Alan Knox on ministers or attendees

Interesting thoughts at The Assembling of the Church on the phenomenon of “attendees”, people who show up at church now and again but don’t minister in a meaningful way to other Christians. I liked this brief statement:

Attendance is not our purpose. Edification must be our purpose.

The local church doesn’t need more “members”. It doesn’t need more attendees. It needs more ministers. Our purpose in gathering, as Alan points out, is not to gather just for the sake of saying that we gathered. Many people feel guilty for not “going to church” but not many people feel guilty about passively sitting around for a couple of hours and then going home. After all, they punched their religious time clock for the week so they are in good standing. You can “go to church” for decades and never meaningfully minister to your fellow Christian and feel perfectly justified in doing so. After all, ministry is what we pay the pastor to do, if I wanted to minister to people I would go to seminary! Compounding this is the reality that in most of the church, that is all that you are expected and permitted to do: show up on schedule.

A question in the comments at Alan's post really gets at the heart of where a search for a more Biblical ecclesiology invariably leads. What do you do when you look around on Sunday morning and you don’t recognize what is happening in light of the Scripture? Do you stay in place and try to make a difference or do you take your leave and gather somewhere you can minister to others and be ministered to? Our answer as a family was to leave, with no hard feelings and no acrimony, and gather somewhere we saw a more Biblical model, albeit an imperfect one. Is that the right answer?