Pastoral Job Description: Shared Church

Suppose a church begins acting as an assembly of priests (see previous two blogs). What, then, does a pastor do? Will practicing the priesthood of all believers impair pastoral work? Might the fear of a reduced role discourage pastors from sharing the priesthood? Since the Reformation, Christians have spoken of the priesthood of all believers. Spoken of? Yes. Practiced? Not so much.

Daryl McCarthy, with the Forum of Christian Leaders, says, “Tragically, the priesthood of all believers is the one Reformation doctrine that has never been fully embraced by evangelical churches.” And Dr. Art Lindsley adds, “The priesthood of all believers has been the most neglected central teaching of the Reformation.”

But why?

Might pastoral job descriptions be putting a damper on practicing a shared priesthood?

I just reviewed a few such job descriptions offered as models. They have the pastor doing nearly everything in gathered-church meetings: preaching, leading worship, administering ordinances, and officiating at baptisms, weddings, and funerals. One job description has the pastor heading all boards and committees to develop the vision for the church, supervising staff, providing pastoral care, and so on. The first sentence in one model said: “The pastor is to be the spiritual leader of the church.” Not one of the spiritual leaders, but the spiritual leader.

In most cases, pastors get paid to do what these job descriptions call for. Those in a congregation typically receive no compensation for doing church-related work. So, paychecks add pressure on pastors to carry out their extensive to-do lists. Any surprise so many burn out?

What, I wondered, might a pastoral job description look like if it were written for a church that wanted to actually live out the priesthood of all believers? My pondering prompted me to jot down a list—practices that would connect the dots between how the New Testament pictures church leadership and congregational life in the 21st century. Would the following role description fit every setting? No. But I hope it will stimulate some creative thinking:

 Job-Description: Shared-Church Pastor

Job Title: Pastor/Elder

Reports to: Board of Elders and Church Body

Job Summary: The pastor/elder, coequally with fellow-elders, is responsible for watching over and nurturing the life of the church body and for preparing those within it to serve in both the gathered and scattered church.

Primary Job Responsibilities:

Sets an example for other believers by:

• Maintaining a vital relationship with Christ and with others in both the gathered and the scattered church.
• Living a life—in attitudes, actions, and speech—God would approve as a model for other believers in the church body.

Together with fellow-elders, ensures that the gathered church is fed regularly with sound biblical teaching and guards the church against false teaching.

Shares with fellow-elders the work of helping those within the church body to identify and  develop their God-given spiritual and natural gifts.

Helps to recognize and train others within the church body who are gifted and motivated to serve as elders, to preach and teach, and to lead the gathered church in public prayer.

Oversees the setup and maintenance of:

• A listing of those in the church body with ministries in these five sectors: family, school, marketplace, neighborhood, and hobbies/recreation.
• A church-wide prayer ministry for those ministering in the five sectors.

Sets aside one day a week to spend “on location” with those in the church body who minister in one or more of the five sectors, gathering their prayer needs and hearing their stories of how they see God working.

Coaches believers in writing and presenting personal testimonies.

Structures gathered-church meetings in such a way that they provide opportunities for:

• Those with teaching gifts to develop and exercise them.
• Those who have been prepared to do so to lead in public prayer.
• Christians to report on what God is doing in their ministry sectors during the week.
• Public prayer for the issues and opportunities Christians are facing in their workplaces, families, neighborhoods, and other areas of their weekday lives.

Invites and helps to prepare others in the church body to baptize believers and to take the lead in overseeing the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

Seeks to include personal testimonies in gatherings for baptisms, weddings, and memorial services.

Pastoral Role Enhanced

So, practicing the priesthood of all believers in a shared-church context does not set aside or reduce the importance of pastoral service. Rather, the pastoral role becomes even more important as catalyst and multiplier, releasing the gifts and ministries of others.

In our traditional non-practice of the all-believer priesthood, church governance language often says that elders, boards, deacons, etc., “shall assist the pastor.” Shared-church practice turns that upside down. Pastors/elders assist other priests to develop and carry out their respective ministries in the gathered and scattered church. In doing so, they fulfill Eph. 4:12.

According to Paul, pastors—along with other church leaders—are “to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.”

Shared Church: An Assembly of Priests (Part Two)

In Part One: a key step toward helping Christians practice shared church includes teaching them to self-identify as priests. But what do priests—those not paid to serve as church officials—do? Part Two takes on this question.

Priests Live and Work in God’s Presence

This tops the to-do list of the New Testament priest. In English versions of the Old Testament, the word priest translates the Hebrew word kohen. One scholar linked kohen to an Arabic root word meaning to draw near. Moses wrote that non-priests “must not go near” the Tabernacle (Num. 18:22). Only those from the priestly tribe could approach the immediate presence of God—and even they could do so only by following a  complex set of rules.

But because Jesus died, rose, and returned to heaven, he has become our wide-open doorway to God. Jesus, our great high priest (Heb. 4:14), has drawn near to the Father. And because God has placed those who trust Christ “in him,” we too may draw near. The New Testament even urges us to do just that: “Since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God” (Heb. 10:21-22). So, the first thing New Testament priests do is to live out our lives in the presence of God. We do so mostly in our homes, our neighborhoods, and our workplaces.

Priests Offer Sacrifices

Sacrifices? Aren’t they obsolete in the 21st century? Old Covenant priests served fellow Israelites by killing their animals and hoisting the carcasses onto burning altars. But what inward state did these outward actions reveal? A sacrifice meant giving up something valuable (an animal) for something considered even more valuable (being in right relationship with God). When Jesus said to his Father, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Lk. 22:42), he was giving up his own valuable self-interest for something more valuable—the purposes of his Father. We Christian priests offer sacrifices when we say no to self-interest and take up our cross to follow and serve Jesus (Matt. 16:24).  

Offering sacrifices flows out of living and working in God’s presence. Peter puts it this way: “You . . . are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet. 2:5). What “spiritual sacrifices” can we modern priests offer? The New Testament provides some examples:

• Praise and thanks (Heb. 13:15). Sacrificing time and attention to express our love for and gratitude to God.
• Care for the needs of others (Phil. 4:18). Putting the well-being of others ahead of our own wants and wishes.
• Faith (Phil. 2:17). Trusting God’s promises rather than relying on our own plans for self-rescue.
• Physical bodies (Rom. 12:1). Using the strength and energy of our brains, limbs, and organs to carry out God’s purposes for people, animals, and plants here on earth.

Priests Pray for Others and Hear their Confessions

Our traditions can make it seem as if these roles belong only to officials in the institutional church. For example, take the ministry of confession. Limiting Christian confessions to a formal “confession box” misses the point. Or take the ministry of praying in public. In some churches, just one person—the pastor—offers all the prayers in a Sunday meeting. In The Problem of Wineskins, Howard Snyder warns, “If the pastor is a superstar, the church is an audience, not a body.” However, New Testament one-anothering includes both prayer and hearing confessions: “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (Jas. 5:16).

Priests Serve Fellow Priests

The Old Testament paints a word-picture that helps us see another role of New Testament priests. The Holy Place in the Tabernacle would have been pitch-dark except for the lampstand that held seven lighted lamps. Fueled by oil, these lamps needed constant care. “Aaron and his sons are to keep the lamps burning before the Lord from evening till morning" (Ex. 27:21). Lamp-tending priests refilled the bowls with oil. They also trimmed and replaced the wicks.

Today, we are both priests and lamps. We need to tend and to be tended. When sin entered, our world went into spiritual blackout. Jesus, who came as the Light of the World, has made us the world's illuminators. He now lives in us so that we can shine his light into this pitch-dark world (Matt. 5:14). But, like those oil lamps, each of us needs constant tending and refueling: being prayed for, encouraged, built up, strengthened, comforted, refreshed, instructed, warned, and even—occasionally—rebuked. Without mutual “priesting,” our lights can flicker out.

We carry out these priestly roles in our weekday lives—but not only then. On Sundays, in churches that adopt a shared-church meeting format, we may also serve in the ways described above. As Greg Ogden puts it in The New Reformation, “We are priests to each other.”

"When you come together, everyone . . . " (I Cor. 14:26). In other words, we gather as an assembly of priests, not as an audience of spectators who simply look on while someone else carries out our priestly roles.

Shared Church: An Assembly of Priests (part one)

Think back to the Easter gathering of your church. What term would most Christians there use to identify themselves? Some may hold unbiblical self-identities. Seeing myself as “laity” can silence me in a church meeting. As one Christian put it, “I'm just a layperson. I don't think they'd listen to me.” Perceiving ourselves this way works against shared church.

Many might say, “I’m a child of God.” This offspring image calls attention to the vertical relationship with God. Others may see themselves as “saints.” Still others might say, “I’m a disciple,” an apprentice to Jesus. All three are biblical identities, but none points us toward one-anothering.

Thankfully, the New Testament also provides identities that remind us of our horizontal calling to serve each other. For example, we are “members of one body” (Eph. 4:25); body parts work for each other. We also need to dust off that long-neglected New Testament word, priest. Martin Luther said, “This word ‘priest’ should become as common as the word Christian.” Luther based this on Scripture. Peter calls the Christian community both a “holy priesthood” and a “royal priesthood” (I Pet. 2:5, 9). John says Jesus has made us “priests” (Rev. 1:6).

Seeing ourselves as priests would help blaze the trail to shared-church meetings. Not only does the word priest express our relationship with God, it also speaks of our relationship with people. Melchizedek, the first priest mentioned in the Bible, served vertically as “priest of God Most High.” But he also served horizontally by bringing Abraham bread, wine, and a blessing (Gen. 14:18-20).

I recently asked those in my Bible study group if they ever thought of themselves as priests. Most said no. Why do so few Christians see ourselves in the priestly role? At least two reasons come to mind. First, the word priest carries centuries of heavy baggage. The term is packed with Old Testament images—slaughtering animals, wearing scented clothing, burning sacrifices, and so on. In our time, we associate “priest” with clerical collars, cassocks, and silk skullcaps. Because we connect priest with images like that, most of us can’t identify.  

Second, we associate priests with church officials. For nearly all in my Bible study group, the word priest brought to mind religious leaders. The thesaurus in the Word program offers pastor and minister as synonyms for priest. By whatever name, a clergypersons' work looks like priest-work. As Greg Ogden puts it in The New Reformation, “Even in the Protestant tradition the minister has a priestly aura. . . . All pastors; have experienced a sense of being treated differently because of their priestly position.”

Coaching a congregation to self-identify as priests will help prepare them to practice shared church. But, in the New Testament sense, how are we to live out being members of the royal or holy priesthood? How do such priests spend their time? Most will not serve on a paid church staff. The great majority will work in non-ecclesiastical roles—as electricians, homemakers, software engineers, secretaries, or what have you. Few will wear unusual clothing or answer to religious titles.

In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I write: “Although Martin Luther and other reformers recovered this truth of the priesthood of believers, in the centuries since then—even in Protestant churches—it has gotten far more lip-service than legwork. The doctrine shapes our church meetings about as much as an exhibit of horse-drawn buggies in a museum affects our daily drive to work. In When You Come Together, Amy S. Anderson writes, ‘Many pastors who teach about the priesthood of all believers fail to train their people to do priestly ministry.’”

But what does that “priestly ministry” look like? In Part Two, we will explore the roles of New Covenant priests.  

Resurrection Day Dialogue

The most pivotal day in earth’s history sparked an intense exchange of dialog in the circle of Jesus’s followers. He had, before his death, left them with a new command calling them to lives of one-anothering. And now, on the very day of his rising, they engage each other in a flurry of back-and-forth conversations, full of questions and answers. God had acted decisively. How could they help but hash out its meaning among themselves?

At the cross, they had seen the life leave Jesus’s body. On Friday, some had wrapped the corpse and carried it into the newly cut rock tomb. But now, on this first day of the week, others report actually seeing Jesus—in his body—alive, well, and walking around. And as people always do, they and their companions begin sifting the evidence to grasp the significance of what has just happened.

Early Sunday morning a few women head for the tomb with spices for Jesus’s body. The dialogue begins as they walk along: “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mk. 16:3). But upon arriving, they find the doorway wide open—someone has already moved the heavy stone. An angel, after explaining that Jesus had risen and left, invites them to enter and see for themselves.

Mary Magdalene, heartbroken, lingers at the tomb. Jesus, at first unrecognized, asks her two questions. She responds. He replies, telling her to take the news to the disciples. She goes and fills them in. Later in the day, without identifying himself, Jesus falls into step with two others as they trudge toward the village of Emmaus. This begins an extended dialogue in which Jesus and they exchange questions and replies. At the dinner table, as soon as they recognize him, Jesus disappears, prompting them to ask each other: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" (Lk. 24:32).

Although it is getting late, they can’t keep this encounter to themselves. So, they make the seven-mile trek from Emmaus back to Jerusalem where they tell the apostles and those with them what they have just witnessed. The group is “still talking” (Lk. 24:36), dialoguing, about this report when Jesus himself suddenly appears among them. He makes several statements and asks them at least two questions.

Clearly, the one-anothering on Resurrection Sunday takes the form of dialogue. In chapter 24, Luke records words and phrases such as: talking with each other; discussed these things with each other; asked each other; talking about this; told; and asked. Thus, the birthing of the Church takes place within a context of discussion, conversation, give-and-take. The understanding of the Resurrection event comes about through a process in which many take part.

On the day he rose bodily from the grave, the Master Teacher did not call his followers into a large room and explain what had just happened in a lengthy monologue. Instead, he made snippet appearances to an individual, a group of two, and then a larger group. Some saw an empty tomb and heard angels describe the absence of Jesus’s body. Their understanding of this hinge of history grew as this one and that one shared with the rest what they had seen and heard. The puzzle pieces started to fit together. Participatory body life had begun.

In Preaching as Dialogue, Jeremy Thomson writes, “Adults need to learn how to articulate their faith for themselves, and how to apply and work it out in their own lives, interacting with preachers and fellow church members. . . . In most official church life, there is hardly any space for such activity; there is little room for assumptions to be challenged, presuppositions to be punctured or true thought to begin. It is as people have the opportunity to put their own words together that they become conscious of their thoughts and realize new paths of behavior.”

Forty days after rising from the dead, Jesus returned to his Father in heaven and poured out the Holy Spirit, a gift not for just a few but for all in the Body of Christ. As on Resurrection Day, the members of his body—in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces—witness what the Risen Christ is still doing through the activity of the Holy Spirit. This one or that one may see and hear just a snippet. But when they gather together and tell one another what they are witnessing, their knowledge of the Risen Christ takes on a fullness not otherwise possible. This is shared church.

Clarifying Our Calling to Ministry

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.” If only that old proverb were true. But words can harm us, especially when distorted. Our religious vocabulary can barricade us from moving toward shared church. Take the words calling and ministry. As Paul Stevens says in The Other Six Days, “almost the only people who speak of being ‘called of God’ are ‘full-time’ missionaries and pastors.” It seems God calls just a few special people to serve in official church roles. The rest don’t see themselves as having any calling. Why not, then, just sit back, watch, and enjoy listening to those God has called?

So, preparing Christians for participatory church gatherings will require teaching on God’s calling. “Calling,” writes Os Guinness in The Call, “is not what it is commonly thought to be. It has to be dug out from under the rubble of ignorance and confusion.” The word ministry, too, has gotten buried under centuries of debris. Part of the muddled thinking comes about because calling and ministry often show up as conjoined twins: “I was an engineer before God called me into ministry.” Are Christian engineers uncalled? Are they not called into ministry?

Paul and Peter repeatedly use the phrase “you were called” when writing to Christians in general. We become Christ-followers only in response to God’s summons, his invitation, his “Come to me.” God’s calling initiates our life of faith. So, every believer is called. Wrapped inside that calling is a second calling—to a life of ministry. To minister, in New Testament Greek, means to serve. Paul wrote that God gave the church its leaders “to prepare all God's people for the work of Christian service [ministry]” (Eph. 4:12, TEV). 

If, week in and week out, the ecclesiastical professional shoulders most if not all of the spiritual workload during a Sunday gathering, the New Testament concept of a shared ministry gets blurred and even blocked. The Message paraphrase paints the participatory church vividly: “When you gather for worship, each one of you be prepared with something that will be useful for all: Sing a hymn, teach a lesson, tell a story, lead a prayer, provide an insight” (I Cor. 14:26). Paul wrote this letter to the whole church in Corinth. So, “each one of you” means everyone in the meeting was to come prepared to minister to—to serve—all the others.

Our church traditions, though, have conditioned us to think that only the ordained or those on a church payroll are called into ministry. Os Guinness says “there is not a single instance in the New Testament of God’s special call to anyone into a paid occupation or into the role of a religious professional.” Check his statement out for yourself. Guinness adds: “Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. . . . Our secondary calling . . . is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live and act entirely for him.”

As I say in Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, “. . . getting our vocabulary right is critically important, because the terms we use become the tools we think with. Just as a hammer is the wrong tool for fixing a leaky pipe, the wrong word can never repair a damaging idea. Does this mean we should expunge the word ministry from our lexicon? Not at all. Instead we need to extend ministry (service) so that it applies to all forms of God-honoring work. In addition to the ministry of the Word, there is the ministry of education, the ministry of construction, the ministry of automotive repair, and on it goes.”

What, then, is the work—secondary calling—of pastors and teachers? It is to serve fellow believers by helping them discover and develop their own secondary callings, their own unique works of ministry. We can see this pattern in Paul’s instructions to Timothy: teach others who will teach others who will teach others (II Tim. 2:2). If we actually practiced this, think of the spiritual workforce it would unleash in and from the church!

Recently I was asked to bring the sermon in a church meeting. My text came from Romans 6 on the truth of our having been set free in Christ. To illustrate how God liberates us from sin’s rule in our lives, I invited a young woman (I’ll call her “Joan”) to share in the message by telling her story. She related how she had gone virtually blind by the age of four. Starting out from an abusive home life, she descended into a life of addiction. Along the way, Joan gave birth to five children, losing custody of them all. Although initially resisting God’s call to faith in Christ, she finally yielded. She began devouring Scripture and experienced God’s deliverance from her former prison. Joan told that she now has a job and for the first time is able to pay child support to those caring for her children.

After the benediction, many from the congregation rushed to surround and thank Joan for her testimony. For weeks afterward, I kept hearing church people talk about what she had shared. Just the other day I learned she will soon give her testimony in another church. In the traditional, distorted sense of being “called into ministry,” Joan never was. Yet there is no doubt that God has called her. And he has clearly given her a ministry.

Church congregations everywhere are filled with Christians who are experiencing God at work in their families, their neighborhoods, and workplaces. Some will need coaching to learn how to tell their stories effectively to their church families. But, like Joan, when they are given opportunities to share what God is doing, believers are built up and God is glorified.

Recovering an Unclaimed Entitlement

Moving from passive to participatory church meetings involves seeing from a new viewpoint. Preparing God’s people for shared church calls for teaching the truth that regular, non-ordained Christians can hear God speak. If I think my peers in the pew have no spiritual insights worth hearing, I will oppose the idea of shared church. So, any transition in that direction needs to overcome the barrier of what we might call an “unclaimed entitlement.”

An entitlement remains unclaimed when people do not know it rightfully belongs to them. Financially, tens of billions of dollars go unclaimed. Spiritually, many who regularly attend church miss out on an entitlement that belongs to every Christ-follower: the privilege of hearing God speak. For some, the idea of hearing from God is a sign of having gone loony tunes. An old joke says: talking to God is prayer; hearing God talk to you is schizophrenia.

Yet Scripture leaves no doubt that the children of God are entitled both to the privilege of speaking to and hearing from the triune God. The Son: “My sheep,” Jesus said, “listen to my voice” (Jn. 10:27). The Father: “Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me” (Jn. 6:45). The Holy Spirit: “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (Jn. 14:26).

Why does this entitlement remain unclaimed? Why do God’s people often remain hearing-impaired? Let’s look at three possible reasons. First, some may think God stopped talking after the last book in the New Testament. I have sometimes heard long-time churchgoers say, “I just wish God would speak to people today, like he did in Bible times.” Second, some believe God speaks to them only through the clergy. One man asked God to speak to him personally through the pastor, so that whatever God wanted him to hear would come that way. Third, others think hearing God speak means hearing an audible voice from heaven.

In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I quote the following from Dallas Willard: “One of the things I began to realize over time is that for many years God spoke to me and told me to do things, and I didn’t know it was him. I just thought it was me thinking” (The Allure of Gentleness).

 Willard continues: “I believe the single most important thing I have to do is to encourage people to believe that God will speak to them and that they can come to understand and recognize his voice. . . . God speaks constantly to people, but most of them don’t know what’s happening. . . . Now, sometimes God does strange things to get people’s attention, but the fundamental way God speaks to us is by causing thoughts in our mind that we come to learn to have a characteristic quality, content, and spirit about them. . . . I don’t think we should rule out any options, but we should understand that God’s preferred mode is to address willing hearers by the thoughts that are given to their minds, the ‘still small voice’ of I Kings 19:12 (KJV).

Our culture can condition us to see reality only in terms of visible, physical matter. If we believe that to be true, the idea that God speaks to us in our thoughts can seem ludicrous. Yet people around the world rely on invisible signals from cell towers to communicate with each other. Why, then, should it seem impossible for the unseen God, who is Spirit, to send signals to our spirits in a way that is neither visible nor audible?

We all swim in an atmosphere brimming over with “broadcasts” from the spirit world. Some of these messages come from the good Spirit: “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children” (Rom. 8:16). But some thoughts come from evil spirits: “In later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons” (I Tim 4:1). Therefore, we believers need to know how to sift out the true from the false broadcasts coming at us from the spirit world. “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (I John 4:1).

Knowing Scripture, having Jesus’s words “remain in us,” is the key to recognizing God’s voice and his “accent.” God will not contradict what he has revealed in his written Word. In a shared-church meeting, believers who have claimed their entitlement and have learned to discern God’s voice, can help each other sort out and evaluate the messages. Any church always stands in danger of misleading broadcasts from the spirit realm. As Paul warned the elders from Ephesus: “Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard” (Acts 20:30-31).

Standing guard is the task, not of just one member, but of the whole body of Christ. This makes preparing God’s people to hear his voice a vital part of equipping them to do the work of ministry. Then, within a shared-church meeting format, they will be free to serve one another with mutual discernment.

Activating Unused Church-Building Tools

In church-as-usual, the majority sit, watch, and listen as onlookers, sightseers, bystanders. Traditional formats have taught most in the room to stay silent while a few others exercise their gifts from the platform. Old habits die hard. So, any movement toward a shared-church agenda must be done gradually and with care. In this and the next few blogs, I’ll explore how to help prepare God’s people to meet in more participatory ways.

What must benchwarmers have to become active players in a church meeting? They will need a new (and perhaps untapped) source of strength, energy, and wisdom—a source God supplies for Christ-followers. Because Jesus died, God has forgiven our sins. Because Jesus returned to his Father, he has given us the live-in Holy Spirit. Now and then in the Old Covenant, the Holy Spirit “came upon” people to empower them for special tasks. In the New Covenant, God has “poured out” his Spirit on his servants (Acts 2: 17, 33). The Holy Spirit is actually “in” them (Jn. 14:17). How does all this relate to shared church?

This Holy Resident moves in bearing gifts. Not gifts in the sense of Christmas presents given to please the receivers. Instead, these gifts are more like the tools contractors provide for their crews. God’s Spirit gives his gifts so that we may join Jesus in completing his construction project—the building-up of the Body of Christ. As Paul urged the believers in the church at Corinth, “try to excel in gifts that build up the church” (I Cor. 14:12). In their church meetings, they were to bring out their gift-tools and use them “for the strengthening of the church” (v. 26).

That worked in New Testament churches. But today, thanks to centuries of learned passivity in church meetings, many believers have little or no idea of what their Spirit-given gifts may be, let alone how to use them. Back in 2009, the Barna Group, specialists in conducting research in churches and among Christians, reported their findings from a survey on spiritual gifts. They found that “between those who do not know their gift (15%), those who say they don’t have one (28%) and those who claimed gifts that are not biblical (20%), nearly two-thirds of the self-identified Christian population who claim to have heard about spiritual gifts have not been able to accurately apply whatever they have heard or what the Bible teaches on the subject to their lives.”

What explains this ignorance of spiritual gifts and the inability to use them? In some cases, the lack of clear teaching may lie at the root of the problem. But another factor also plays a major part. How much opportunity does the typical church meeting offer for practicing the use of the Holy Spirit’s gifts? The saying, “Use it or lose it,” may shed some light here. Non-use of our gifts can surely cause us to lose sight of them.

In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I say, “Imagine the results if construction workers were given cordless drills, pneumatic nail guns, and circular saws and told how the tools worked—but without any opportunity to practice boring holes, driving nails, or cutting two-by-fours. An apprenticeship in carpentry includes both teaching about the tools as well as hands-on experience in using them. Discipleship in following Jesus and learning to help build his church should also include carefully structured opportunities to practice using the Spirit-given gifts.”

But the traditional non-participatory church meeting encourages believers to leave their gifts in the unopened tool box. In his book, The Reconstruction of the Church—On What Pattern? E. Stanley Jones wrote: 

“The very setup of the ordinary church tends to produce the anonymous. The congregation is supposed to be silent and receptive and the pastor is supposed to be outgoing and aggressive. That produces by its very makeup the spectator and the participant. . . . It produces the recessive, the ingrown, the nonconributive, and the parasite. Men and women who during the week are molders of opinion, directors of large concerns, directors of destinies are expected to be putty on Sunday, and are supposed to like it. They have little responsibility, hence make little response, except, perhaps, ‘I enjoyed your sermon.’ They have little to do, hence they do little.”

God gave the church leaders to help Christ-followers learn how to use their gift-tools in his church-construction project. As Eph. 4:12 puts it, “Their responsibility is to equip God's people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ” (NLT). Equipping Christians to find and use their gifts will require teaching. But it will also call for providing constant opportunity to practice using those Spirit-given tools.

Shared church happens when teachers not only instruct but also share speaking time with other members of the Body of Christ. Where else will believers learn to vocalize their commitment to Christ, to develop the connection between their voices and their faith?

Planting Shared Churches in Brazil

Suppose someone were to develop new software called “Question Detector.” If you were to use it  before, during, and after the sermon on a given Sunday in your congregation, how many questions would the program uncover in the pews or chairs? More importantly, how many of those questions would remain unasked and unaddressed as the meeting ended?

In his blog, Dave Simpson, a pastor in Maryland, asked: “Where did we ever get the idea that Christians shouldn’t ask questions about their faith? . . . We may not be putting inquirers on the rack . . . anymore, but our spoken and unspoken attitudes toward questions are driving people away.”

Church Discussions in Sao Paulo

In doing the research for my book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I interviewed Jane Hawkins. She and her husband, Pete, had planted the Sampa Community Church in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The main teaching for the congregation came by means of DVDs (with subtitles for Portuguese speakers) from Andy Stanley, pastor of the Northpoint Community Church in Atlanta, GA. After the 35-40-minute message, the congregation divided into small groups to discuss what they had heard. In time, the Sampa Church hired a teaching pastor. But the people insisted on keeping the after-sermon discussion period.

The Hawkins have planted 2 other churches using the same approach—messages by Stanley followed by the conversational interaction time immediately afterward. To prompt discussion, the Hawkins use modified questions supplied by Northpoint Ministries. To prevent the risk of any arguments over theology or having to publicly correct someone, they make certain the questions are experiential. As each meeting ends, Pete wraps up the discussion, repeats worthwhile comments, ties everything back to the message, and closes in prayer.

Questions for God

The other day, in response to my blog on the importance of questions, Jane wrote with news from their most recently planted church in Sao Jose dos Campos. At a church gathering earlier that week, she had invited the people to write out their responses to this question: “If you could ask God a question, what would it be?” The results surprised her. “These were mostly Christians,” she wrote, “and yet, look at the questions we got.”

• Why do people feel so lonely that they have to believe in God? Does God really exist?
• If a person doesn’t have faith or believe, will God forgive them at the end? I mean… will he show them the truth and give them a chance to save themselves?
• What’s the difference between God’s permission and God’s plan?
• Why did God change people’s languages at Babel?
• Does God really love everyone independent of their religion or belief?
• Why does God stay silent when you are living a difficult moment? You pray, pray, and nothing happens. Why? Tell me!
• How was God created?
• Is God one person or three? Why do Christians believe that Jesus is also God? What about the Holy Spirit?
• If the Bible was written by humans, how can I believe it is inspired by God?
• If there are so many religions, why do you preach that Christianity is the right one?

Jane said: “I knew during the church discussion no one would call out their question for God. So at the end of the 15-minute discussion period, I read out that list. The room went quiet, because they were questions so many of us could relate to, and they were so honest.”  Pete and Jane decided to focus in on the first question and open the meeting up to discuss it. They deliberately chose NOT to have a pastor give the "right" answer, but to let the "ordinary" people themselves make comments.

“Revolutionary. Community-Building”

“Wow,” wrote Jane, “it was powerful. A girl from Estonia talked about life under the Soviet Union where they were taught there is no God, then they became independent and missionaries of all kinds came, and 'Now, I am still trying to figure it out.'  Two guys quoted from apologist William Lane Craig. One person talked about the wonders of creation that testify to a Creator. She said this planet, space, and the animal kingdom all testify that they were designed. One person said he had had a prayer answered that week.”

Jane concluded: “All that to say—doing this sort of discussion after the message is revolutionary and community-building. It engages everyone.” Well, almost everyone. One Christian left the fellowship  because the whole-church discussion time made him uncomfortable. Jane believes he was more at ease in the traditional church of his childhood. “He is shy,” she said, “and doesn’t mix with people—not visitors, not lost people, not even other Brazilian Christians.”

In his book, Partners in Preaching, Reuel L. Howe, describes the interplay between questions and responses: “Dialogical preaching . . . is a two-way give-and-take; it is a partnership. In dialogical preaching we need the question and the answer. The question awaits the answer, and the answer needs the guidance of the question. The preacher is, so to speak, master-of-ceremonies in the dialogue between question and answer.”

I doubt that question-detecting software will be available anytime soon. No matter. We don’t need it. By simply adopting a shared-church format, leaders will find that church people are eager to ask their pressing questions. The askings will come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. As Jane Hawkins found, many will come as surprises. Some will require I-don’t-know-but-will get-back-to-you responses. But the payoff will come in the form of increased relevance, as the timeless truths of the Gospel sync with the real-life concerns of contemporary Christians.

Shared Church Takes On Monday Stress

Where is your church on Monday?

No, I don’t mean the building at the corner of First and Main. I’m talking about the church—the people, the Body of Christ. Weekdays, much of your church scatters to work in hardware stores, classrooms, government agencies, sales offices, repair shops, and so on.

In your church, how many working people regularly show up on Sunday? You can easily make a rough estimate. For example, in the U.S., around 63 percent of those 16 and older serve in the labor force. So if your church has 100 people in that age range, nearly two-thirds may spend most prime-time hours in the work world.

What might these fellow believers be going through on the job? The American Institute of Stress (AIS) says, “Numerous studies show that job stress is far and away the major source of stress for American adults and that it has escalated progressively over the past few decades.” Rising  quotas. Too few workers. Coercion from demanding bosses. Toxic fellow employees. Killer overtime schedules. All these and more help explain why Gallup has found that 70 percent of American workers are either not engaged or disengaged on the job.

Created (and Re-Created) to Work

Does the church—do its people—have any responsibility here? Let’s see how the New Testament speaks to this issue. For starters, consider what it says about why God made us into new creations in Christ: “For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10).

No, we are not saved by good works. We are saved by faith--for good works. This Greek word translated as “works” is not a stained-glass, churchy word. It includes the everyday get-your-hands-dirty work of weekdays. Paul used the verb form of the same word when said, “We work hard with our own hands” (I Cor. 4:12). It’s the word he used to say that former thief should “work, doing something with his own hands” (Eph. 4:28). It’s the word he used to tell the Thessalonian believers, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands” (I Thess. 4:11).

Put all this together. Why did God form us in Christ? Not only to join him in heaven someday but also to do good work on earth here and now. Not only good church work but also good work that will help his creation and our fellow creatures thrive. Good work that will demonstrate the difference it makes when we work as new creations in Christ. The labor of each Christian puts God’s own artisanship on display (we are his "workmanship"). So the way we do our work matters greatly.

Mending Wounds from Workplace Stress

Now relate this to shared church. As AIS says “job stress is far and away the major source of stress.” Are Christians exempt from this kind of workplace hassle and tension? Hardly. Just as the post-sin lives of Adam and Eve involved thorns, thistles, sweat, and pain (Gen. 3), we still work in a fallen world. In such a setting, our work depletes and frays us. So Christians in the labor force regularly need three kinds of repair work the New Testament calls on all of us to do for each other. When disheartened, they need to be encouraged. When exhausted, they need to be strengthened. And when knocked down, they need to be built up.

I’ve regularly observed traditional church services for three-quarters of a century. And from what I’ve seen, platform performances typically leave little if any time or space for one-anothering. More than half the people present likely spend their weekdays working among people who will not—and cannot—encourage, strengthen, or build them up. But even on Sundays, among fellow Christ-followers, the damage they’ve sustained in the work world is rarely attended to.  

Shared Church Frees Up One-Anothering

That’s why shared church, which opens doors for New Testament one-anothering, is so important. Working Christians need to hear encouraging accounts from other working believers who are experiencing God’s sustaining presence on the job. In my book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I include  this quotation by Alan and Eleanor Kreider from their book, Worship and Mission after Christendom:

“If we receive no reports from the front in our congregations, we are in trouble. Without testimonies we experience a drought, a nutritional deficit for healthy Christian living. And the dominant cultural narratives take over. God seems powerless and inactive. And Christians who do see evidence of the missional activities of God in our time may only whisper about it in the church’s hallways or discuss it during the week in house groups or on the telephone—but not in worship services.”

Of course, those who spend their weekdays in the workplace are not the only ones who need to be strengthened, encouraged, and built up. So do single moms. Those battling cancer. Spouses who are struggling in their marriage relationships. And believers coping with many other situations. All of us need to hear from each other stories of how God is at work in our scattered-church lives. Those on the front lines who have seen God deliver can best refresh others who are struggling in similar arenas.

Without using the term "shared church," the author of Hebrews wrote about our need for it. The instructions are just as relevant today as they were 2,000 years ago: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds [literally, 'works']. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb 10:24-25). That Day is even nearer now than when the author penned those words. This makes moving toward shared church an urgent concern.

A Favorite Tool of Jesus

Think back. In the past year, how many times have you sat in a church service in which people were invited to ask questions? The previous blog quoted from You Lost Me, in which David Kinnaman says, “Fully one-third of young Christians (36 percent) agree that ‘I don’t feel that I can ask my most pressing life questions in church.’”

Questions Begin Early

Why do toddlers and preschoolers ask so many questions? Because, instinctively, they know they can learn by doing so. Why do people die? Where do babies come from? How do birds fly? And, as any parent knows, the answer to one question may uncork a dozen more. Imagine a family gathering where the unwritten rules allow no one to ask questions. Sadly, such rules seem to shape the agenda in a great many contemporary gatherings of God’s family.

And yet the Master disciple-maker, Jesus, relied on the give-and-take of questions and answers as a key part of his teaching technique. How large a part did questions play in Jesus’s relationships with others during his brief teaching ministry on earth? To get a better idea about that, I counted the questions in the first and fourth gospels. (I did not tally questions in Mark and Luke, because they repeat many found in Matthew.) By my quick scan through Matthew and John, Jesus asked 130 questions—and was asked about the same number by others. Questions swirled around Jesus:

He asked them of his disciples: "You of little faith, why are you so afraid?" "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" “How many loaves do you have?” “Do you still not understand?”

Jesus asked questions of others: "Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts?” “Do you want to get well?” “Why is my language not clear to you?” "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"

His disciples asked Jesus: "Lord, to whom shall we go?” "But Rabbi . . . a short while ago the Jews tried to stone you, and yet you are going back there?" "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" "What does he mean by 'a little while'?”

Others asked Jesus: "What must we do to do the works God requires?" “What is truth?” "By what authority are you doing these things?" "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?"

Clearly, questions, responses, and dialogue played a prominent part as Jesus began to build his Church. It seems reasonable, then, to think he would endorse that same kind of learning context in the later stages of Church-building and disciple-making. Centuries of church tradition, though, seem to rule out  participation within our Sunday gatherings.

Can questions fit into church meetings in 2017? And, if so, how?  Good questions. Glad you asked.

In answer to the first question: Yes, questions can fit. In response to the second question: My book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, includes interviews with 25 church leaders who tell how, in various ways, they are making their church services more participatory. Sample just a few of the techniques they are using to open their Sunday meetings to more interaction:

Panels.

One pastor, following the sermon, calls for questions and comments. Sometimes he replies to questions himself. On other occasions, he invites a knowledgeable panel to respond to the points people raise. The panel may join him up front or speak from roving microphones. Another pastor, says: “Fairly often, at the end of a sermon series, people will have questions that the teaching has raised but not answered. So we will form a panel of, say, three persons up front. Then we open things up for questions from the body. This usually makes up the entire service.”

Reports from the Front.

After hearing requests for spoken testimonies, one pastor began asking two from the congregation to tell their faith-stories during Communion services. Normally, those asked to speak are not in the limelight. Better, the pastor believes, to ask “average” believers others can identify with. As a result, some have come requesting opportunities to share their stories. Although these are not Q & A sessions, the sharing in these reports actually responds to many applicational questions people struggle with.

Community Time.

A church in Minnesota opens its Sunday meetings not with the traditional “stand-up-and-greet” moment but with “community time.” The leaders usually offer two suggested ice-breaker questions to help get conversations started. Instead of taking 60 seconds, this segment lasts from five to eight minutes. As one of the pastors says, “You can’t remember someone unless they share something with you.”

A Real Meal.

The book includes an account from my own experience while serving as pastor. During our once-per-month celebration of the Lord’s Supper, we filled the room with tables and embedded Communion into an actual meal. We emphasized the need to keep the menu simple—often soup, bread, and perhaps a salad. The families from one of our small groups—including children and young people--provided the meal and did the serving.

Each month the message for Communion Sunday focused on some aspect of Jesus’s death and its meaning for us. Then, during the meal, we paused as we shared the bread and later the cup, during which times someone briefly helped us focus on the significance of each. Conversations across the tables liberated us from any somber stiffness. Yet the focus on the meaning of the bread and cup preserved the seriousness of what we were remembering. We found that dining together restored a sense of family and one-anothering. On each table we included a few suggested conversation-starters designed to stimulate mutual encouragement and spurring on.

Sharpening a Well-Used Tool

Jesus promised, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). Dialogue made up one of the major construction tools for this Carpenter/Church-Builder. The results in that first-century Church proved he knew what he was doing. As we Christians meet together in our century, can we sharpen and use the same tool?

Shared Church and the Exodus of Young People

Does doing church the-way-we’ve-always-done-it help to explain why so many young people are checking out? In his book, You Lost Me, David Kinnaman says research by the Barna Group found that, “Overall, there is a 43 percent drop-off between the teen and early adult years in terms of church engagement.” Commenting on how this looks on a line graph, he says, “The ages eighteen to twenty-nine are the black hole of church attendance; this age segment is ‘missing in action’ from most congregations.”

In light of this trend, Kinnaman asks: “Can the church rediscover the intergenerational power of the assembly of saints?” This sentence caught my attention. I take him to mean that we have lost the potent outcomes that result when Christians connect across the age ranges. As Kinnaman points out, this is something we need to “rediscover.” I agree. From what I’ve observed, in most “assemblies of the saints” (church services) the people sit and listen as spectators. The typical meeting format leaves no opening for comments or questions from the congregation.

True, church experience includes more than the main congregational gathering. Most churches offer other venues for nurturing faith. Most of these, though, usually provide less "intergenerational power" than the weekly event most call "church." The very term "youth group" narrows the age range. Many young adults have attended only age-graded Sunday-school classes. Small groups may include young and old but often do not.

"I Want to be the 'Talker-Man'"

In the main gatherings of some churches, the pastor has nearly all the speaking parts. I knew a boy of ten or so who, after watching how church meetings work, said when he grew up he wanted to be the “talker-man.” The word-ministry of those with shepherding and teaching gifts is vital to the oversight of any congregation. But the New Testament never paints the church as monovoiced.

Something Paul wrote in I Cor. 13 can help us see why the gathered church needs to hear more than one voice. “For we [plural] know in part and we prophesy in part” (9). Paul goes on to say, “Now I [singular] know in part” (12). In other words, none of us knows it all. Even Paul himself, who wrote a quarter of the New Testament, did not.

Each member of the Body of Christ has knowledge, even though it is partial. Each has received a portion of God’s grace. Experience with grace gives us some knowledge of it. Each has received at least one Spirit-given gift—equipping us with another form of knowledge. Each is "taught by God" (Jn. 6:45). So the question becomes: How can we structure our church meetings in such a way that we can all share our partial knowledge? The resulting "pool" will supply far more than any one of us could individually.

Learning from Our Bodies

As Paul makes clear, the way all the parts of the human body work together paints a clear picture of how members of Christ’s Body interact. Each part should do its work. It belongs to all the others. It brings a unique contribution to the other parts. It dare not see itself as either non-essential or more important than other parts. It occupies a God-arranged place in the body--a place that provides a distinct perspective.

How do you and I stay in touch with the realities of the physical world? Only through the parts of our physical bodies. Think of what you would miss if the following parts of your body worked poorly or not at all:

• Eyes: Losing vision in just one eye can reduce your depth perception (close one eye and try threading a needle). It can also cut peripheral vision by about 20 percent.
• Feet: Neuropathy can cause the nerves in the soles of your feet to lose touch with the ground or floor, throwing off your balance.
• Ears: Your ability to communicate with others, to recognize voices, or to savor the sounds of a symphony can all suffer from impaired hearing.
• Fingers: Failing finger nerves can dull the warning signals of pain from a too-hot surface.
• Nose: As one person with anosmia put it, “Not being able to smell yourself makes personal hygiene incredibly stressful.”
• Tongue: You were born with thousands of taste buds. But if you lose your sense of taste, you might unwittingly eat food that has gone bad.

In these and other ways, your body illustrates how the Body of Christ works. No single member “knows” everything your body needs. But each member in good working order can contribute its “knowledge” of surrounding physical conditions for the benefit of all the rest. Similarly, a meeting of the church should allow members of Christ's Body to share from what they know of Spirit-revealed reality. This releases, in Kinnaman’s words, “the intergenerational power of the assembly.”

Any Room for Doubts, Questions?

How does this apply to young people? In a meeting format that permits them to do so, they can contribute from their “partial knowledge” by asking questions. Struggling to relate faith to life in the 21st century equips them with first-hand knowledge of the quandaries they and their peers face—questions adults may not even realize need answers.  As Kinnaman says in You Lost Me, “Fully one-third of young Christians (36 percent) agree that ‘I don’t feel that I can ask my most pressing life questions in church.’ One out of ten (10 percent) put it more bluntly: ‘I am not allowed to talk about my doubts in church.’”

Kinnaman reminds us how young people are coming of age in an era of interaction. They have a "participatory mindset." But,  he says, “the structure of young adult development in most churches and parishes is classroom-style instruction. It is passive, one-sided communication—or at least that’s the perception most young people have of their religious education. They find little appetite within their faith communities for dialogue and interaction.”

But a willingness to venture outside the-way-we’ve-always-done-it can change that perception. Kinnaman writes of a “faith community in Oregon [that] hosts a weekly worship service that invites anyone to ask any question they have about faith. To fit with the uber-connected world of young people, the church accepts questions submitted via text and Twitter. . . .The entire community gets to witness, on a weekly basis, what it looks like to wrestle with doubt, to confess our questions without abandoning faith.” My book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, includes more than two dozen examples of churches that are making their main weekly meeting more participatory.

Paul described shared church nearly 2,000 years ago, when he said “the whole body . . . grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16). Peter agreed: “Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms” (I Pet. 4:10).

So we don’t have to invent shared church. We simply need to rediscover it.

Why Do We Gather as Christians? (Part Two)

(In Part One we saw that the widespread idea that worship is the purpose of church meetings is not supported in the New Testament. Now, in Part Two, we will take a closer look at the New Testament pattern for gathering and ask why a clear idea of the purpose matters.)

The “Currents” in a Church Meeting

In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I include a diagram (see right) with arrows that show the New Testament picture of the dynamic movements that ought to take place when we meet as Christians.

I. Howard Marshall explains these movements in these words: “When a specific function or purpose is ascribed to a church meeting [in the New Testament] it is not the glorification of God but the building up of the church and the ministry to its members. Church meetings are for the benefit of the congregation and so indirectly for the glory of God [emphasis added]. Worship in the sense of giving praise to God is thus logically secondary to ministry in the sense of God’s ministry to us. At the same time, since this ministry is exercised between persons, the church meeting has the character of fellowship in which the keynote is mutual love. The symbol of the church, therefore, is not simply an upward arrow from man to God, nor simply a downward arrow from God to man, but rather a triangle representing the lines of grace coming down from God to his people, the flow of grace from person to person, and the response of thanks and petition to God [emphasis added].” (From "How Far Did the Early Christians Worship God?")

As Marshall’s last sentence points out, worship can and should take place in a church meeting. But it comes about as a by-product of our Spirit-empowered one-anothering. By his Spirit, God pours his grace into this Christian and that one in the church gathering. They share it with others in the same meeting,  who—moved by God’s action—then return thanks and praise to him.

Why Does Our Purpose for Gathering Matter?

As stated in Part One, congregations typically get the message that worship is the purpose of church meetings. Holding this idea can determine how church leaders format the Sunday agenda. If worship sums up the whole point of the meeting, then some things just don’t fit. For example, it may seem out of place to include reports on what God is doing on weekdays through those who work at Starbucks, Lowes, or Homeland Security. Why? Because those concerns seem earthly, not heavenly (not worshipful). As a result, a congregation never gets to hear fresh accounts of how God is moving through his people during the other six days.

Believing the church meets to worship can press leaders toward manipulative methods. A blog carries this title: “34 Tips for Creating Powerful Worship Experiences and Vibrant Worship Teams.” But worship is not an “experience” one person can “create” for someone else.  Another blog, “How to Set up a Worship Set,” offers a 13-step process for doing so. Nothing like those steps, though, seem to have been included in the New Testament for use by the first-century church.

Members of a congregation may hold an unbiblical definition of worship, seeing it as the music or as a feeling. If they think the whole meeting is about worship, they will try their best to get into a worshipful mood. Or they may struggle to keep their focus exclusively on God. In response to Thom S. Rainier’s blog post, “Should Your Church Stop Having a Stand and Greet Time?” one reader explained emphatically why a greeting should have no place in the congregational meeting: “You do that before and after worship — not DURING worship! Worship is for God – that is why you are there!!!” In this way of thinking, one-anothering would distract from the “real” purpose of gathering.

God is Glorified in Our One-Anothering

At times, of course, we should focus our attention exclusively on God. But God, unlike some of us, does not insist on constantly being the center of attention. Like a loving human father, God delights in seeing his children enjoying, helping, reassuring, supporting, and encouraging each other. “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity! . . . For there the Lord bestows his blessing. . .” (Ps. 133:1, 3).

It pleases God to have us focus on and serve one another when we meet. The plural-you wording in each of the following verses strongly suggests a church-meeting context. And in each case, Paul was calling on the believers to pay attention to each other:

• “I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another” (Rom. 15:14). 
• “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord” (Eph. 5:19).
• “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16).

As God’s grace reaches us through our fellow brothers and sisters, we will—and without any human engineering—spontaneously praise and worship God. Serving other members of Christ’s body is serving him—which he receives as worship. So, yes, worship should take place when we gather as it should when we scatter. And it will rise to God as we practice the unified one-anothering he repeatedly calls for in the New Testament.

Why Do We Gather as Christians? (Part One)

True or false: “The New Testament reason for meeting with other Christians is to worship God.”

If you said true, your answer lines up with what most of us have been taught. One website, which suggests how to speak to children about church, begins with: “People go to church to worship God.” We call our main congregational meetings “worship services.” In those meetings we sing “worship songs,” led by “worship leaders” in charge of “worship teams.” Sometimes we call church buildings “worship centers.”

I know it is not RC (religiously correct) to question the nearly universal idea that gathering with other believers is all about worship. So please grant me a little grace as I ask you to examine the evidence for this rarely questioned conviction.

Right off, I’ll reveal my assumed starting-point. I believe Scripture is our only rule for faith and practice. Faith involves what we believe—truths such as the deity of Christ, salvation by grace through faith in Jesus, his bodily resurrection, and so on. Practice involves what we do, including how we meet with other Christians. I am assuming the New Testament, not church traditions, should have the last word on why we assemble.

Check It Out

What is “worship”? In the New Testament, the Greek words for worship of God all reflect attitudes and actions directed toward him. Duties carried out toward God. Esteem and reverence directed toward him. Obedience and service oriented toward God. Bowing down toward God. In short, in worship, we aim our attention in a God-ward direction. Think of a single arrow pointing upward from us to God.

If you have a complete concordance, trace the uses of “worship/worshiped/worshiping” in the New Testament. You’ll find that, together, those English words appear about 70 times (NIV version). Yet you will not find those words used in contexts that speak about what we Christians do in our regular gatherings.

Yes, in Acts 13:2, while fasting and praying, a group of prophets and teachers were “worshiping.” Not so much a church gathering as a prayer meeting among church leaders. And in I Cor. 14:25, Paul says an unbeliever, after hearing gathered Christians prophesy, might be led to “worship” God. Here, an unbeliever—not believers—is worshiping. Neither text describes what typically goes on in church meetings. But this is about as close as the New Testament comes in connecting the word “worship” with Christian assemblies.

By contrast, a great many verses describe worship as taking place not in church gatherings but by individuals in other settings. The Magi, upon seeing baby Jesus, worshiped (Matt. 2:11-12). Anna, presumably by herself in the Temple, worshiped (Lk. 2:37). The disciples worshiped Jesus in a boat (Matt. 14:33). As they hurried away from his empty tomb, the two Marys worshiped Jesus (Matt. 28:>9). The man born blind worshiped Jesus (Jn. 9:38). And so on. These are not what we call “corporate worship” occasions.

Others Agree

After a study of all the Greek words translated as “worship” in the New Testament, the late I. Howard Marshall (well-respected as a New Testament scholar) says: “It is a mistake to regard the main or indeed the only purpose of Christian meetings as being the worship of God.” (See "How Far Did the Early Christians Worship God?")

And in Paul’s Idea of Community, Robert Banks writes, “One of the most puzzling features of Paul’s understanding of ekklesia [assembled church] for his contemporaries, whether Jews or Gentiles, must have been his failure to say that a person went to church primarily to ‘worship.’ Not once in all his writings does he suggest that this is the case.”

Then Why Should Christians Gather?

The New Testament leaves no question that we believers should meet. But why? If not to worship, what should be our main purpose for getting together? Think of it this way: you and I are to worship anywhere and everywhere—all alone, with our families, in our workplaces, and in our church gatherings. In other words, worship can rise to God even when no one else is around.  

But time after time the New Testament calls us to do something we simply cannot do by ourselves: one-anothering. In his new commandment, Jesus calls us to “love one another” in the way he has loved us (Jn. 13:34). These words became the seed from which the dozens upon dozens of New Testament one-another/each-other instructions grew.

For example, the two one-anothers in Hebrews 10:24-25 explain why we should never stop meeting together: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Getting together lets us see and hear each other. This  creates the setting in which we may spur on and encourage each other.

This focus on one-anothering when we meet, although in different words, shows up in I Cor. 14:26: “When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church.” Each of us has been given one or more gifts to use in building each other up. The New Testament term “fellowship” is a one-anothering word. The church is a body made up of mutually-supportive members. It is a family whose members huddle to help each other. This is shared church.

(Part Two will explore why the single-arrow model does not reflect the gathered-church picture seen in the New Testament. It will also ask, “Why Does Our Purpose for Gathering Matter?”)

Shared Church on Sunday Morning?

The other day, a woman who recently began participating in our home group made a telling comment. She has regularly attended a variety of churches for decades. “But in church,” she told us, “I could never ask my questions and hear answers about the Christian life.”

Today shared church—the sort of one-anothering seen in the New Testament church—is more likely to take place in small groups that meet in living rooms than in main congregational meetings. Yet few Christians ever call those home gatherings “church.” Instead, like the woman in our small group, when they say “church," they mean the large assembly that usually gets together on Sunday.

Many Never Take Part in a Small Group

So although what happens in a home cluster comes closer to the practice of first-century Christians, a great many believers never experience that kind of involvement. According to Joseph R. Meyers, in The Search to Belong, “Books on small groups, tapes, seminars, and models abound, yet few of us achieve more than a 30 to 35 percent participation rate.” If accurate this translates to 65-70 percent whose experience of church is something far less participatory.  

Aaron Earls, writing in the website, “Facts & Trends,” pegs the small-group participation rate a bit higher: “In a typical month, less than 6 in 10 churchgoers attend some type of small Bible study group at least once. This means that over 40 percent of those who are in your church building at least on a monthly basis never go a small group.” 

Jesus clearly intended that his followers share in the give-and-take of one-anothering: “A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn. 13:34-35).

The dynamics in a congregation of 150 or 300, of course, differ greatly from those in a group of 8 to 12. But as already noted, a large proportion of believers never take part in a small group. How, then,  can they experience one-anothering in the only form of church life they know?  

One-Anothering Possible in Congregational Meetings

The interviews with church leaders in Curing Sunday Spectatoritis make it clear that some level of body life can take place even in the larger congregational setting. For example:

Panels. One pastor, after his sermon, invites questions from members of the body. Sometimes he organizes a panel of mature believers to help him respond to what people ask. Those on the panel may join him up front or speak from roving microphones.

Shared Preaching/Teaching. In another church of about 300, the pastor shares the preaching/teaching ministry with a dozen or so church members who are gifted and able to serve in this way. “My goal,” he says, “is to have someone from the congregation preach once a month, without pulling in a guest speaker from the outside.”

FaithStories. Nearly every Sunday a church in Minnesota includes “FaithStories” in their congregational meeting. Each one usually runs about five minutes. In addition to the examples included in Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, these stories  cover a wide range of topics, including reports on: How Christians are living out their faith on the job; How a new mom received encouragement from the church’s meal’s ministry; How God worked in the life of another mother to heal her after she lost two of her children; How the Lord delivered a man from his involvement in a cult. Those presenting their stories are carefully coached as they develop what they will say and how they will say it. This avoids the objections raised against what, in other times, were called “testimonies.”

Sermons with Dialogue. Some pastors have carefully developed the art of preaching that draws the congregation into conversation. They prepare a significant part of the message ahead of time and present it without interruption. But with the skillful use of thought-provoking questions, these pastors invite the people to take part in a dialogue. Anyone may ask about something they do not understand, contribute an insight, express a doubt, or read a related Scripture.

By means of these and other ways to structure the main church meeting, a leader can open new opportunities for those who will never join a small group. This frees them to become contributors instead of passive consumers. They get to know the names and stories of others in the congregation. And after tasting body life, they may even choose to join a home group.

An Experiment

In The Other Six Days, R. Paul Stevens invites churches to “Consider an experiment that has been undertaken in several churches. The culture of a local church can be partially changed in fifty-two weeks by refusing for one year to give ‘air-time,’ speaking time, to visiting missionaries, denominational officials and professors from denominational colleges in the Sunday service. Instead each week an ordinary member should be brought forward and in five minutes interviewed along these lines: 'What do you do for a living? What are the issues you face in your work? What difference does your faith make to the way you address these issues? How would you like us as a church to pray for you in your ministry in the workplace?'”

Ephesians 4:11-12 calls church leaders “to equip God's people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ (NLT).” God’s people include not just those in small groups but also those whose only church experience occurs in the main congregational meeting. Church meetings, even fairly large ones, can be structured to some degree as shared-church gatherings that allow that kind of body-building work to take place.

Is the Church an Audience?

A blog for preachers explained how to write sermon introductions. No less than 28 times the author called the congregation an “audience.” Another blogger wrote, “There are some things you can do in advance, when preparing your sermon, to ensure you’ll keep your audience hooked.”

But is the church an audience? The New Testament speaks of it as a body. A family. A temple. Never as an audience. Even so, these days we often use that term to describe the church. Does it really matter if we think of church as an audience?

Think it Through

An audience, like your TV set, is a receiver. It takes signals in but does not transmit them. An audience watches and listens. It has well-developed eyes and ears but hardly any mouth. By contrast, in addition to its ability to see and hear, a body can also speak in ways that make a difference. Members of a body and of a family interact with each other. They engage in give-and-take.  Calling it an audience can lead us to deal with the church in ways we would not if we were relating to a body or family.

I enjoy being part of an audience. For example, my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in a Seattle audience as we watched and listened to ten gifted pianists make music on ten grand pianos. Audiences can and should gather for sports events, political rallies, and stage plays. But for most of its regular meetings, the church should assemble not in audience mode but as a body and family—in the one-anothering mode. We might compare the contrast between being a member of an audience or a member of a body to the difference between watching a play and appearing in it. We Christians are not to be hearers only.

The Playhouse Model

Church architecture helps squeeze the church into audience mode. In the nineteenth century, churches in the U.S. shifted to the playhouse model for church meeting places. That is the point made by Jeanne Halgren Kilde in her book, When Church Became Theatre. By the twentieth century, she says, megachurch buildings offered “a space, time, and place in which one might get away from it all. Attending a service is an activity akin to going to a movie: One need not dress up, worry about the kids misbehaving, or be upset by a depressing message.”

But, she continues, “The use of religious auditoriums . . . is not isolated within the nondenominational megachurch movement. . . . Hundreds of congregations, building new churches in the newest ring of suburbs . . . now choose the amphitheatre form. . . . The amphitheatre space can accommodate a large audience in a way that allows everyone gathered to hear and see the performances taking place upon the stage.”

Theaters Have Consequences

They Invite Performance. An elevated stage or platform provides the ideal place for star-making. The performers who regularly appear up there get magnified larger than life. In a theater, only a tiny fraction of those present enjoy platform privileges. This entitlement makes them seem more momentous than those in the audience. In the Church, any perception of insignificance flies directly in the face of what the New Testament teaches about the vital importance of every member of the body.

They Induce Applause. Today, church audiences clap approval when they relate strongly to the message or music. But human adulation easily stimulates an appetite for more, and repeated exposure to such ovations can play havoc with the ego of those on stage. (I write this as one who served for two decades as a pastor.) Too often we have witnessed the elevation of Christian celebrities—whether pastors or musicians—and watched in sorrow as they fell from their lofty heights. Superstars share the weaknesses common to us all. Hero worship edifies neither hero nor worshiper.

They Inhibit Participation. Think back to the last movie you saw in a cinema. Or to those occasions when you have attended a concert in an auditorium. Or listened to a lecture in a hall. Other than clapping (and perhaps laughing or crying), how much did you participate? Almost all the action that mattered took place up front. A good audience knows how to be reactive, mostly silent, and passive. Everyone but those on the platform or stage are expected to play the observer role. Hardly the New Testament picture of the Church.

They Isolate People. Even in a crowd of 300 or 1,000, you can feel all alone. As I note in Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, although it can provide some sense of being together, an audience allows you to assemble with your individualism unchallenged. It lets you come and go with little or no perception of any responsibility for the other spectators. An audience provides slight if any opportunity to lay down your life for others or to risk using your Spirit-given gifts for their benefit. In spite of some surface socializing in an audience, you are free to leave just as detached and self-absorbed as when you arrived.

By contrast, the member of a body serves and is served by fellow members. Each part of a body works not on the basis of individuality but of mutuality. Equipped with something to share, it interacts with and contributes to the other members. Your presence or absence makes no difference to an audience. But an absent body member is sorely missed.

Practicing church as theater, with a crowd of spectators watching a few performers, began centuries ago. The road back to shared church--church as body/family life—will be neither short nor easy. Traveling it will require courage and patience. In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I include more than two dozen accounts from churches that are finding ways to incorporate participation in their congregational meetings.

Only as the Body of Christ, not as the audience of Christ, can we serve as the world’s light—which he calls us to be and to do.

Shared Church Cultivates Critical Thinking (Part Two)

In the previous blog (Part One), I said church meetings should provide a context for developing critical thinking skills in adults and young people. Shared church can help us fine-tune our lie detectors.

In my experience, many Christians have received little if any encouragement or instruction in such thinking. During online classes, I see this in students who have learned largely by rote. When asked to evaluate course material in, say, a journal entry, they can recap and restate what they have heard and read. But they struggle with seeing underlying assumptions and evaluating whether the material is persuasive, complete, applicable, and biblical. Doing so,  of course, requires critical thinking.

Here in Part Two, I’ll follow up with a question that rarely gets asked about church meetings. 

Can Unbelievers Help Us Learn How to Think?

Sometimes, hearing from those who lack a Christian perspective can help to nurture the ability to sift and evaluate. While writing Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I interviewed Trevor Withers, Network Church, St. Albans, UK. In his account, he tells how he invited “Rachel,” an unbeliever, to visit their weekly gathering and state up front her questions about the Christian life. Some of those in the congregation thought Withers had gone too far. Others welcomed the opportunity to hear her.

Rachel had often come for Network’s Sunday lunches but only rarely for their services. Having grown up in a home in which both parents were atheists, she had begun serious questioning when she was in her late teen years. “I am clearly seeking something,” she told the congregation, “but I am not finding it.” Her first thought-provoking question had to do with human sinfulness. Why would an all-powerful, holy God, she wondered, need a relationship with us if we are sinful? The session with Rachel lasted more than half an hour, with helpful dialogue between her and several in the congregation.

Imagine for a moment that you had been a part of that gathering on that day. What kinds of fruitful heart-and-mind work was likely going on among those present?

• Mature Christians, some of whom in the past had struggled in a similar way, recalling how God had found them and drawn them to follow Jesus.
• Newcomers, unaccustomed to witnessing such candid sharing in a church gathering, deciding to make Network Church their home—or never to return.
• Young people hearing something authentic—honest words from a soul describing the ache of a search for truth that had, until then, proved unsuccessful.
• All present participating in the give-and-take as members of Christ’s body wrestled with questions they normally would not have heard from each other in church.

How Will Young People Learn to Think?

Church meetings can project an aura of unreality. Not because the teaching is untrue, but because it seems so distant from the actual questions that vex people. According to a Barna Group report, 36 percent of the Millennials surveyed said part of their problem with the church is the inability “to ask my most pressing life questions in church.” If not in church gatherings, where are these young people—or their parents—going to learn to think critically about their faith and messages coming at them from their culture?

In her book, Finding Truth, Nancy Pearcey reminds us that, “In today’s pluralistic, multicultural society, teens have to navigate their way through a complex web of competing worldview claims. . . . Yet church youth groups rarely teach apologetics, majoring instead on games and goodies. . . . Parents are rightly concerned about the risk involved in exposing their children to nonbiblical perspectives. But there is also a risk in raising children who think the only way they can test their mettle is by breaking away from their family and church.”

Colossians 2:8 warns, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” But how many church young people have learned how to avoid being taken in by such deceptions? Suppose a college professor tells them, “God did not reveal what is in the Bible. It is just an obsolete book written by many people over thousands of years.” If not equipped with thinking tools, how will they cope with misleading statements in a university classroom, a workplace, a science textbook, a blog, a movie, or a television commercial?

Shared Church Pools Insights

Shared church means meeting together in a format that includes opportunity for anyone to ask a question, contribute an understanding, challenge an interpretation, or test a teaching. It offers a way to stimulate and mature the ability to think critically about our faith. While each of us individually should heed the following words, Paul originally addressed them to corporate gatherings of believers: 

• “You are reasonable people. Decide for yourselves if what I am saying is true.” (I Cor. 10:15, NLT).
•  “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best . . . .” (Phil. 1:9-10).
• “Don't be gullible. Check out everything, and keep only what's good. Throw out anything tainted with evil.” (I Thess. 5:21-22, MSG).

These and other texts leave no doubt that God wants us to be prepared to evaluate false teaching, fake news, and whatever else fails to line up with the truth. In the verses just listed--calling for deciding, discerning, checking things out--Paul wrote in the second-person plural. The closest American English can come to that is “you-all.” And if our meeting formats permit a shared-church experience, those gatherings can provide one of the best opportunities for training ourselves and our young ones in critical thinking.

What do you think? Have you encountered Christians who resist the idea of critical thinking? If so, how  best can you help them understand its importance?

Shared Church Cultivates Critical Thinking (Part One)

Fake News in the News

As 2016 ends, fake news is making real news. The Bible calls the vendors of bogus reports false teachers or false prophets. Can practicing shared church help equip us to follow Jesus in a world full of phony reports and spiritual viruses?

From Genesis to Revelation Scripture warns us about the dangers of being deceived. Today all of us—including our young people—swim in a torrent of information, some true, some misleading, some both. It surges in endlessly through our cell phones, the Internet, tweets, television, magazines, books, classrooms, and so on. 

Even something we hear in a church meeting may not pass the truth test. Peter warned his Christian readers, “there will be false teachers among you” (II Pet. 2:1). And Paul cautioned the Ephesian elders, “Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth” (Acts 20:30). From our enemy’s point of view, insiders make ideal carriers of fake news.

Is Critical Thinking Biblical?

Clearly, we need to be on our guard. Yet today some conservative believers warn against critical thinking, often associating it with those who attack the authority of Scripture. While being interviewed on a radio program, Nancy Pearcey called for Christians to practice critical thinking. The liberal program host exclaimed, “Critical thinking? Most people on the conservative Christian Right would say that’s one of the biggest dangers we have—this 'nonsensical' idea of critical thinking.”

In a review of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Robert Knetsch wrote: “I have been frustrated by the lack of deep thinking within Christian circles and often I find myself branded as a cynic for asking too many questions.”

But in I Corinthians 14, Paul actually instructs us to do critical thinking when we gather with other Christians. The context includes a call to practice shared church: “everyone” can say something to benefit others (v. 26). How should they hone their truth-detector skills during church meetings? By practicing Paul’s how-to-meet instructions: “Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said” (I Cor. 14:29).

“Weigh carefully” (NIV) comes from the Greek diakrino. Other Bible versions translate it as “evaluate,” “pass judgment,” or “discern.” God’s Word Translation says, “Everyone else should decide whether what each person said is right or wrong.” And the New International Reader’s Version puts it this way: “Others should decide if what is being said is true.” So in Paul’s thinking, shared church was the natural setting in which to cultivate critical thinking.

Can Church Meetings Still Train Us in Critical Thinking?

Is it possible to develop critical thinking skills in contemporary church meetings? In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I include an interview with Lowell Bakke who recalled what he had done while pastoring Bethany Baptist Church in Puyallup, WA. In his words:

“For three summers while serving as pastor in in this church, I used a five-question strategy. Maybe the best part of the whole process was that it put everyone on an equal footing—young believers, mature believers, and not-yet-believers. I chose a Bible book and divided it into sections. Each section became my text for that week, and everyone was notified in advance of the Scripture passage to be read.”

After teaching from the text, he asked questions that helped the congregation form some critical-thinking skills:

1.      What did you like about this text?

2.      What did you not like about the text?

3.      What did you not understand about the text?

4.      What did you learn about God—Father, Son, Holy Spirit?

5.      What are you going to do now that you’ve read the text?      

He then invited the congregation to interact, using the same five questions. Roving microphones made it possible for everyone to hear clearly. Bakke says, “I was amazed at some of the insights. It made me realize that even with the aid of the Holy Spirit, my mind as a pastor is so finite that I don’t understand many things about the Bible that the congregation was able to bring to the table each Sunday.”

His statement leaves no doubt that Bakke did not see himself as having the last word. In The Incendiary Fellowship, Elton Trueblood, 20th-century author and theologian, wrote: “There is little chance of renewal if all that we have is the arrangement by which one speaks and the others listen. One trouble with this . . . is that the speaker never knows what the unanswered questions are, or what reservations remain in the [listener’s] mentality. Somehow or other we must arrange opportunities for Christian dialogue, since the old idea of the preacher standing ten feet above contradiction simply will not do.”

Paul praised the church in Berea for sifting and evaluating what he taught: “The people there were more open-minded than the people in Thessalonica. They listened to the message with great eagerness, and every day they studied the Scriptures to see if what Paul said was really true” (Acts 17:11, TEV). Yes Paul was handpicked by Jesus to serve as an apostle. But that did not exempt him or what he said from careful scrutiny.

What do you think? I invite you to engage in some critical thinking and to post your thoughts as a comment below.

Dialogical Christmas

During this Advent season the biblical account of Jesus’s birth has reminded me how much God favors dialogue. The buildup to Christmas—the entire Old Testament—shows him as the God who speaks and listens. God had conversed with his human creatures in Genesis 1 and 2, but the real give-and-take begins in Chapter 3. In verses 8-13, God calls the pair out of hiding, asks them four questions, and they reply three times.

God also dialogues with their firstborn. In his conversation with Cain in Chapter 4, God asks five questions. Cain gets in a question of his own. And his spoken responses reveal his heart—both  dishonesty and fear. The relationship between God and Abraham is often a ping-pong-like series of questions and responses. The patriarch’s responses to God took many forms: falling down in worship, laughing, asking how, and negotiating. Moses, too, had a dialogical relationship with God, beginning at the fiery bush.

In his book, Communicating the Gospel God’s Way, Charles H. Kraft contends that “God’s interactions with human beings are characteristically in the form of dialog, rather than monolog. The Bible, from beginning to end, represents God as seeking conversations with people.” Imagine that: the God of ocean-like wisdom asks for input from those with nanodroplets of insight!

Birth Announcements: Dialogical

So no surprise that, when God began to speak to the world through his embodied Son, the advent is announced dialogically. Conversation does come as a shock, though, to Zechariah the priest. As he goes about his usual routine, burning incense in the Temple, a heavenly being suddenly appears and begins to speak. The announcement that Zechariah’s aging, childless wife would have a son—welcome as that might have been—prompts the elderly man to ask how he can know for sure. After all, he reminds the angel, “I am old and my wife is well along in years” (Lk. 1:18).

Several months later, the same heavenly visitor addresses a young woman in Nazareth. Again, the angel makes a birth announcement, this time of her Son to be called Jesus—but also the Son of the Most High. And as with Zechariah, the angel allows Mary to speak, to ask a logical question raised by this incredible announcement. After a bit more dialogue, the angel takes his leave.

As promised, Mary delivers the One who will save his people from their sins. Twelve years later, Joseph and Mary, in company with others, take Jesus to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. On the return trip, however, they discover the Boy is not with them. So back they go, only to find that Jesus has—for at least three days—been dialoguing with the rabbis in the Temple: listening, asking questions, and offering answers. All this prompts even more dialogue among Jesus, Mary, and Joseph (Lk. 2:41-50). 

Adult Ministry: Dialogical

The Boy with the dialogical beginnings becomes the Man who relates to people with back-and-forth conversation and interaction. Far more than 100 times the Gospels show us Jesus “asking” and “answering.” The Master Teacher understands the cooperative process of involved in effective teaching and learning. Why, then, do so many churches continue to make the monological sermon the centerpiece of the Sunday gathering?

Reuel L. Howe, in The Miracle of Dialogue, asks: “How does the Church or any other group of people become a community?” His answer: “It becomes a community when as persons, the members enter into dialogue with one another and assume responsibility for their common life.” In his opening paragraph, Howe says, “Dialogue is to love, what blood is to the body.” And he flatly states, “Monologue is not effective communication.”

Contemporary Sermons: from Monological to Dialogical

My book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, includes interviews with pastors who have seen the advantages of dialogical preaching. For example, Dan White, one of the pastors in Axiom Church in Syracuse, NY, had preached monologically for years. Influenced by his training and experience, he saw himself as a platform preacher. “When I visualized what preaching is all about,” he says, “it came down to me, a pulpit, and an audience. I relied heavily on my personality, my words, and my ability to bring the Word of God into focus for his people.”

But that all changed when he began to look into some of the New Testament Greek words surrounding the preaching/teaching of Paul. “Most of his preaching,” White says, “had an element of proclamation, but it was very dialogical. I began to realize that I had been interpreting what the New Testament said about preaching through my own contemporary lens.” How, White asked himself, could he translate the way preaching was done in the first century into the twenty-first century context?

He wanted to make certain his congregation continued to hear messages rooted in the authority of Scripture. And he determined to avoid the pitfall of a meandering, rudderless conversation. Over time, he developed a method of dialogical preaching—now used by himself and the other pastors—that  includes four “movements”:

Instructive. White takes 10-15 minutes to explain his text in its historical and sociological context. This segment includes no dialogue. Following this, he asks two thought-provoking questions: (a) in what you have just heard, where is there conflict for you? and (b) where is there clarity? He then calls for a full minute of silence to “level the playing field” between those who tend to dominate and those who need time to process what they have just heard.

Expressive. In this 10-minute segment, White invites the congregation to respond to the two questions posed just before the waiting period. He acts as moderator, drawing out comments and relating them to the theme of the message. Sometimes, White says, a comment from the congregation may contain a better insight than what he had planned.

Collective. Next White moves to a whiteboard on which he summarizes what has been shared during the expressive segment. This 5-minute Collective time, too, is interactive, with opportunities to refine what has previously been said.

Summarative (a word coined by White).  In the final 10 minutes, White uses material prepared beforehand to draw together the truth from the text and the congregational comments. He usually ends with questions, such as: “What is God proclaiming over our lives,” and “What is our take-home?” As the congregation has grown in dialogical experience, this segment includes more and more of what has been written on the whiteboard. Together, all four segments total about 40-45 minutes, of which more than half has been prepared in advance by the one teaching.

Sharing the Body-Building Workload

The interviews with 25 church leaders in Curing Sunday Spectatoritis includes accounts of other pastors who have also developed methods of dialogical preaching. As one of them says, “All in all, participatory church meetings have made it clear that there is a lot of wisdom in this church—far more than just what I am able to bring.” This insight seems to echo the last half of Eph. 4:16, that the Body of Christ “grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” When practiced on Sunday, the dialogue seen throughout the Bible and in the Christmas story distributes the body-building work—shared-church work. Does it also point toward a way out of pastoral burnout?
 

What Does Shared "Church" Mean?

In our men’s Bible study this past week, the study guide booklet suggested we discuss how to use Paul’s prayer in Col. 1:9-12 as a model in praying for our church. One man said, “When most Christians say ‘church,’ they are thinking of the bureaucracy, not of the people.”

His comment prompted me to reflect on how much our terms matter. The meaning we attach to words can change over time. To “broadcast” used to mean planting seeds. Yesterday’s  “clerk” is today’s clergyperson. And “hospital” no longer means inn or motel. Words can work like concrete forms, molding our thoughts. Over time our thinking rigidifies.

What we label as “church” will shape the way we understand (or misunderstand) shared church. At least three misnomers for church have crept into our vocabulary.

Church as Building

Those concrete word-forms get set in place early in life. You may recall this children’s song—and the hand motions that went with it: “Here is the church (interlace fingers inside hands) and here is the steeple (press index fingers together and point them straight up). Open the doors (spread palms apart) and see all the people (wiggle fingers).” The takeaway for toddlers? The church is the building.

The New Testament takes only passing notice of the buildings where Christians met. When Acts 4:31 says “the place where they were meeting was shaken,” it offers no clue as to the size or shape of the room. And when Acts 20:8 notes that there were “many lamps in the upstairs room where we were meeting,” we know only that getting there must have meant climbing stairs.

For many, shared church means two or more churches, at different times, gathering in the same building. The Latin simultaneum mixum originated in 16th-century Germany to describe two distinct congregations—perhaps Roman Catholic and Lutheran—meeting in the same facility. Understood this way, shared church speaks of divvying up the use of a building, not of one-anothering among believers. Seen as building, church is a place we go to, not who we are.

Church as Bureaucracy

Any local church must, of course, have a measure of organization. The believers within it need to recognize those with gifts of shepherding, teaching, and leadership and allow them to serve in their various roles. They form part of the church but are not “the church,” as such.

Yet my friend in the study group recognized that church, in the minds of many, refers to those with official titles and specifically-assigned (often paid) roles in the establishment. This may surface in statements such as, “The church ought to take a position on civil rights for minorities.” The idea here seems to imply that some detached leadership group should initiate actions and promote policies. Church-as-institution fosters an “us-and-them” versus a “we” mindset. Shared church, seen from this perspective, may lead the larger body of people, like shareholders, to delegate any significant work to the “company.”

Church as Denomination

Adding to the confusion, we often speak of denominations as “churches.” Even the world knows the lingo: the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, the Lutheran Church. Yet, as Lesslie Newbigin defines the term in Foolishness to the Greeks, a denomination “is a voluntary association based on the free personal choice of a number of individuals to cooperate for certain purposes.” So a denomination, he says, “is not, in any biblical sense, the church.”

For most regulars in a local church, the denomination is a far-off, little-understood abstraction—as remote as the cloud in the world of computers. Those in charge at that level apparently write statements of faith, issue policies, and stake out positions on controversial issues. Seeing church as denomination could lead to interpreting shared church as paying one’s fair share to some remote fund or group of officials. But again, this understanding of church fails to help us grasp our responsibilities to live as members of a mutually serving body.

Assessing and Repairing the Damage

Defining it as building, bureaucracy, or denomination can dilute or distort our vision of what Jesus means by “church.” Any of these, wrongly labeled church, can exert a powerful pull on all involved. This, in turn, may warp the way we see and practice gathering. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians regarding their way of celebrating the Lord’s Supper, he warned them about “not discerning the Lord’s body” (KJV) or not “recognizing the body of the Lord” (I Cor. 11:29, NIV).

Was Paul speaking of the physical body of Christ on the cross? Or the corporate Body of Christ, the Church? Perhaps both. But much in the context favors the second idea. In this entire section on the Lord’s Supper, Paul mentions many symptoms that suggest a lack of body-awareness: opposing groups; divisions; going ahead with one’s own meal; despising the church of God; and putting to shame fellow believers in need. By naming these practices, Paul seems to be dealing with their failure to discern or recognize the church as the Body of Christ.

The antidote? One anothering: “when you come together to eat, wait for each other” (v. 33). The way they gathered proved they were not perceiving in one another the presence of the Body of Christ. This even though Jesus had given top priority to one-anothering in his new command: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (Jn. 13:34).
Practicing shared church requires that we begin with a clear definition of ekklesia, the word usually translated as church in English New Testaments. There it refers to Christ-followers in community—either in a local get-together or in their totality. Because the ekklesia is an assembly or gathering, sharing and one-anothering are built into the word itself.

In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I include 25 interviews with church leaders who, in various ways, are helping their congregations practice shared church. Doing church that way typically involves breaking out of traditional molds that have shaped how we speak of church.

We do need words to describe our buildings, bureaucracies, and denominations. And well-known terms can fill the bill. Why not call buildings meeting places? Let’s speak of church officials as support staff. And denominations are branches or sections of the Church (as in the Baptist branch, or the Presbyterian section).

The later definitions of church that our traditions ushered in are newcomers. For the characters in his novel, 1984, George Orwell developed a language known as “newspeak.” Its purpose was, in his words, "to diminish the range of thought." Whose purposes would it serve, we might ask, to use non-Biblical definitions of church to reduce our range of thought when it comes to the Body of Christ?

Our vocabulary matters. Perhaps it’s time we adopt “oldspeak,” retraining ourselves to think and speak of the church in the way the New Testament writers did.

Did Fast Food Change the Church?

If you google on “Why are people leaving the church?” you’ll find more websites than you could possibly open in years. Various authors, of course, explain the exodus in different ways. In his book,  British author John Drane says some of the trouble has come from The McDonaldization of the Church.

He borrowed the fast-food reference in his title from The McDonaldization of Society, by George Ritzer. Drane explains that “when I . . . applied Ritzer’s four characteristics of the McDonaldization process—efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control—to the Church, I began to see some of the reasons why so many of today’s people struggle so much with it.”

Drane taught Practical Theology in the University of Aberdeen’s Department of Divinity. That role put him in touch with leaders from a great variety of churches across Scotland. “I soon realized,” he says, “that if our faith was to continue to make a difference to our nation in the twenty-first century, we could not continue to do the same things as our forebears had done before us.”

Squeezing More Out of Less Effort

McDonald’s now sells burgers in more than 100 countries—in part because the chain has turned efficiency into an art form. Drane sees a similar priority in churches.  “I have come away from too many churches feeling that I have been given the same sort of pre-packaged ‘welcome’ as I might expect in a fast-food outlet where the server will routinely enquire about my day, but really has no interest in either me or my life.”

In the McDonaldized church, “somebody else does the thinking for you, predigests it, and serves it up in an efficient manner. It is the spiritual equivalent of fast food, and unlike the home-prepared meal it requires no preparation, no cleaning up afterwards, and no involvement in cooking it.”

In my own book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I describe church meetings in which “all elements . . . are preplanned, in which the voices heard are prearranged, and in which any words spoken or sung by members of the congregation are preselected by someone else and provided for them.”

Running by the Numbers

Drane sees calculability as the second characteristic of McDonaldization evident churches. As he puts it, “Christians are not immune from this obsession with numbers and quantity.” But our counting does not end with bodies, buildings, and budgets. Drane contends that “most churches just have far too many gatherings that they expect their people to attend, midweek as well as at weekends.” Christians serious about their spiritual lives, he says, are likely to remain unimpressed.

Drane includes an example from the experience of a pastor friend: “He had started with just seventeen people, and ended up with more than 3000, but in the process the church had become a depersonalized machine. . . . Growth led to increased numbers, which required a bigger space to contain them, which called for fund-raising and building projects, which necessitated a mortgage to pay for it all, which demanded efficient marketing and sales techniques to maximize the attendance in order to raise enough money to meet the payments, and on and on in a vicious spiral of cause and effect. When all of that came together, it created a system that, in terms of human relationships and real spiritual growth was pathologically self-destructive—but which was apparently necessary in order to maintain the trappings of ‘success.’”

Avoiding Surprises

Admittedly, says Drane, “The security of what is predictable can indeed help people to feel safe—but the downside is that it all becomes routine. . . . Pragmatically, the Church’s love affair with this aspect of McDonaldization is a major stumbling block to effective evangelism in today’s post-modern culture.”

In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I quote a blogger who wrote, “Routines are convenient and make for a comfortable, easy life. They make you think less. They let you predict the future. In essence, routines make you lazy. They make your life and you boring. Routines won’t provide you with stories to tell.” Even so, in some churches regulars don’t even have to read the order of service in the bulletin to know what will come next.

Managing the Event

“This issue of power and control,” Drane says, “is at the heart of all the other factors that are at work in a McDonaldized style of being.” As an example, he points to the typical church practice of offering self-tests to help people discover their spiritual gifts.

“While we say we are wanting to be sensitive to people’s skills, and open to using them in the life of the church, the possible ministries that are on offer invariably have an over-emphasis on particular areas—all of them carefully chosen to ensure that we identify in other people only those gifts that are not going to challenge the position of the established leadership.”

The Shared-Church Connection

What does all this have to do with shared church? I’ll close with one more quotation from Drane when he says that today’s world will require the church in its worship services to “place the mutual sharing of stories of faith at the center of its search for meaningful human community, not to mention its obedient commitment to the gospel.”