I was watching a bit of post-match analysis from Roy Keane after England’s dismal loss to Greece. He was characteristically pretty miserable about them. But then, it’s hard to deny that they deserved it this time. His main takeaway – as has been that of many a football commentator and pundit for many decades – was this: they just didn’t get the basics right.
If in football we talk about getting the basics right, in basketball we tend to talk about fundamentals. You don’t wind up on the receiving end of absolute pastings without failing to work at the fundamentals. You can do all the fancy trickery under the sun, but if you can’t do the basics on defence or don’t commit to running back to help, all your skill will be for naught. You’ve got to get the fundamentals right before we talk about anything else.
We probably baulk at fundamentals (for different reasons) in the church. So, I think we’ll stick with basics. But it still holds true. Many a big church has come a cropper because it has run away with itself and forgotten about the basics. Many a small church has thrown the towel in because it doesn’t think it can operate on the necessary level whilst failing to spend any real time considering the basics, basics even they can do. In the church, we’ve got to do the basics.
The question is, what are the basics? What are the core things any church, of any size, can do well? What are the things that the Bible wants the church to be about? Helpfully, in his book The Big Picture for Small Churches (which is brilliant, by the way), John Benton helpfully boils it down to these five things:
- Quality presence
- Quality welcome
- Quality teaching
- Quality hospitality
- Quality prayer
These are the basics as far as churches go. Basics that any church can do well.
By quality presence, we mean presence in our community. Being around as faithful witnesses to the Lord Jesus. It is through our presence in our community we will get opportunities to speak of Christ and share his gospel.
Being welcoming is Church Basics 101. Nobody will come to our church, and certainly nobody will come back, if we aren’t welcoming. If we make it clear we don’t really want them to come, we are obvious that we aren’t very happy they’re there or we plain just ignore people, nobody will bother coming back. Churches are supposed to be welcoming places, mirroring the welcome Jesus has offered us, and if we are so taken up with all the business of church that we ignore the people Jesus would have us welcome, we are clearly forgetting the basics.
Quality teaching is also vital for any church. Teaching is what will help our people grow. Which means giving your pastor the room to truly and properly prepare his sermons and studies for the church. You might want him involved in any and every work the church might do. But if that eats into his time teaching the Word, we are pushing our pastor into areas that may be helpful and good, but are not necessarily the centre of where his time ought to be spent. Of course, he may want to be doing other things too – but whatever else he does, it should not be at the expense of the regular teaching of the Word.
Hospitality is, to some degree, an outworking of welcome. I suppose we might say it is different in that we aren’t only aiming to be hospitable with newcomers, but also showing and sharing regular hospitality to those who already belong to the church. As we read Acts 2 and the first major increase in the Jerusalem church, one of the key things they did was share hospitality with one another day by day. It was the community built amongst the believers that led to an increase in the church and served as the main draw for new believers.
Finally, churches ought to be places of prayer. Churches should be full of people of recognise that they can do nothing by themselves. The church will only grow if Christ himself is pleased to grow it. Which means we need to be people of prayer. It is through the prayers of God’s people that God is pleased to work. If we are keen to see our churches grow in holiness, if we are keen to see our churches grow numerically, if we want to see pretty much anything happen in our churches at all, prayer must be at the heart of matters.
But the beauty of these five things is that any church can do them. Big, small and anywhere in between. In fact, when churches get taken up by all sorts of other things and start to neglect these core things, they are in danger of forgetting the basics. Whether that is large churches who have forgotten exactly why their church exists at all or it is a small church that is desperate to do everything it can to grow, throwing aside anything they deem unnecessary or secondary in that endeavour, they forget the basics at their peril. Just like a sports team that will find itself embarrassed as they do all sorts of showy things but fail to do any of the basics – no amount of keepy-uppys in the world will lead to Champions League glory on their own – so churches that fail to do the basics will find themselves similarly embarrassed as they chase after things that, whilst potential good, are not really the heart of what they are there to do.