Monday, March 16, 2009

An interesting perspective

We had a guest speaker from a church in Dearborn yesterday, a younger guy. We have not had the same person teaching twice in over a month, which is a bit jarring. I am used to the expository method, and I like it. Not because it encourages fellowship or is Biblical or anything, but because I enjoy the linear nature of teaching where we go from one verse to the next, one chapter to the next. He was teaching on spiritual gifts, and when he said that my wife looked at me in alarm. I must have started twitching or convulsing, because that is often a topic that goes far astray in a hurry into conjecture and tradition. Actually it was a decent talk.

The main point he was trying to get across with the spiritual gifts was that the gifts are both specific and universal. In other words, some people have a real heart and gift for teaching and that should be nurtured, but we are also all commanded to teach. He made a very salient point I think in pointing out something my wife and I have talked about a lot, that when a young man feels called to ministry service, the natural impulse is to send him to seminary so he can be a vocational pastor. That has led to a lot of men in pastorates who really don’t have the heart or talents for it. We always look back at a pastor in a small Southern Baptist church who was a wonderful singer but was really lacking in a lot of the typical skills associated with vocational ministry. By specializing ministry and service to the extent we have, we have made the church look less like a fellowship and more like a factory (more on that idea later)

One line I liked, it may not be totally accurate but it was funny, was your body doesn't grow new members, it just adds fat. He was referring to the idea of critical mass, although I don’t think he called it that. I kind of took the idea he was speaking about and expanded it in talking to my wife. As churches get bigger and bigger, there is not a proportional increase in service from the laity. In other words, if you have 10 people out of one hundred serving in a local church, and you double the size to 200, you don’t have a proportionate increase in gift utilization. A preacher can preach the same message to 50 or 100 or 1000 people. A music leader likewise, and the pianist/organist. You will likely need more people in the nursery or a few more teaching Sunday school, but I think it is generally true that the bigger the church, the less the average person in attendance has an opportunity to or a call to serve. In other words, if we all have some measure of each of the spiritual gifts, and we are called universally to exercise those gifts, it is pretty hard to do that if you arrive at 10:00, go to Sunday school, go to “worship” and then go home.

Being in a smaller church is not easy. When we were going to a much larger church after we moved, there was nursery for all of the little ones, children’s church, etc. so that we could drop off the kids and do our own thing. Now we have to kind of deal with our kids ourselves, and that is hard but I am sure it is no harder than it was in the first century.

Ultimately I think the church is healthiest when everyone shares the heavy lifting of service, when we bear one another’s burdens instead of relying on paid staff to do it. It can be a lot more demanding and a lot less appealing than showing up somewhere and being a taker instead of a giver, but who said that the Christian life was supposed to be easy and comfortable all of the time?

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