A Different Perspective

Why change church structure?

People seek out info on the emerging church for many different reasons. The primary reason I hear and observe is that pastors want to reach the young, unchurched generation. So they turn to the new, hip movement just getting underway called, “the emerging church.”

I’m excited that so many in the established church are asking questions about church structure and polity. In order for the answers they seek to have full effect, we need to be ready to shape the questions… prepare people for them in advance, if you will.

One of the key questions is, “Why change church structure?” That question may not get asked, because they think that’s the question that drove them to investigate the emerging church in the first place. The answer they would likely give is, quite simply, “There’s a huge part of our culture who won’t step foot in a church.”

While this is certainly true, our answers should dig deeper. On the surface, it would appear the only motivation to change is to reach people in the culture. If that were the case, you should seriously question whether you would just be compromising to make your religion more appealing.

Unfortunately, I think that is where many looking into the emerging church actually are. Avoiding division, which is no easy task, we must be able to articulate reasons other than evangelism for changing church structure.

It seems that even when other reasons are given, we feel the need to place the impetus for change on evangelism. Perhaps that’s because the established church is so numbers driven, or perhaps it’s because we really do believe all people should have our faith. But either way, problems in church structure do not come merely from lack of relevance.

I’ve been accused, many times, of just bashing the establishment. The accusation has some merit, but it also stings. It stings because I believe we are all part of the body of Christ, and we should be able to critique each other, especially when the motivation is to grow in something better for the body. And that is my heart for the Church.

I realize that many will see the benefit in only tweaking the current system. And the truth is, I agree with them. Not that I should only be tweaking, but that we need the institutional church to meet the needs of some persons who will fit there culturally. However, whether we tweak or completely rebuild from the ground up, we need to be aware of why the tweaking and rebuilding needs done in the first place.

This post is getting longer than I intended, and I’m actually working on an article on this subject for THEOOZE. I’ll just add a couple of my reasons for wanting to see a different church structure without elaborating too much.

The established church, as it is, finds focus on intellectual and propositional teaching. Ironically, many in the emerging church have changed the content of the teaching without changing the medium. The well-known Marshall MacLuhan (sp?) saying, “The medium is the message,” comes to mind. When you focus your community’s worship on teaching, it doesn’t matter too much if you’re teaching them that it’s not about the teaching.

Our budgets are out of control in the church. Not every church should be as radical as ours and spend absolutely nothing on our community gatherings, but there is just too much poverty in the world for the church to be rich in capital. And, while I won’t ever say that the professional ministry shouldn’t exist, the form of paid minsitry needs to change. Right now the structure places paid professionals in roles where the participation of the entire body is mitigated and subjugated to supporting roles. This isn’t an evangelism issue, this is a holistic issue. As a body, we need all the parts working to their fullest potential, not just the parts that get paid to be there.

And I’ll close with this reason why church structure needs to change: compartmentalization. Certainly some ministries in the established church have been more effective than others at creating well-rounded disciples who do not divide their church life with their work life with their family life, but the organization itself predisposes compartmentalization. With our focus on organized ministries, meetings, and events, we send the message that church activity is about attending church activities. Our structures need to be more fluid in such a way that the structures themselves speak to integrating faith and the body of Christ with all aspects of our lives. I’m not sure how to do this, but we certainly need to try.

Okay, again much longer than I planned. I hope this provides some food for thought and helps us to shape the conversation so we are asking some much needed questions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.