Beginning today and every Thursday in 2022, I will be sharing some personal reflections with you. These reflections are the result of thirty-six years of pastoral ministry. Many of them were forged in the fires of leading God’s people through the good, bad, and sometimes ugly of church life.
Today, I want to share a story from a church I served for less than three years and was, in fact, the last church I served in the United States before my years in Seoul, Korea. This story serves as a springboard from yesterday’s post on the need to tear down, rather than remodel, some of the forms and structures in many churches and denominations today.
I began my ministry in North Atlanta with high hopes. The city was growing, and what had once been a rural area was now the second-fastest-growing county in the United States. The demographics said it all - Sixty percent of the county was made up of residents who had moved from outside of the state, twenty percent had moved from outside of the county, and twenty percent had lived in the county all their lives.
The two fastest-growing churches in the county were new. Their ministries and worship were fresh and appealed to a large number of people both in and out of the area. I’ll never forget what one of the pastors of these churches said to his congregation - and it is not insignificant that this pastor was a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who had left his church to begin the new work. “Laypeople don’t know how to run a church.”
I know that may sound harsh, but I have to say, that’s pretty much been my experience. And the biggest issue I have come across with laypeople and church growth is an unwillingness to dismantle old and existing ministries that have had their day, been successful in the past, but no longer fit the present community or culture.
The most difficult thing for any pastor to accomplish is to dismantle the existing structure. This is because these structures become sacred cows and, like the temple and its place in Judaism, which I wrote about yesterday, they can’t be remodeled; they have to be torn down.
Which, and I didn’t mention this yesterday, is exactly what God allowed to be done to the temple in Jerusalem just a few short decades after the death of Jesus.
Anyway, here’s my story.
We had an incredible children’s church. It ran alongside our worship service with the adults. And the kids loved it! It was also a huge benefit for us that we ran a weekday preschool. A whole lot of these parents and kids were potential members.
But there was a problem. Along with our children’s church, we had a full Sunday School program along age-appropriate classes that ran the hour before worship. We also had an awesome Awanas program on Wednesday nights, and an old program from, I believe, the 1950s on Sunday evenings known as Royal Ambassadors (for the boys) and Girls in Action (for the girls).
Of these children’s ministries, the Sunday evening had the fewest in attendance. At the same time, we constantly struggled to find adults to work the Sunday evening ministries. Even worse, the adults working on Sunday evening outnumbered the kids something like 4 to 1.
The fact is, not only was the Sunday evening program outdated, it was also at a time when families were no longer interested in Sunday evening church.
In a meeting with our children’s leaders to discuss the issues of staffing, I suggested we consider doing away with the Sunday evening children’s ministry. This way we could find more workers for the other children’s ministries, especially children’s church.
Never happened. And for the remainder of my time, the Sunday evening children’s ministry limped along, and staffing for our more fruitful ministries suffered greatly.
Sometimes you need a wrecking ball. Tearing down the old ministry structures and making the way for new, fresh, community, and culturally relevant ministries is vital to the life of the church.
Jesus said it best - “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined.” (Mark 2:22)
Yesterday, we saw how important it was that the new wine of the gospel not be placed in the old wineskins of Judaism. Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a powerful testimony of this truth. But more than that, the issue of confronting cultural Christianity trapped in old forms, structures, and ways is the message we find in Galatians for our day.
I’ll be fleshing this out in the weeks to come, and what I have to say goes a lot deeper than the children’s ministry issue I shared above. Hint - the Protestant Reformation was four hundred years ago. I thank God for it, it is a vital part of our Christian history and a movement inspired by God, but maybe the time has come for a different kind of reformation. One I like to call a Reformation of the Heart.
Stay tuned.
In Christ,
Dan
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