The Church in Action

I was on craigslist.org the other day trying to find a body shop for my car to repair the massive hail damage from last week. I didn't find anyone trustworthy but what I did stumble across was an advertisement for a group called Center For Inquiry. If you are unfamiliar with this organization, they label themselves as a group driven by atheists, agnostics, free thinkers, and humanists. They discredit (and even at times make fun of) anyone who believes in God because it doesn't make sense to believe in something you can't see or prove exists. This really bothers me a lot, not because they don't believe in God, but because they promote themselves as some kind of "defender of reason" yet they embrace macro-evolution and darwinism with little or no evidence to support their claims. For example, we have never observed, either in nature or in a test lab, cross-species evolution. Yet they believe with 100% certainty that it exists. Sounds hypocritical to me.

Anyway, that's not the point of this blog post. The point is that I believe it's partly our fault as Christians that people get attracted to groups like this in the first place. I know that not everyone who is presented with the truth of Jesus Christ is going to accept Him; but I think sometimes we try to argue or debate with these groups on their level and it hurts us. What I mean is that we often try to prove that Christ is the answer by using apologetics, or coming up with counter-arguments to their rationale. But the truth is you'll never really prove that God exists or Jesus Christ has provided a way to save us from our sins by using these methods because God is not a logical being and doesn't want people to come to know Him through reason or logic. Christ's love can only be observed when it's in action. You can't observe it or study it as a stand-alone entity. If you were a scientist attempting to study gravity or air pressure or magnetic fields, you would only be able to study those things when they're in action! The same is true with Christ and His love; you can only observe it when it's in action.

How can Christ be seen in action? Through us, the Church, selflessly loving each other as Jesus Christ first loved us. When we do that the rest of our community will take notice and, at the very least, wonder why we do what we do.

John 13:34-35
"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

Measuring Growth

I talked to a friend of mine last night about house/organic churches. He is in a house church himself currently. A part of our conversation that stuck out to me was when we talked about church growth. My friend believed, as do many of the current proponents of organic church, that if your church is not growing or multiplying (new churches) than the church is dead.

I think there are a few problems with this line of thinking. First of all, according to this logic, mega-churches are the most spiritually alive churches today which we know is almost the opposite of the truth. Just because a church is growing in numbers, it doesn't really tell us anything about the true growth of that church other than the fact the people like to go there.

Secondly, and more importantly, is that this line of thinking puts us right back into the traditional-church line of thinking that has put the current church in the state it's in already. People that think this way are still thinking about each church as its own entity rather than being part of the global body of believers that comprise the Church. If the global Church body isn't growing (if new people aren't coming to know Christ as their personal savior) than our individual organic/house churches can't grow. It's just not possible. Instead all we end up doing is swapping people from church to church. There is never any true growth; popular churches at the time only "steal" believers from other churches and the cycle continues.

Our churches cannot be thought of or used as our primary ministry tools. Actually they aren't meant to be ministry tools at all. Each church is a place for believers to congregate and have fellowship with each other, which has already been discussed in this blog. Our ministry to the unsaved needs to happen in our everyday lives outside of the church. Our churches are a place for them to grow after that.

I think the common analogy that the organic church proponents use when talking about church growth is that if an organic creature such as a plant doesn't continue to grow and/or reproduce then that creature is dead. This is a bit of a contrived example because not all organisms need to continuously grow or reproduce to be considered alive. Instead, think of the organic church more as like a cell (as in biology) rather than an independent organism. Each cell makes up a greater organism (perhaps a plant) that is the global Church body and we're all connected/related to each other. Each cell needs to continue to replenish and repair itself to be considered alive. Growth in the cell is not always necessarily a good thing. Especially not if it is simply taking resources from other cells to promote its own growth.

In summary, I'd like to say that I do agree with the fact that the Church body needs to continue to grow. I also believe that each organic church needs to grow as well. But measuring growth simply by numbers is inaccurate at best. There is so much that is ignored when we measure growth in this way. Somehow you would have to taken into account the relationships between each individual and God to truly measure the growth of each church. I'm not sure right now at this point how growth is to be best measured. I need some time to think about this one. I know Jason has had some thoughts on this subject as well, so maybe I'll ask him to share some of those thoughts on here.