Can we call it a church?

I have never been in a perfect church, and, as the saying goes, the church would no longer be perfect the moment I joined. All churches have their shortcomings, but we call groups of people a “church” because we feel that they have enough of what a church should be to warrant the title. We often talk about churches dying, but I don’t think churches die, they just stop being the church, and sometime after that the institution once called a “church” ceases to exist. If you start removing enough pieces from a chair, you reach a point where you can no longer call the pile of wood or metal a chair. And in the same way, churches can reach a point where the title “church” no longer really applies, no matter what the sign in front of the building says.

As I reflect back on my church experience, what surprises me is the closest I have come to experiencing all of what church is about was not in “church” at all but on a short-term mission trip. We were just five people in a city of some 30,000 with no other believers that we knew of in a closed country, but surrounded by darkness I experienced a lot of what church is supposed to be. We worshipped together everyday. We didn’t have a bulletin and no one was on a stage, but instead we trusted the Spirit to lead us, and each of us offered a message from God’s Word or a song or a word of encouragement as we were led to do so. With just five people, no one could hide during our times of worship, but we confessed our sins to one another, cried with one another, prayed with and for one another, and were accountable to one another. If I was not right with God or with the group when we came together for worship, I could not hide, and my issues were forced into the light where they could be exposed, confessed, and forgiven.

Yet in our churches back home, we are so good at finding places to hide. If we are struggling in our walk with the Lord, no one has to know. If we have conflict with a brother or sister in the church, we can sit on the other side of the sanctuary and pretend like everything is ok. We even take pride in how we don’t meddle in the affairs of others, as though God has called us to ignore sins of instead of forgiving them. I suppose church is easier with just five people who are on a mission together for a short period of time. But somehow we as churches must capture the intimacy, the accountability, and the day-by-day leading of the Spirit that are all a part of what any group called a church should be.

The Power of 2 or 3

Neil Cole’s Church 3.0 has a number of ideas that might be considered radical in many churches, but his perspectives on the church have challenged me to evaluate how I “do church.” One point that stands out is his discussion of the need for small group discipleship. He argues that churches should be built around small groups of 2 or 3, which then build into larger groups of 10 to 12, and then up to larger groups into the hundreds. Often we try to build churches the opposite way. We start by pouring our resources into large groups, and then we work our way back down to the smaller groups, which are usually no smaller than 10 to 20 people.

As a pastor, I spend a lot of time focusing on the big group. Sermon preparation and worship planning take up large portions of my week. Most churches spend huge amounts of money, time, and resources on their large worship gatherings. Meanwhile, church staff members usually spend far less time overseeing, equipping, and growing the smaller groups in the church. While I don’t want to suggest that these large group times are unimportant, when I reflect on my own life, most of my sustained spiritual growth has come through a small group of believers, often less than 5 people. If growth is most likely to occur in small groups through mentoring and personal accountability, should we reevaluate how we spend our time, money, and resources as pastors, as church leaders, and as churches?

Most churches I have been involved in don’t have groups smaller than a Sunday School class. These classes usually have at least 10 people in them. Ten people is too many for mentoring and for the kind of intimate discipleship that is so crucial to Christian growth. As churches, we often assume that believers are discipling other believers in personal, intentional ways, but we rarely plan for these kind of relationships. The consequence is that Christians can find places to hide all over the church, even in groups as small as a Sunday School class. We can come to church week after week without baring our souls to our brothers and sisters, confessing our sins to one another, or praying together for the deepest longings of our hearts. Too often this means that we don’t grow as believers because we are never honest enough with a brother or sister to show them the hidden secrets in our hearts.

We desperately want our large group times of worship to grow. We want them to be attractive to non-church members, we want them to be Spirit-filled and passionate, and we want them to be creative and interactive times of worship, but perhaps we need to consider that our worship times will never be what God intended until our small-group discipleship times are intimate, personal, and life-changing. Perhaps we will never grow significantly in our corporate worship until we are growing through mentoring and intentional discipleship in far smaller groups than the 50 to 5,000 that gather for worship on Sunday morning.