10 Reasons to Underprogram Your Church

I’m a devotee the “simple church” concept, but I have experienced just how daunting a task it can be to lead the under-programming of my church. We are inundated constantly with opportunities for activity from other churches (which we don’t want to turn down lest we appear uncooperative and standoffish), advertised “movements” local and national (which are good at getting people excited and distracted), and “good ideas” from our own community (which we are reluctant to deny lest we break someone’s heart). But what all this so often amounts to is a church that is merely busy, and busy does not always equal diligent or faithful.

Here, then, are 10 reasons to under-program a church:

1. You can do a lot of things in a mediocre (or poor) way, or you can do a few things extremely well. Craig Groeschel has some good things to say about this subject. Also check out Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger’s Simple Church, a book not without its weaknesses but with a strong premise.

2. Over-programming creates an illusion of fruitfulness that may just be busy-ness. A bustling crowd may not be spiritually changed or engaged in mission at all. And as our flesh cries out for works, many times filling our programs with eager, even servant-minded people is a way to appeal to self-righteousness.

3. Over-programming is a detriment to single-mindedness in a community. If we’re all busy engaging our interests in and pursuits of different things, we will have a harder time enjoying the “one accord” prescribed by the New Testament.    Continue at Jared C. Wilson

How Do You Know When Someone Is Repentant?

How do you know when someone is repentant? In his helpful little book Church Discipline, Jonathan Leeman offers some guidance:

A few verses before Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 18 about church discipline, he provides us with help for determining whether an individual is characteristically repentant: would the person be willing to cut off a hand or tear out an eye rather than repeat the sin (Matt. 18:8-9)? That is to say, is he or she willing to do whatever it takes to fight against the sin? Repenting people, typically, are zealous about casting off their sin. That’s what God’s Spirit does inside of them. When this happens, one can expect to see a willingness to accept outside counsel. A willingness to inconvenience their schedules. A willingness to confess embarrassing things. A willingness to make financial sacrifices or lose friends or end relationships. (p. 72)

These are good indicators, and I believe we can add a few more.

Here are 12 signs we have a genuinely repentant heart:

1. We name our sin as sin and do not spin it or excuse it, and further, we demonstrate “godly sorrow,” which is to say, a grief chiefly about the sin itself, not just a grief about being caught or having to deal with the consequences of sin.

2. We actually confessed before we were caught or the circumstantial consequences of our sin caught up with us.   Continue at Jared C. Wilson

Evangelicalism and Theological Mediocrity

Dr. Mohler’s recent article “Is the Megachurch the New Liberalism?” is thought-provoking along several fronts, but one in particular struck me. He writes:

What about theology? This question requires a look at the massive shifts in worldview now evident within American culture. Trends foreseen by researchers such as James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia and others can now be seen in full flower. The larger culture has turned increasingly hostile to exclusivist truth claims such as the belief that faith in Christ is necessary for salvation. One megachurch pastor in Florida recently told me that the megachurches in his area were abandoning concern for biblical gender roles on a wholesale basis. As one pastor told him, you cannot grow a church and teach biblical complementarianism.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pushback I got for this half-serious post at The Thinklings blog last week, specifically on the #8 point in that list, where I reveal my position against women in pastoral authority. The comments became an exercise in vain disputations, and while the vast majority of the feedback was positive, the still sizable portion that wasn’t, was quite vitriolic. I’ve been called more “choice words” in the last two weeks in public than my whole life combined. (But, remember, I’m the graceless one.) Those disagreeable sorts who weren’t angry, were at the least flummoxed.

The post has been reprinted on a few other sites and was even mentioned on a radio show, and the questions it’s received are revealing. It’s not the accusations of misogyny or sexism that bug me — those are understandable and not unexpected. It’s the question behind the question — “Wait. What’s wrong with female pastors?”   Continue at Jared C. Wilson

See also: The Relevant Queries for Andy Stanley

 

Long-Term Consequences of Pragmatism in the Church

 

 

On Constantly Taking Your Church’s Temperature

That voice in your head that keeps rehearsing the disappointments and flaws of your church is not from the Lord. It is the accuser, helping you get to the “I have no need of you” forbidden in 1 Corinthians 12:21. We may have legitimate concerns about our church’s maturity, its repentance, its effectiveness, or its “personality,” and there is certainly a place for sharing concerns and criticisms, a biblical call to honest appraisal, and plenty of space for exhortation and rebuke, but many claiming to do these things have shifted to a legal measuring none of us really has the authority for. Here is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer says in Life Together about looking at our churches through the lens of scrutiny:

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

This applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous members about their congregations. A pastor should not complain about his congregations, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men. When a person becomes alienated from a Christian community in which he has been placed and begins to raise complaints about it, he had better examine himself first to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream that should be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank God for leading him into this predicament.  Continue at Jared C. Wilson

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