith practice they can never be effective in spreading or nurturing the faith. That requires face to face, heart to heart conversation, which is notoriously difficult to have in a pew, disrespectful during the preaching, and drowned out by the performance be it the organ or the band.

Evaluating Wellbeing - a Tool for the Church?

Gallup has launched a new book and program focused on Wellbeing. Their StrengthsFinders work has been extremely valuable to me so I expect this will be good stuff as well.

It uses an online assessment questionnaire that you can take repeatedly in order to see changes in your wellbeing over time and the influence of events and actions you take. Suggestions are provided for making improvements in the five "Essential Elements" of Wellbeing their material presents:

• Career
• Social
• Financial
• Physical
• Community

A couple of things come quickly to mind:

No "Spiritual" aspect to wellbeing? I can't imagine that's an oversight, so they must have reasons for not going there. I'll be interested to learn what they are.

Social and Community Wellbeing are two different things. The fact that I was surprised to see them listed separately is telling evidence that I really am a part of my Western culture, which is generally so focused on the individual that issues around community are generally off the radar.

What if your congregation picked this up and ran with it? Suppose your congregation made intentional, ongoing work with this tool a core practice of your community life (after adding in a Spiritual Wellbeing component, of course)? Imagine adding a faith-based perspectives to conversations on Career and Financial Wellbeing? Do you think this might be something your people would value and benefit from?

Do you think they might, just possibly, mention it to their friends, neighbors and coworkers?

Suppose you offered workshops and support groups around this to the community around your church... gave them the books for free as a sign of your commitment to the practice of being a blessing to others... made the sessions completely non-religious but offered an opt-in conversation after each gathering for those who wanted to add the faith dimension... I'm just thinking out loud here...

Do you think people outside your church might begin to see it as an asset to the neighborhood, a partner in the community?

I wonder!

Kiddie Pool Community Gardens?

Is your congregation looking for a way to serve - and meet - your neighbors? Interested in a ministry to help feed the poor or welcome immigrants from foreign lands?

Here's an idea - offer free garden space to the community in kiddie pools!

The materials are fairly cheap and reusable. You could probably get a grant for a project like this from any number of community-building or hunger related groups. (Know a good one? Please leave a comment!!)

Got apartment dwellers on the block? There have got to be some frustrated gardeners living in there! Give them a reason to cross the street and then go meet them as you garden together.

Does your local food shelf need fresh food? Why not grow some for them?

Are there immigrants in your community who are still trying to develop a taste for Mac'n'cheese but really miss the flavors of home? Offer them a place to grow the vegetables they are used to eating. Imagine what you might pick up from swapping recipes with them!

Maybe a small flotilla of tomato-laden kiddie pools isn't quite what you had in mind when you thought of ways to make your church landscaping more attractive. Of course, there are different ways to think about "beauty." Is Jesus really that big into well-mown grass? Or is a community meeting place a more likely field in which to sow the seeds he favors anyway?

As they say, it's all in the eye of The Beholder.

Ownership vs. Posession

I had occasion to give my personal perspective on stewardship recently at my church and it was videotaped so I though I would share it here. The key moment is when, after placing my wallet, mortgage, car title, marriage certificate etc. on the altar I simply ask God; "What do you want me to do with your stuff?"

The video starts with the distinction between ownership and possession, covers my personal family journey into tithing, and affirms percentage-based giving as a grace-filled approach. It specifically advocates a three step process: start where you are but look at your giving from the percentage perspective, set a goal, then make a plan to grow towards it.

Plus, you get to see me ask my friend Rick to hand over his wallet to me in front of the congregation.

Pastor Tim on Stewardship from Gethsemane on Vimeo.

Welcome to PostChristendom

Here's a quote that caught my eye:

"We had numerous Catholic churches praying for us, a Buddhist temple, a bunch of Lutherans, a pagan sect and at least two Satanists that I know of, so we were pretty much covered."

I ran across that in a Star Tribune article about a guy who found a kidney donor for himself through Facebook. I'd say that's putting the "S" in "social networking!"

I know this is old news for many of you, but worth repeating especially "for some have never heard," that the world around us in the US is no longer saturated with Christianity, if indeed it ever was.

Of course, you can still simulate a Christianity-dominated culture quite easily. All you have to do is surround yourself with nothing but other Christians in your social world and be sure to rarely venture out. Listening solely to Christian music, Christian radio, and reading nothing but Christian books can also be a big help with this.

But do take note. If a collection of Catholics, Buddhists, pagans and "at least two Satanists that I know of" doesn't bear at least some resemblance to the world you live in, then you are probably living in a religio-cultural ghetto.

From which position it will be very, very, very hard to do effective mission.

Very.

Church Decline in the Public Eye

The decline of the church is something that borders on an "open secret" - "widely known to be true, but which none of the people most intimately concerned is willing to categorically acknowledge in public." (Lifted that from Wikipedia.)

If you want to see evidence of that, take a look at this Bizarro cartoon in todays Pioneer Press, near the top right corner. It actually points out both the reality, and the denial of those "most intimately concerned," in one punchline.

When church decline is well enough established and so widely understood that it can be the source of humor in popular culture, it's way past time for us to do something about it.

Mainline Decline and a Radical Response

Phillip Clayton, who teaches at Claremont School of Theology and leads a Transforming Theology project, recently posted some reflections from a conference that explored the reasons for mainline denominational decline. The article concluded:

"Effective answers to the current situation will require us either revivify the older beliefs and institutions or to invent radically new forms of Christian community."

Well, I had some thoughts, both on the why of decline and on a radical response, so I put up two comments on his blog and thought I'd share them here as well.

First comment:

Re. the original question “Why? … what has changed..?” to account for the decline, I offer this analogy.

Consider a pond. It grows larger when the inflow exceeds the outflow.

Mainline denominations (like my own Lutheran tribe) previously grew through immigration from the old country and childbirth. (My believing parents had 6 children: 400% church growth!). In addition, societal pressures “herded” people into church as a necessary entry point into civic community, as you noted in point 1 of the initial post.

All of these have changed and no longer feed people automatically into our congregations. The “tributaries” have largely dried up. One additional tributary is conspicuous by its absence: Evangelism. It seems never to have been a substantial feeder to the mainline pond. It’s been easier to rely on the other tributaries.

On the outflow side, there has also been change. People still die, of course, presumably at more or less the same rate. (If anything there’s been increased longevity which prolongs the life of the pond.) What’s changed is the erosion of the banks that have kept the water in place. The pond “leaks” like never before. Again, this is related to the sociological landscape you mentioned in 1 above. It is no longer a scandal for people to leave the church and have no formal “institutional” spiritual life.

So: less inflow, more outflow; shrinking pond.

Second comment:

Re. your second question: “HOW radical do the changes need to be to respond to the reality of the situation that the mainline is facing today?”

Pretty radical I’d say.

For starters, we’ll have to discover how to do evangelism in our current context. Just doing evangelism at all will be a big leap for a lot of us! (Among Lutherans, it’s often noted that we invite someone to church, on average, once every 20 years. Maybe 30.) Add to that the fact that our context is radically different than what we’ve known and it’s a tall order.

But more than that, I think we need a radical revision in the way we “do church.” (That really should be “the way we be church” which is unfortunately awkward to say.)

Conventional congregational life – across the denominations and across the decades of decline – centers around a weekly large group gathering. For most, this is their primary if not sole experience of Christian community. Yet in these gatherings, it is essentially impossible to experience the “one anothers” that are truly at the heart of being a people sharing a life of faith together. That kind of substantive community requires smaller groups to flourish.

We invest vast amounts of time, energy and money into maintaining a weekly event, in the hope that substantive community will arise around it.

We need to invert that. We need to invest primarily into nurturing small, self-reproducing faith communities where people actually grow as disciples. That’s a radical change.

Whether this results in larger gatherings arising from the small communities or not is secondary, icing on the cake.

Can existing, conventional congregations can make that kind of transition? It seems doubtful, though it would be exciting to try. Whether they can serve as a launching pad for new expressions of Christian community seems more likely, and I’m hopeful there. But whether they can or not, I think these communities are on their way, thank God. We need them. We have a lot of Kingdom work to do!

Evangelism as Fundraising: Let's Not

I belong to the Emerging Leaders' Network (how's that for self-aggrandizing!) and a friend there started a discussion about the risk of doing outreach & evangelism as a fund raising strategy when the church is having a hard time making budget. I just had to offer my two bits on that and thought I'd share it here as well:

Here's a small step we're tying to make where I serve.

In our little brochure about membership and in conversation as it comes up, I always present membership this way: Everything of value that this Congregation has to offer, it provides free of charge to anyone who wants it: Baptism, Communion, Sunday School, Bible Studies, worship services, pastoral care and so on. So "membership" provides no additional benefit. Rather, becoming a member is what you do when you want to get on the "supply" side of the equation and join us in keeping all this stuff available to others for free, just like it was for you when you arrived. The only thing you "get" with membership is extra responsibility.

I compare it to enlisting in the Army or Peace Corp: a voluntary choice to join an organization that serves others, because you believe in its mission and want to take part in achieving it.

That also sets up a great point I love to share with prospective new members. When you "enlist" in an organization like that, then they have a responsibility to equip you for the work you will be doing - basic training, as it were. So we as a congregation have begun to provide "Equipping Workshops" for new members (open to everyone, of course) to fulfill our responsibility to them when they join.

On a completely different track, though, and with apologies if I'm being a gadfly, I can't read your post without thinking that there would be a lot less temptation to link evangelism and finance if we could break our dependence on buildings, programs and professional clergy (like me), as if that were the only or even a relatively effective way to be Church. I spend a lot of time thinking about the house church model, which you can easily imagine, would have a very different outlook on both evangelism and stewardship.

Tim

What the Bishop Said, Part 2: Relationships over Programs and Structures

As I mentioned in the first post of this series, I'm exploring four "core values" offered by my Bishop Peter Rogness, to lift up the ways I see them align with a house church expression. Peter's first value is this:

Relationships are more life-giving than programs or structures.

It's tempting just to write QED and move on to the next post, but I'll expound a bit anyway.

He's absolutely right of course. Relationships must have primacy over programs and structures, and the latter should be evaluated on the basis of how they contribute to the former. Sort of a "Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the sabbath" kind of thing (Mark 2:27). I'm convinced we desperately need to make the changes that would reflect having relationships as a real priority.

So, how do we act on this value?

In conventional congregations, it's going to be tough sledding. Most of our resources there are invested in large group activities that are inherently less able to nurture relationships, Sunday morning worship being the most prominent example. (I've written more about this fundamental mis-alignment here.) Programs and structures are already in place - dare I say entrenched - and institutional inertia is a hard force to overcome. Not to mention the chronic challenge of funding even when we're not in a historic recession. But this re-prioritization is important work and it needs to be done. At a minimum, there needs to be an emphasis on nurturing small groups or perhaps "counting conversations" as Reggie McNeal has suggested. Kudos to Peter for putting relationships at the top of his list.

But there is another option: start fresh. Start new communities that are centered on the primacy of relationships from the outset and let them generate the programs and structures they need to support that kind of life. New communities, where the small group is the primary expression rather than a programmatic add-on. In a word, house churches.

It's not an either/or situation. I do not believe we should abandon conventional churches rather than take on the hard work of re-aligning their priorities. But I do believe we should add another strategy, and invest at least some of our time, energy and funding in an approach that's naturally aligned with the primacy and priority of relationships.

If we want to take Peter seriously, and I believe we should, I think that's what we'll need to do.

Twin Peaks: Resource Allocation and Effectiveness in Promoting Spiritual Growth in Conventional Congregations

Dontcha just love that title? It's just like the stuff I used to write back when I was a molecular biologist.

I have an observation.

In conventional congregations, the larger a gathering is, the more resources are invested in it. For example, the typical Sunday morning worship service consumes the vast amount of the resources available. This is true I believe in terms of staff time, funds and physical space. (It's probably true of member time investment as well, to the extent that they invest their time in their spiritual life.)

Here's how that looks:


(You'll notice that I drew that on a napkin to underscore the sophistication of this analysis.)

Thus far, I've restated the obvious.

I also have a hypothesis: The smaller a group is, the more effective it is in promoting spiritual growth (to the extent that the group focuses on spiritual life).

So on one extreme you have spiritual friendships, marriages, mentoring relationships and "two or three are gathered" accountability groups. Next up come the familiar "small groups" and Bible studies. At the other extreme is, well, Sunday morning worship.

Here's how that looks:


The obvious question here is; "What's wrong with this picture?" To which I would respond; "Well, it looks to me as if resource investment in conventional congregations is 180 degrees out of alignment with the strategies that are most effective in promoting spiritual growth."

But here's a more interesting question: "What would congregational life look like if we realigned our resource investment to reflect this?"

Thoughts?

The Three Minute Old Testament

Here's something I'd like to share. I created this short telling of the Old Testament narrative to support a sermon series we're doing at my church for he summer. It has what I think is the bare minimum of details for the story to hold together. As with any telling, it's an interpretation. I've presented the "plot" of the story as God's plan to use Israel as a showpiece and a meeting place to introduce himself to the rest of the world, with the whole people serving as a "priestly kingdom." (Exodus 19:6) I love how consistent God is in this fundamental outward focus for his chosen partner/servants. We see it applied to the Church in 1 Peter 2:9 where we we called a "royal priesthood." It beautifully invites the question: "If we are all priests, then who is the congregation?" All the rest of the world of course, the ones we are called to serve.

So - here is the video. I hope you enjoy it and find it helpful. (The resolution isn't very good so you may want to view a slightly larger version here.) I also want to say thanks to Harry Wendt of Crossways International for the use of his graphic icon for God, his prophet sketch, and general inspiration for this video. I encourage you to check out his excellent Bible-teaching materials!

Breaking a 17-Century Habit

I've been writing a little lately over at the Emerging Leaders Network, a Ning-based social network about 130 strong, populated predominantly by Lutherans interested in the Emergent conversation. One thread there led me to write the following about a shift taking place in our culture that undoes something fundamental which has been in place for 1700 years.

"One other thing I wanted to pick up on: you wrote about how "...many Gen X/Y people, especially, haven’t even had enough church contact to be alienated—the church is simply not on their radar." I think that's critically important for us to wake up to. People often talk about the importance of the change in worldview from Modern to Postmodern... shifting something fundamental that has been in place for some hundreds of years. But I believe there is - at the same time - another shift now in process that undoes an assumption that has been in place for 17 centuries: the relationship between Church and civil culture.

"Before Constantine, the Church was viewed as an enemy. Afterwards, the Church was viewed as a partner. (The Reformation - as significant as it was - did not depart from this. It simply led to multiple choices for which Church each State wanted to partner with.) But now, as your observation reveals, this way of relating for the past 17 centuries is changing. The civil culture is now looking at the Church as irrelevant.

"It's this kind of massive context-shifting that I believe really urges us to first, go back to the kernel of Christian faith, and second, experiment wildly with various ways to re-enflesh Christian life and community."

Media Scan - Recent Articles of Note

Local/Cell-Church: The Minneapolis Star Tribune has an article on Julie Jacobs and her cell church network, Frontier Fellowship. Julie was the first person I profiled for this blog in my 100 Cups of Coffee thread. The article gives a nice introduction to her work and her cell-church approach, and it's good to see the point in print that it's not intended as a rejection of larger/conventional congregations or as a competition for members. My only quibble is where Julie says that "Home churches are trying to grow big enough that they can get a building" in contrast to cell churches that aspire to grow in order to multiply into more cells. (Frankly, I'm skeptical that Julie would make that kind of sweeping generalization.) Obviously, some HCs do aspire to get back in the building, while others intend to grow by multiplication instead. Most of the people I'm in contact with who are active or interested in house church forms are interested in growth by multiplication and are pretty passionate about steering clear of buildings.

National/House Church: My Google Alert service constantly scans the web & blogosphere for me in search of key words and phrases and sent me a surprising notice yesterday. Someone over on the Huffington Post was talking about house churches! This I had to see. Turns out it came up in the post Small Is the New Big in Progressive Politics by Rob McKay. The article is about political organizing strategy and "whether the Democratic Party is about short-term voter excitement or permanent citizen engagement." In that context, he makes these observations:

This new group of efforts focuses on local leadership, small circles, and cultural organizing. They are taking their strategies from the anti-slavery movement, groups like craigslist, and most surprisingly, a new Christian movement. "We keep saying that the evangelical churches gave Bush the White House," Erin Potts, a leader in strategic thinking for groups as diverse as foundations and big rock bands, said. "If we want to know, we have to study it and see what works. And what works, is culture and small groups. The emerging house church movement has a very dynamic and interesting strategy."

Potts and other organizers note that while overall church attendance has steadily declined since the 1990s, a new form of church has taken off--the house church. Unlike traditional churches, the house church movement doesn't meet in a specific house of worship, but instead, as the name suggests, in people's homes. While traditional churches have hierarchical leadership, the house church meets as a circle of peers, and while churches try to grow the membership of a congregation, house churches purposely splinter into smaller groups as soon as a circle gains more than a handful of members.

The success of the house church movement is staggering. Membership is well into the millions. One study suggests that 70 million Americans regularly attend or have experimented with a house church.

I think it wold be pretty ironic if political groups took more and better notice of the HC movement than Christian denominations and congregations. Ironic, but in a way not surprising. Like people in the business world, politicos are driven by a powerful zeal to get an outcome; elections won and policies enacted for one, profit and market share for the other. This drive can lead to experimentation, risk, innovation etc. and it's commonplace to see churches learning from the business world - although typically after quite a lag. But sometimes it seems that urgency, drive and passion are more prevalent in politics and business than in the Church. Profit and power more motivating than sharing the gospel? "Irony" isn't enough to cover that; it's just plain sad.

Moving right along, and to something more encouraging, here's my third newscatch.

Denominational/Emergent: My denominational magazine, The Lutheran devotes its cover article for June to Emergent/emerging ministries with profiles of three examples within the ELCA and a study guide. I haven't read it yet so I can't comment on the content But I will say that my little heart went pitter-pat when I read this among the study guide questions:

If you had a school, home or prison where people proclaimed the gospel and
celebrated the sacraments, would that be the church? Why or why not?

If you're familiar with my blog, you'll know I believe that is a question for which we have an answer - and a very, very Lutheran one at that.

Why House Church? Community.

This is part four in a four-thread topic.

Please Note: Although I'm "defending" the idea of house churches here, I don't think it should be an either/or proposition, or that conventional congregations should be abandoned wholesale in favor of nothing but HCs. I see value in both, and I'm eager to see hybrid and partnership forms develop as well. But since HC is appearing as the "new thing", it's natural for it to need more explanation, which is what I'm trying to provide.


Community. Lastly, I also think we should explore the HC form because it provides the most natural context for the rich life of Christian community Jesus wants us to have. By “Christian community,” I’m referring to the kind of shared life we find described in the “one-anothers” of Scripture; things like love one another, care for one another, encourage, admonish, comfort, serve and so on. Most of these simply can not be done readily in a large group gathering like Sunday morning worship, if they can be done there at all. Yet a HC provides a very natural context for encouraging, comforting and such. So I think the work of the Kingdom will progress better if the primary expression of Christian community is the one in which you can readily practice these key marks of community.

The importance of community and investing in the kinds of gatherings that promote it is even apparent to those who don’t believe. You may have heard of Matt Casper, an atheist who was hired by a Christian to visit and comment on a wide variety of congregations. You can read all about his visits in the book Jim and Casper Go to Church. But here’s a quote I found on another blog in which he himself talks about community:

“The “community” at some churches seemed to disappear with the first note of the recessional, if it was ever there at all. I think “community” goes out the window when you have 2,000 (Saddleback), 7,000 (Willow Creek), or 16,000 (Lakewood) people under the same roof. What you’re seeing then is simply mass mentality, no different than a World Cup game, a rock concert, or the Nuremberg rallies. It’s when these mobs would break into smaller groups that the community focus would kick in. And the smaller the church, the larger the sense of community. I attended a house church where the sense of community was so incredible, even a non-believer could feel it. And these house church people were/are committed to working together to make the world a better place and held each other accountable.

It’s a simple fact of human nature: the more people there are, the less individual accountability there is. And the message of Jesus is ALL about individual accountability. The biggest problem facing the entire world may be people saying, “Hey, that’s not my problem.” Johne Donne put it best: ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Basically, the big churches let people feel like they were doing something to make the world a better place, when they weren’t really participating at all.”

Striking words for us to hear – especially as they come from an atheist who's been to a lot of churches.

Why House Church? Discipleship.

This is part three in a four-thread topic.

Please Note: Although I'm "defending" the idea of house churches here, I don't think it should be an either/or proposition, or that conventional congregations should be abandoned wholesale in favor of nothing but HCs. I see value in both, and I'm eager to see hybrid and partnership forms develop as well. But since HC is appearing as the "new thing", it's natural for it to need more explanation, which is what I'm trying to provide.

Discipleship. The stewardship questions from the previous post press us to look into the utility of a HC form. Once we do, I believe we find the strongest reasons yet for supporting this expression of the Church. I think we’d agree that the most important thing in making and growing disciples is the movement and power of the Spirit of God, which can happen in any size gathering. But next to that, I would say that the most important thing for discipling is conversation with believers about Jesus. In the absence of that, it’s hard to see people readily coming to faith or growing in it. But here’s the critical turn: what is the best context for conversation? Clearly, it’s small groups – even down to the level of “two or three gathered in my name.” And so, to put it simply, I think the Church should invest most of it’s time and energy in the context that is most supportive of effective discipling. The House Church form is far better structured for this than a conventional church, where most of the time and energy and resources are used in support of a large group gathering that effectively precludes conversation.

I should hasten to add that I do think there is value in large group worship! (And buildings and clergy, for that matter.) But I think the discipling goals of the Kingdom are calling us to invert our priorities: small groups and HCs first, with large group as an addition, rather than large group as the norm, with a handful also in small groups or HCs.

Why House Church? Stewardship.

This is part two in a four-thread topic.

Please Note: Although I'm "defending" the idea of house churches here, I don't think it should be an either/or proposition, or that conventional congregations should be abandoned wholesale in favor of nothing but HCs. I see value in both, and I'm eager to see hybrid and partnership forms develop as well. But since HC is appearing as the "new thing", it's natural for it to need more explanation, which is what I'm trying to provide.


Stewardship. The stewardship of time, energy and money is one of the most powerful arguments in favor of the HC form, in my opinion. Conventional congregations require lots of money to pay for buildings, salaries and programs. HCs require vastly less money. The time and energy involved in crafting and presenting a weekly conventional worship service is again, very substantial – ask any pastor or church musician! Worship in a HC; much, much less. And of course, there are meetings. From that one perspective alone, the HC model cries out for serious consideration.

That’s the “input” side of stewardship: consumption of resources. From the output side, we also need to ask about the return on all that investment. How effective are conventional congregations in the core tasks of the Kingdom: making disciples out of people who don’t know Jesus; growing mature disciples out of people who do know Him? In North America over the last 60 years at least, I believe the evidence is clear: conventional congregations have not been very effective in either. Now, I can’t really say yet how effective HCs are in North America. That jury is still out, though we could look at the evidence so far. But even so, the ineffectiveness of conventional congregations calls for us to at least investigate the HC form to see if it might serve the Kingdom better.

In addition to input & output, there’s the question of stewardship of assets. It is very common to find churches that struggle to make ends meet while maintaining a congregation that is a fraction of the size their building can serve, yet their net equity in the land alone is in the millions of dollars. That money belongs to the Lord. Is that the best use He has for it? It’s sobering to me how much that situation resembles the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) where one servant just hid the money buried in a hole in the ground rather than risk investing it.

Priesthood of All Believers

Some wonderful Lutheran maverics over at A.R.E. (A Renewal Enterprise) just put up a comment on "What’s the golden nugget in Lutheran theology that is the most underutilized?" Their answer, the Priesthood of All Believers, finally got me to say a couple of things out loud that I've been thinking silently for too long. Here's a recap of what I wrote in a comment on their blog:

Well, I agree that the P of AB is the motherlode of underused gold, but I think it’s a lot more explosive than most people think! (Sorry for mixing metaphors there.) The idea that all believers are capable and authorized for all “priestly” ministry - including sacraments - has always been in our theology but only rarely apparent in our practice. Instead, we’ve reserved vast swaths of ministry to professional clergy (like me) “for the sake of good order.” Well, I’ve finally begun to ask “How’s that working out for us?” Put another way, since we don’t seem to be doing well at all in either making disciples or growing them, then what exactly is good about our order? The fact that it's orderly?

Thinking about my answers to those questions led me finally to look at the house church movement, an expression of the Priesthood of All if ever there was one. Plenty of room for unhelpful order there, too, I’m sure! But I have a lot of hope that the results will be better. And truthfully, I think that Lutheranism at its core is built for both house church and the postmodern world. But that’s another topic. ;)

The Huckabee Bible Quiz

If you’ve been following the presidential primaries, you may have noticed that Mike Huckabee often refers to Bible stories in his speeches. What you may not know is that when he does that, most people in the U.S. have no idea what he’s talking about!

A recent story done by National Public Radio took several Biblical allusions from Huckabee speeches and went in search of people who could identify them. Most could not, which wouldn’t surprise you if you knew that 50% of Americans (and that includes Christians) can’t name any of the four Gospels, or know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible. But it should surprise you to learn that every person they asked had been raised in a Christian home and gone to Sunday School.

Want to see how you’d do on the quiz? Here are the four quotes. Do you know the Bible story each one comes from? I'll put the answers in the first comment to this post. In fact, why not add a comment yourself and let us know your score!

1. "It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people."

2. "Sometimes," the former Arkansas governor told his supporters, "one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor."

3. "We've also seen that the widow's mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world."

4. "It's almost like when the prophet was looking for a king. He came down, looked through all of Jesse's sons, went through a whole bunch of them, and said, 'Is this all you got?'"

I hope you did well.

Why does this matter? Well, consider this: Huckabee has a message he is trying to get out to people. He is using Bible stories as a way to get it across. But people will never get the message if they don’t know the stories. In the same way, God has a message that He is trying to get out to people, including you. God uses Bible stories to help get the message across. But if you don’t know the stories, do you think you’ll understand the message?

Have you read your Bible lately? I highly recommend it. After all, Someone is trying to communicate with you.