Post-Congregational Christianity

Recently, I endured a four-hour meeting of our church’s leadership team. It’s a monthly nightmare where everyone on this twelve-person team puts forward their ideas to “improve” the church by adding programs, fixing potential problems, tweaking this and that, disbursing financial support, and discussing the merits of strange new pursuits that might be the magic bullet to revitalize the church’s health. I am not exaggerating when I say that I think this group is the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine ever developed! It could go for days, as long as someone would put food/drink on the table and allow time for bathroom breaks.

I will be so glad when I’m off this ridiculous leadership treadmill. But this is what happens when “the church” moves beyond the New Testament model of intimate, relational gatherings for food and encouragement; and pursues life in the fast lane, with buildings, large weekly gatherings, massive programs, and the necessary infrastructure to manage it all with the attention these sort of things require.

Earlier that day, I met up with a brother in Christ who is pursuing the same like-minded journey that will eventually lead us “outside the box.” We didn’t have to “open in prayer,” conduct a devotional reading from the Scripture, attend to “old business,” follow a carefully-prescribed agenda, vote on whether we should sit inside or enjoy the sun on my patio. We just met together and encouraged one another in the Lord. The time flew without fighting sleep or counting ceiling tiles.

Have you ever heard or read an explanation of the following passage?

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

This recorded prophecy in Jeremiah 31:33-34 outlines several important distinctions of the “New Covenant” that God intended to bring to fulfillment. Our Father in heaven declared through the pen of Jeremiah Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an excellent video clip by Alan Roxburgh regarding “A Tale of Three Churches & A New Age Mall in Toronto.” Based on one of his earlier books, Reaching A New Generation. At the end of this brief clip, Roxburgh says,

I keep meeting all kinds of people who are tired of the “go to church” and “do the church thing” and be disconnected from what is actually happening in their neighborhoods and their communities. All kinds of people are asking, “How do we enter our local communities without needing to sell them anything, but just live among and be among, listen to stories, and begin to engage them with God’s story in a non-coercive way?”

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke on Social Justice and the Emerging New Age at Western Michigan University. Following that speech, he received a standing ovation before fielding a series of questions by WMU’s President Miller. In that Q & A, he declared:

We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing in Christ there is no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this. Now, I’m sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn’t have many of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform is to remove the yoke of segregation from its own body. Now, I’m not saying that society must sit down and wait on a spiritual and moribund church as we’ve so often seen. I think it should have started in the church, but since it didn’t start in the church, our society needed to move on. The church, itself, will stand under the judgement of God. Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community. The institution that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body. Read the rest of this entry »

Common misconceptions and clichés and false assumptions abound when such terms as “churchless Christian” or “post-congregational” or “free range believers” get introduced into a conversation. It’s understandable, in some respects, because most people equate faithful church attendance and being a good Christian. In their mind, there is NO category for followers of Jesus who neglect Sunday church meetings except for one…backslider. So if you don’t go anywhere on Sunday, then something is wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Smith writes:

Dressing only in our best on Sunday mornings is not a big deal. But it is symptomatic of a problem that is a big deal. People bring to church too often only their nice selves, attractive selves, dressed up selves. Leaving our real selves, the selves our families see, at home and bringing only our dressy selves to church risks turning church into two hours of “impression management.” Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Knight has put together an interesting blog post that you might enjoy reading. It triggered Fernando Gros to ask, “Is It Possible to be a Post-Congregational Baptist?“

When one’s life has been so focused within institutional Christianity (whatever you choose to call it), there is a predictable pattern or routine that recycles every seven days: Sunday worship services followed by an optional menu of mid-week events, such as prayer meetings, Bible study, choir rehearsal, men’s & women’s ministry meetings, church-based sporting events, children/youth activities, and small group meetings. Your spiritual commitment is measured by how many or how few of these events you can fit into your schedule; and church leaders never fail to push people into more and more activities, especially when they have a captive audience on Sunday mornings. I often remember how similar it seemed to going to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster, but having to endure twenty to thirty minutes of mind-numbing advertisements running up to the featured film. Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting title, isn’t it? I ran across an obscure article entitled Church Without Clergy by Christian Smith. He lists four problems with the clergy as a profession in the church:

1. God doesn’t intend such a profession to exist. There is simply and unequivocally no biblical mandate or justification for the profession of clergy as we know it. In fact, the New Testament points to a very different way of doing church and pastoral ministry.
2. It crushes “body life.” We can see in the New Testament that God doesn’t intend church to be a formal association to which a rank-and-file membership belongs by virtue of paying dues and attending meetings, an association which is organized, guided, and governed by a professional leader (and, in larger organizations, by an administrative bureaucracy). Yet that is exactly what most churches are.
3. It is fundamentally self-defeating. Its stated purpose is to nurture spiritual maturity in the church-a valuable goal. In actuality, however, it accomplishes the opposite by nurturing a permanent dependence of the laity on the clergy. Clergy become to their congregations like parents whose children never grow up, like therapists whose clients never become healed, like teachers whose students never graduate. The existence of a full-time, professional minister makes it too easy for church members not to take responsibility for the on-going life of the church. And why should they? That’s the job of the pastor (so the thinking goes). But the result is that the laity remain in a state of passive dependence.
4. What it does to the people in that profession. Being a member of the clergy as we know it is difficult. Doing it very well is almost impossible. Yet good-hearted men and women, convinced that they are serving God in this way, admirably pour their lives into this task. What they encounter as professional clergy, however, is stress, frustration, and burn-out.

Through a bit of research, I discovered that the article was published in 1993 as a chapter in a book, Going to the Root: Nine Proposals for Radical Church Renewal. Unfortunately, it’s Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, we must have repeated the chorus “I could sing of your love forever” until I finally just sat down in absolute disgust. Arghhhh! Amazingly the “worship leader” and the band just continued to play and sing, seemingly happy to be punishing everyone with eight to ten repetitions of each chorus. The only positive was that we sang most of the “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs after my message…not before.

You know, it’s one thing to sing songs like “Great is Thy Faithfulness” or “In Christ Alone,” because they are composed of realities that are rooted deep within the pages of Scripture. I can sing them even when life sucks and even when I don’t “feel” particularly like worshiping God at the moment, simply because I’m singing Truth. The Apostle Paul said, “Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others Read the rest of this entry »