The Next Stage of the Church

Where do we go from here?

We have just come off Easter weekend at the time of this writing. Dubbed the “Superbowl” of services, many churches spent thousands—some millions—on marketing grand shows of talent, performance, pyrotechnics, and emotions. The goal? Get as many people to show up to our churches as possible. We heard many leaders announce a willingness to do “anything short of sin” to get people in the door. Did it work? It depends on how success is defined.

I think the more significant measure of success will be this weekend following Easter. Statistically, the weekend after Easter is one of the lowest-attended weekends in the church year. A week after “celebrating” the resurrection, we return to the status quo as if nothing ever happened. How can we treat something so monumental with such apathy?

About seven years ago, the most popular shoes on the market were Yeezys. People would sit online for hours waiting for a limited amount of shoes to be released, hoping to get a pair. I remember people willing to wear a size 14 shoe stuffed with socks because they didn’t fit but were the only size available when they got through the purchase queue. Then, Yeezys would resale for hundreds of dollars over the price the original person paid for them. They were of high value. Why? Because the company knew they were highly sought-after and treated them as such.

Today, you can easily get a discounted pair of Yeezys. This is mainly because Kanye lost his mind and because what was once highly valued is now cheap. So, more people have Yeezys because they can purchase them for a smaller amount of money—they have less skin in the game. It is this same psychology that gives businesses like Hobby Lobby profit power. Everything is always 40% off, so we buy stuff because “they are on sale.” The truth is, the product’s price is the price once the 40% discount is applied. They aren’t discounting anything. It is a mind game.

The church has, at large, adopted this model of ministry. If we make the “product” cheap, more people will “buy” it. So, we’ll get people in the doors of our church, NOT because we carry the life-giving message of the good news that Christ has reconciled the human race back to God, but because we have snowcones and inflatables for kids. I love an excellent snowcone, and my daughter loves inflatables. Still, we are communicating that the gospel needs to be supplemented to be valuable enough for people to invest their lives and time into it. People won’t come for Jesus, but they will come for Jesus AND a gift card.

Likewise, we are training a generation that this is just how you do ministry. If people show up, who cares how they got there?

In the Old Testament, in the book of Joshua, the Israelites are warned to rid the land of everything that once lived in their promised land because if they didn’t, they would turn to their gods and ways. What happened? They got in the land and compromised to stay in good graces with its inhabitants. What did they eventually do? Turn away from the Lord and to their gods and ways.

It is a tale as old as time (in the words of the great Misses Pots). Compromise always becomes captivity. One generation mixing the message of the gospel with appeasement of narcissism (giving people what they want) will one day become—and has become—another generation of narcissists. The church is not called to give people what they want; it is called to provide people what, or rather who, they need.

I am not against having fun. Trust me, my church has a blast. But, what we are called to steward as the church is the gospel. The gospel can stand on its own two feet. It doesn’t need supplemental value; it has all the necessary value to transform the creation into what it wants to be transformed into. What the gospel needs is a church willing to become it.

Maybe some of the perceived need to supplement the gospel comes from our poor versions of the gospel that are baptized in hell, dualism, platonism, and gnosticism. To be blunt, they are theologically void of any substance, and the substance they do have is typically historically and theologically wrong.

For example, I recently heard a story from a family member who attended a communion service at a prominent church in their town. The pastor told the congregation that, according to scripture, only those who are entirely sin-free can take communion. He said they must be worthy to take the Lord’s Supper. So this family member didn’t take it because, like all of us, they had gone through the catalog of actions for the past few weeks and weren’t sin-free (like all of us).

I was stunned because the Lord’s Supper (communion) is a reminder that sin and death have been finished. You take it as a reminder that because of Jesus, you ARE worthy. It isn’t you who makes you worthy; Christ makes us all worthy.

This is just one of many examples of the poverty of our “gospel.” Therefore, it does make sense that we need to supplement the gospel we believe in because the gospel most people believe in is so poor. However, the answer isn’t continuing in delusion and working our fingers to the bone to make up for our gospel’s lack with events; the answer is to “repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

As I’ve mentioned before, repenting means to change how you think. This change of thinking produces a change in direction or action. We cannot change our actions until we change our thoughts (philosophy).

The good news of the gospel is not that Jesus provided some blood for us to use to try and work harder to make it to heaven when we die “some glad morning.” The good news of the gospel is that Jesus stepped into our lie, became it, traded it for his truth, finished it, and, in doing so, placed us on his shoulders and carried us back to the Father. The gospel’s good news is that heaven is waiting for the moment when the sons and daughters of God become the instruments by which it can flood the creation.

I want people to come to my church because they know they can find the measure of life their bones are crying out for, not because we have the best program in town. When your mind is transformed to see the gospel for what it is—a gospel that religion hates because it threatens religion—you don’t feel the pressure or need to supplement it for anything. You trust the good news is enough. From this trust, you can transform people and cities.

Our churches have gotten bigger over the past few decades, and yet Christianity as a whole has tanked. How? Because we weren’t drawing people into the gospel, we were drawing people into what they wanted. How you draw people is how you will always have to keep them. If Christ, and his message of resurrection life, attracts them, that is what will keep them. You can stop being the host of a show, and you can be a pastor. You can stop reading so many leadership books and growing organizational leaders and be content with the gaze coming from the bridegroom king as you grow others who are content with the same. Leadership isn’t bad; pastor’s becoming obsessed with leadership rather than presence is.

We can keep doing the horse-and-pony thing or stop here and admit it does not work. We know what does work: Jesus. You might not become the fastest-growing church in America, but you will transform families and your city. You must decide which one you want.

Let’s not make the resurrection the ceiling; make the resurrection our floor. From here, we can go anywhere.