Is your church focused on reaching out to the community or asking the community to reach out and give the church a try? One focus is more risk-prone, and the other is more love prone. Does your church often give time and resources before the plea for gifts or offerings? Does your church offer help before asking to be helped?
If your church is truly in care mode, putting the congregant and community before the organization, people will want to know you. The mission of the church gets accomplished much more thoroughly and effectively when people are asking how to be a part of something positive, rather than having to be asked!
Culture is constantly changing. Everything changes eventually, it is inevitable. And the Christian church must change. Change almost always leads to growth.
The fear of most churches that refuse to change is that people who currently attend will leave the church if the status quo isn’t maintained. However, a more accurate indicator of a church’s maturity and spiritual health is in how they choose to care for those who may leave the church because of what has changed.
Chapter 5 - A Divergent Church
With the influence of culture becoming so prevalent within American society, it can be difficult to distinguish between who is actually a follower of the Christian faith in all its directives, someone who is a cultural Christian, and someone who is just spiritual. The lines that define these sectors have become blurred, or better put, absent.
When a church that defines and acts on its mission as those who seek after the lost, the hurting, and the downtrodden, rarely is there a question as to their calling. But for the majority of churches in America, it is often challenging to determine who is the evangelist and who is the convert.
When culture sees something different, they often take notice, at least for a while. They don’t move on to something else as long as what they see remains appealing. What isn’t appealing to culture is something they no longer have a need for, something that is no longer effective. For example, when one goes camping, the reason to pack a flashlight is not to see in the daylight, but to see when the darkness comes. The flashlight is not very effective in the light, rather the flashlight has a greater effect when operating in the dark.
For the church to be effective, it needs to penetrate into the darkness of its surroundings. Those who need to hear the “good news” that the Bible illustrates, are those not often found solely in the church building. The church’s mission is to “find the lost” and bring them restoration, redemption, and salvation. The church has to operate in the midst of the oppression, the abuse, the injustice, the calamity, and in the sufferings of those they should be seeking. Otherwise, the light is only being utilized within the church building and will go unseen and unnoticed by society, thus becoming ineffective.