This week we continue our
series on Rethinking Church. Our task this month is to take a fresh look at
what it means to be a church. Last week we looked at the fact that so many
Christian churches mistakenly think of themselves as a hotel for saints, when,
in fact, God calls us to be a hospital for sinners. Today we’ll examine another
subconscious metaphor that has distorted Christ’s church.
It seems to me that the vast majority of American
churches operate as if our chief purpose is to lure or attract people into our
buildings on Sunday mornings. If you look at the cover of our bulletin today,
you’ll see my somewhat crude attempt to visually depict what I call the “Magnet
metaphor.” This corrupt way of thinking has been affecting churches on a
subconscious level for decades. This morning, I want to see if this magnet
model stands up to biblical scrutiny.
If the church is a magnet with the purpose of sucking
more and more people into its building, then that would explain why churches do
things like hire a younger pastor in attempt to “bring in more young people.”
It’s also the magnet metaphor that leads churches to want to modernize their
music, thinking that a more contemporary service will be the key to fuller pews
on Sunday mornings. And it’s the magnet metaphor that is at work when a church
decides to build a huge new worship center or a Sunday school wing. The church
leaders are thinking “if we build it, they will come,” right?
I got very familiar with this misguided but prominent
metaphor when I was serving as the moderator of what’s known as the Mackinaw
Presbytery – a 42 church region within the Presbyterian denomination that
stretches from Traverse City to Alpena and all the way up through the entire
Upper Peninsula. It’s sort of the Presbyterian equivalent of the UCC’s United
Northern Association. Anyway, in my capacity as moderator, I traveled all
around that region visiting with churches, pastors, and church boards as a sort
of consultant. I can’t tell you how clear it became to me that churches
evaluated themselves – and each other - solely
on the basis of how many people were coming to their services on a Sunday
morning. It was like everything they did was a part of their attempt to get
what my friend likes to call: more “butts in the pews.”
Now let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with wanting
more people to worship with us on a Sunday morning! There is nothing wrong with
re-evaluating who our pastor is or what music we’re playing or anything that
might make our Sunday mornings more meaningful and our worship more powerful.
But if that is what we think we are here for – more people from out there coming in here on a Sunday morning – we can be sure that we’ve totally
ignored the life and teaching of Jesus.
The Mark 6 passage I presented a few minutes ago begins
with these critical words: “Calling the 12 to him, Jesus began to send them out…”
This is just five chapters in to the very first gospel. The calling and
gathering the disciples has hardly finished, and already Jesus is sending them
out! SENDING THEM OUT!
And what were the sent disciples supposed to do out
there? What were their instructions? Were they supposed to invite or coax
people to some big service in their home chapel? No…let’s listen in. Jesus
tells them: “Take nothing with you as you journey…” Then, Mark reports that the
twelve went out and preached, drove out demons, visited and healed the sick.
Then, here’s the part I love. The disciples go back to Jesus, to report to him
all the cool things they’d seen and experienced out there – out there where
they were BEING the church!
You see, folks, being a church is
NOT about bringing people into some building; it never has been! Being a church
is about getting OUT of the building and doing the very things Jesus did out there in the world! There’s a rhythm
to our lives as followers of Jesus, as a part of his church, and the lion’s
share of that rhythm is being sent; it’s going out to the highways and the
by-ways and wherever there are people who are hungry, thirsty, sick, lonely, or
in need.
And then, periodically, the rhythm
of following Jesus also requires us to pull away to rest and refresh. Jesus,
himself, says to all of his followers from time to time: “Come away with me, by
yourselves, to a quiet place and get some rest.” To some extent, that’s what
Sunday morning is. Sunday morning is NOT the church. This beautiful building in
which we gather weekly to worship is NOT the church. Sunday morning in this
place is our gathering time, our worship time. It’s a break in the action; the
time-out that is called during the game of life, when we come away for awhile
to get some rest, to celebrate the exciting work out there that has made us
tired, and to worship the One who makes it all possible.
I wish we followers of Jesus –
including me - would be a little more careful, a little more precise with our
words. I wish we would stop saying that on Sunday morning we’re “going to
church.” I wish we would stop referring to this building at 218 W. Second St.
as “the church.” What we should say is that on each and every Sabbath morn “we
come together to worship,” we “gather to worship.” Then, as we leave this worship
service, we should say, “It’s time to go back out there to BE the church.”
Words make a difference. They affect
the way we think. For decades and even centuries now, our words have reinforced
a false model, an un-biblical understanding of what it means to BE a church. The
magnet metaphor for what it means to be a church needs to be abandoned, buried,
put to rest – forever!
I had an experience just this week that confirmed how
important it is that we kill this magnet metaphor once and for all. There’s a
guy I know who has been struggling to get his feet on the ground. He’s a single
dad with a daughter just about Eloise’s age. He has worked so hard to get and stay
sober and get his life on track. I called him because I was thinking about him.
I come to find out he’s out of work, trapped in an isolated living situation
out in the sticks, and on top of all that, his car just died.
Almost immediately, do you know what he started to say to
me? He started apologizing for not making it to church lately! He went on and
on about how sorry he is that he hasn’t been able to make it here on Sunday. It
was incredibly clear to me how much the magnet metaphor had poisoned his
thinking where the church is concerned. The moment he determined that the
pastor of a church was calling him, his immediate assumption was that I must be
calling to find out why he hasn’t been here for the all-important Sunday morning
worship service.
Can you imagine? The dude has no job and no car; he lives
25 minutes from here, and his first thought when a pastor calls is that I must
be calling to bust his chops about not coming to Sunday worship! That’s the
fallout from too many years of the magnet model dominating the way people think
about church. Eventually, I just had to interrupt him. I said, “Bud, I’m not
calling so that you’ll come to worship on Sunday! I’m calling because my
friends and I want to BE the church for you and for your daughter, whether you
can ever make it here or not! There may come a day when you can come worship
with us on Sundays. But that day is NOT now. You’ve got much more pressing
concerns to address. Now is not the time for you to come to church; now is the
time for the church to come to you.”
As followers of Jesus, we are in a
constant flow of being sent and being gathered, being sent and being gathered.
Sunday morning worship is the gathering part. It’s a vitally important part,
and I’m so glad you are here. But the Sunday morning thing is a tiny part of
what it means to BE the church. It’s less than 1/7th when we do the
math, right? Mark 6 shows us that when Jesus’ attempts to gather the disciples
together for worship and rest were thwarted, he gave priority to meeting the
needs of a hungry world.
Mark tells us that the disciples weren’t too happy
when the needy crowds kept hounding them. They went to Jesus and said, “Rabbi, this
is a remote place and it’s already very late. Send the people
away so that they can go buy themselves something to eat.”
And you know what Jesus said,
right…? “No, I’m
not sending them away…You give them something to eat.” Why did Jesus say that…?
Because he had
compassion on the crowd; he saw them as sheep without a shepherd. WE’RE supposed
to feed them! WE are. And do you know why? Because THAT’S what a church DOES! THAT’S how
a church rolls. THAT’S what defines us as followers of Jesus.
The church of Jesus Christ is not a magnet that we hold
at the open door of this building, hoping to suck people in. The church is the
bridges we build with our actions out
there in the world, when we’re loving people, serving people, feeding
people, housing people, and doing all those things Jesus and his disciples did.
Thank you for gathering here with me today to worship and
to rethink what it means to be a church. I hope you’ll come back next week to
worship and gather and rethink church some more. But in the meantime, in these next
six days, I hope you’ll leave this building and BE the church – out there, in
the world. And if we all do THAT…we won’t need a magnet…Amen.
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