Get Less Involved
(originally posted on July 29, 2006)
I served on our church's leadership body from January 1998 to December 2004, and then, per our denomination's rules, stepped down (you can't serve for more than six consecutive years without taking a break). It was a good time to step down, as I was at that point juggling a very demanding job and grad school, and was preparing to finalize the adoption of our first child. That child came in October 2005, and of course that transition kept me quite busy.
So for the last year and a half, I haven't been that involved in church activities. I'll go to the Sunday morning service and have also been attending a Wednesday morning Bible study, but with the church's many other activities, from prayer walks to covered dish suppers and even some congregation meetings, which I really ought to have attended, I've been pretty sporadic.
So it's a little ironic that as I'm finally getting more involved, via a personnel team that will among other roles provide support and accountability to our staff, I'm convinced anew that what our church needs, and what many churches in America need, is for its members to get less involved.
Come again? To be sure, I'm sure you haven't heard this message from the pulpit: "Brothers and sisters, be less involved in church." So let me explain.
It has often been said that the church is the only institution that exists for the purpose of its non-members. I don't fully agree with that statement, but I appreciate its sentiment: that church is less about nurturing a safe and steady community for its members as much as it is about reaching out to non-members with compassion, truth, and ultimately the invitation to be in relationship with God through Jesus.
And yet this outward focus, this organizational mission -- a mission that first created the church, preceded the church, unifies the church, and compels the church -- is too often relegated to some committee, some subset of a church's activities, some tangible activity that is meant to represent a church's effort in this area. We Presbyterians are particularly guilty of relegating mission to committees and functions, to distinct events rather than ongoing and all-encompassing mindsets. Combine this with our natural desire to be with others like ourselves, and church can very quickly become a place "where everybody knows your name," and where being active in a church means sitting on lots of important committees and attending lots of important events.
And in this sense, then, I believe we congregants ought to be less involved. Jesus, after all, whose body we as a church are supposed to be in this world, spent His share of days teaching in synagogues and interacting with the religious leaders, but He was also out and about, teaching His disciples as they walked from place to place, touching the lives of children, women, and the infirm, and (gasp!) socializing with a town's shadiest characters who were employed in the most prominently sinful professions.
This pattern continues in the book of Acts, our best insight into what "church" should look like. Here we see great community, but we also see God impelling His people outward, as witnesses, to testify. Philip shares the gospel story with a Ethiopian eunuch. Peter eats with and converts a Gentile, for crying out loud, a provocative act to a first-century Jewish Christ-follower; indeed, many of these Jews chastened Peter for doing such a thing, only to be convinced by Peter that this was God at work. Paul, of course, travels the entire Mediterranean region in his quest to make Jesus known throughout the entire Roman Empire.
In this sense, church members ought to get more involved: having over for dinner unchurched families on their block, or getting to know the moms and children at the local park, or engaging co-workers and fellow students and teachers in meaningful spiritual discourse. And indeed, many of our congregants are getting more involved, in this regard.
Very little of this involvement is in our church building or within a sanctioned church function. And so it may look as though our members are getting less involved, even as we are more robustly living out what it truly means to be a church. Paradoxically, this replacement of church by always meeting together with church by always reaching outward can and does lead to greater community and higher intimacy and richer fellowship, not less. And so if it takes me getting more involved to get people less involved, so that we can better fulfill our mission and enjoy true community, let it be so.
(originally posted on July 29, 2006)
I served on our church's leadership body from January 1998 to December 2004, and then, per our denomination's rules, stepped down (you can't serve for more than six consecutive years without taking a break). It was a good time to step down, as I was at that point juggling a very demanding job and grad school, and was preparing to finalize the adoption of our first child. That child came in October 2005, and of course that transition kept me quite busy.
So for the last year and a half, I haven't been that involved in church activities. I'll go to the Sunday morning service and have also been attending a Wednesday morning Bible study, but with the church's many other activities, from prayer walks to covered dish suppers and even some congregation meetings, which I really ought to have attended, I've been pretty sporadic.
So it's a little ironic that as I'm finally getting more involved, via a personnel team that will among other roles provide support and accountability to our staff, I'm convinced anew that what our church needs, and what many churches in America need, is for its members to get less involved.
Come again? To be sure, I'm sure you haven't heard this message from the pulpit: "Brothers and sisters, be less involved in church." So let me explain.
It has often been said that the church is the only institution that exists for the purpose of its non-members. I don't fully agree with that statement, but I appreciate its sentiment: that church is less about nurturing a safe and steady community for its members as much as it is about reaching out to non-members with compassion, truth, and ultimately the invitation to be in relationship with God through Jesus.
And yet this outward focus, this organizational mission -- a mission that first created the church, preceded the church, unifies the church, and compels the church -- is too often relegated to some committee, some subset of a church's activities, some tangible activity that is meant to represent a church's effort in this area. We Presbyterians are particularly guilty of relegating mission to committees and functions, to distinct events rather than ongoing and all-encompassing mindsets. Combine this with our natural desire to be with others like ourselves, and church can very quickly become a place "where everybody knows your name," and where being active in a church means sitting on lots of important committees and attending lots of important events.
And in this sense, then, I believe we congregants ought to be less involved. Jesus, after all, whose body we as a church are supposed to be in this world, spent His share of days teaching in synagogues and interacting with the religious leaders, but He was also out and about, teaching His disciples as they walked from place to place, touching the lives of children, women, and the infirm, and (gasp!) socializing with a town's shadiest characters who were employed in the most prominently sinful professions.
This pattern continues in the book of Acts, our best insight into what "church" should look like. Here we see great community, but we also see God impelling His people outward, as witnesses, to testify. Philip shares the gospel story with a Ethiopian eunuch. Peter eats with and converts a Gentile, for crying out loud, a provocative act to a first-century Jewish Christ-follower; indeed, many of these Jews chastened Peter for doing such a thing, only to be convinced by Peter that this was God at work. Paul, of course, travels the entire Mediterranean region in his quest to make Jesus known throughout the entire Roman Empire.
In this sense, church members ought to get more involved: having over for dinner unchurched families on their block, or getting to know the moms and children at the local park, or engaging co-workers and fellow students and teachers in meaningful spiritual discourse. And indeed, many of our congregants are getting more involved, in this regard.
Very little of this involvement is in our church building or within a sanctioned church function. And so it may look as though our members are getting less involved, even as we are more robustly living out what it truly means to be a church. Paradoxically, this replacement of church by always meeting together with church by always reaching outward can and does lead to greater community and higher intimacy and richer fellowship, not less. And so if it takes me getting more involved to get people less involved, so that we can better fulfill our mission and enjoy true community, let it be so.
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