The de-churched

Skye Jethani has written a second post on the subject of Who are the de-churched? In it he explores a couple of kinds of de-churched people (that is, those who have been churchgoers, but have dropped out for various reasons), in particular those who have left the church because they had received a false gospel, and those who have left because they’ve encountered the true gospel.

The first group have heard a gospel that says if we do the right things everything will go okay - God has to act 'properly.' His second group are people who've found that the institution has become more important than the people (and he quotes a relevant paragraph from a review on the book, The Trellis and the Vine, by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne). These people feel stifled, unloved; they're only 'wanted' because of what they can contribute to the institution.

He offers two ways of dealing with these issues, with the warning: Taking either approach seriously may result in fewer de-churched Christians…or your head on a platter.

Management by Imagination

The perennial argument between those who need to control stuff and those who are okay with not controlling turns up in this article:

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't count"; "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"; "If you can't measure it, it won't happen"? We like these sayings because they're comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it.

But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a "reality" that is in fact an edifice we've unknowingly constructed around ourselves.

Written, as you might have guessed, for a business audience. It could easily have been written for a church one. Photo from flickr.com, taken by a photographer who goes by the name of 'The Truth About..' Which might be ironic...!

'Postchurch'

The Out of Ur blog has posted two pieces by Frank Viola on the 'postchurch.'

In the first, Viola takes issues with the idea that any gathering of two or three constitutes 'church,' as many claim it does. I've probably done it myself, although I think I've kept the sense of a larger church body in mind at the time. Perhaps two or three gathered together is a temporary, fluid bit of the Body. Viola brings more clarity to the issue by pointing out the context in which the verse about two or three gathered together occurs, and shows that it has little to do with random groups of people proclaiming themselves as a 'church,' and a great deal to do with the Body as we know it working to get things right within itself by the Holy Spirit.

In his second post, he offers six 'tests' which he says the idea of the 'postchurch'-2-or-3-gathered fail. Whether you agree with these or not, he's making a valid point that people gathering together on an ad hoc basis without reference to the wider church tend to be avoiding the very things the Body as a whole can deal with (when it's functioning properly, of course!)

As always, the comments following the posts are (almost always) as illuminating as the posts themselves.

Viola, by the way, isn't an advocate for the 'institutional' church in the way we commonly know it these days. He doesn't see value in the hierarchical church, or the business model church, or any other church that's based on something the world has cooked up.

[And apropos of the business model, I watched the movie, Network, the other night. Thirty years on, its satire is as devastating as ever. Here's one of the characters on the value of business to the world: We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that . . . perfect world . . . in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.]

The problem with institutions

Alan Hirsch has recently written two posts on the subject of the church as an insitution, and how that affects its ability to do mission.
This is a quote from the second post.
Perhaps a further exploration of what is meant by institutionalism is needed here: Institutions are organizations initially set up in order to fill a necessary religious and social function and to provide some sort of structural support for whatever that function requires. In many ways they fulfill the very purpose of structure; organization is needed if we seek to act collectively for common cause. And all movements start this way, but in the initial stages structure exists solely to support the grassroots. The problem happens when the newly instituted structures move beyond being simply structural support and become a governing body of sorts-structure becomes centralized governance. So religious institutionalism happens when in the name of some convenience we set up a system to do what we must do ourselves so that over time the structures we create to do this take on a life of their own...

To read the first post, click here.

Both these posts appear on Alan's blog, The Forgotten Ways: the missional musings of Alan Hirsch (developing apostolic imagination and practice in Western contexts)