On Church Culture
Over our last three meetings, the pastors have carved out a chunk of time to discuss various questions related to our church culture. By culture I mean the intangible, in-the-air kind of realities about our church — the things you won’t find on our website, but that you might pick up over time if you’re part of our church.
The idea for this discussion was sparked by the book The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ. This is a great, little book that addresses (and helps) the problem of disconnect between theology and practice, both individually and corporately. We wanted to open ourselves up to every kind of question here, to examine and trace out the ways we’d like to see more congruence between our ways and the gospel we believe — the gospel that announces “eternal life is available right now to hell-deserving sinners massively loved by the all-glorious God who gave his only Son.”
That truth is life-changing, isn’t it? And not just for persons, but for communities — and my goodness, we want all of it! We want to be as Christlike as forgiven sinners can be, and we want our church to be an embassy of the new creation as much as possible.
The thinking along these lines and our discussion as pastors took me back to the Spiritual Growth Assessment our membership did a couple years ago. The idea is to do these every other year or so, to give our members an opportunity to assess ourselves on our growth, and to see areas of progress or lack as a church. I arranged the questions in four different categories and three different types. Based upon the data, the categories in which we assessed ourselves lowest was Evangelism and Generosity. At large, we as a church, one individual assessment at a time, noted that the highest areas of growth for us are in sharing the gospel and in financial giving.
The reason for this isn’t too difficult to track down. Of all the different aspects of our Christian walk in modern times, active witness to Jesus and giving financially come with the highest cost.
For example, spiritual disciplines are vital, and it’s a very good thing to meditate on the Scriptures everyday, but slowly reading a Psalm in the morning isn’t as costly as, say, having a spiritual conversation with your next-door neighbor. You have more to lose, in other words, in broaching the topic of salvation with an unbeliever than you do in reading alone with a cup of coffee. And we certainly feel this dynamic in giving, because when you give it means you are choosing not to have anymore. You take a step from “have" to “given” and that’s a big step. It feels risky.
In our natural mode, our merely human condition, we steer away from risks. We tend toward self-protection and safety. But see, the gospel calls us to more. We aren’t merely human, but we’re redeemed humans. “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20).
The connection of this to our church culture is the potential disconnect of believing Jesus is worth everything, but not really living that out where we might actually lose something.
As I’ve said before, the sad compromise of so much American Christianity is not that we don’t believe Jesus is real, but it’s that we’ve settled for a sub-brand of Christianity where he doesn’t need to be. What in our lives are we doing that only makes sense because Jesus is who the Bible says he is? One step further, we ask: how does the realness of Jesus impact everything I do?
Dear God, I want that to be our church culture. Amen.
