I have just finished reading Mark Ashton’s excellent little book Christ and His People: Eight convinctions about the local church. It is a very short little thing, a booklet really, but packed full of excellent truths and wisdom. I encourage you to get hold of a copy if you have any interest whatsoever in the success of local church ministry (it’s currently going for £2 on Tenofthose.com).
I was particularly struck by one quote from ‘a local minister’:
Do you know how to kill a church? Fasten its members attention purely on internal matters. Get them agitated about what hymn book they should sing from. Make them anxious about charismatic enthusiasm in their midst, or about the sins of the ecumenical movement. Get them totally absorbed in a new building programme, or in fund-raising activities, or in simply being nosey about another’s problems. It does not really matter what the issue is, so long as it has the effect of drying up their outreach. Then stand back and wait for the spiritual gangrene to set in and do its lethal work. Go back a generation or two later and you will find the church has become one of those nasty cliques that are dominated by a handful of inter-bred families who cannot give up the habit of church-going. The church will have been murdered. To be more precise, it will have committed suicide. If such a church remains orthodox, it is a dead orthodoxy; if it retains a congregation, it is a lifeless congregation. As often as not, of course, they do neither. They simply disappear, leaving their once busy churches to be turned into factories or mosques.
I shall leave you to ponder on it.
One wants to guard against the danger, prevalent in the seeker-sensitive movement, of making everything that goes on within the four walls fundamentally about the comfort of, and benefit to, unbelievers coming in. However, this quote is a helpful corrective to the other danger of forgetting that the church must also be about making disciples.
The hard part is getting that balance right. Recognising that (a) the church is about making disciples; (b) it is about growing disciples; (c) the whole of life is about worship, not principally the Sunday service; (d) the reason we call it a ‘service’ is because we fundamentally meet to serve others (whatever form that should take)
Wow. I know that church. We were there for a few years. We left luckily.