Childish Church

OMG – what is our church producing in lieu of leadership these days?  And we have NO ONE to blame but the last generation of dupes who forgot what a church is and assimilated the low values of American culture — making some of them bishops, some General Secretaries, and most of them pastors of big, consumeristic congregations.  Now we fixate on size (yes, mostly male pastors — go figure…) and have no language to describe effective ministry besides numbers.  This makes sense in a Sesame Street society.

See, from late infancy into early childhood, we teach babies to count.  It is simple, it is linear, and it is very appropriate to the mental capacity of toddlers.  We teach counting because it is the limit of the cognitive function at that phase of life.  In early childhood, we teach simple math.  We have to wait until the cognitive capacity shifts from the concrete (counting, adding, subtracting) to the abstract (measuring, estimating, evaluating, strategizing).  But we finally get there — shifting the focus from quantitative analysis to qualitative analysis (simplistic thinking to complex thinking).  Except in the church…

The longer we can keep the focus on the lower mental functions, we won’t have to learn anything or change anything.  Keeping it stupid allows more people to play.  Creating dashboards (oooh, pretty lights and dials!!!) allows us to stay stuck in infancy.  And this has become our standard!  We have lowered the bar so low that all we need to do to be considered successful is get 5% more butts in the pews on Sunday morning.  More people for us to do an inadequate and irresponsible job of discipling.  Jesus wept.

Any pastor who defines their ministry or effectiveness in terms of size is stuck, and we can’t be too hard on him (not generally her).  We have been enamored of big and shiny in our church for over a generation.  Now, Wesley wouldn’t care to be a part of such a church, but we pretend that number-humping is traditional and historic (and it is if you limit your history to the 20th century and your geography to the United States).  But folks, all we are doing is trading in the potential to transform the world for a Sesame Street knock-off church.  We reduce the gospel to a pabulum of A-B-Cs and we teach our “leaders” to count to more.  And guess what happens?