A Thinking Reed

Reaching them for what?

Written by

Lee M.

in

The story that several of the larger evangelical megachurches are opting not to have services on Christmas this year has been making the rounds, provoking quite a bit of outrage that they are selling out to the culture and promoting an “idolatry of the family” (see this Internet Monk post for a good collection of comments (via Camassia)).

Today’s Inquirer carried the story and this bit jumped out at me:

Cally Parkinson, a spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., said church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was 1994, and only a small number of people showed up to pray, she said.

“If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don’t go to church, how likely is it that they’ll be going to church on Christmas morning?” she said.

Two things here. First, “reach[ing] the unchurched” is presumably not an end in itself is it? I mean, once you’ve got them what do you do with them? The whole point can’t be to reach the unchurched “seeker”; you have to be reaching them for something.

Which leads to the second point – there seems to be a confusion between (or conflation of) worship and evangelism here. They aren’t the same thing. The worship of God is an end in itself and shouldn’t be thought of as instrumental to some other goal like “reaching the unchurched.” In the ancient church, the catechumen (those seeking to join the church) were actually dismissed during part of the liturgy prior to the eucharist (the Orthodox church still retains the “dismissal of the catechumen” in its liturgy I believe, but I don’t think non-members are actually expected to depart anymore).

This clearly shows that worship has its own telos that isn’t directly related to evangelism. Although my experience of the megachurch style of worship is limited, I fear this attitude reveals a tendency to make the church service a kind of performance for the sake of those in attendance, rather than an act of worship directed at God.

Comments

19 responses to “Reaching them for what?”

  1. Joshie

    Excellent post! The problem is that “reaching the unchurched” (but who ever came to the altar saying “Lord, I want to be churched!”?) is what the megachurch thing is all about. They get mega by making everything in the church all about evangelism. If its not bringing people in, chuck it out. While I think evangelism is certainly a part of worship, worship is, as you point out, an end unto itself. I think Jesus clearly blesses worship for its own sake when he refuses to rebuke the woman who broke the perfume on his feet.

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  2. Eric Lee

    In the ancient church, the catechumen …were actually dismissed during part of the liturgy prior to the eucharist (the Orthodox church still retains the “dismissal of the catechumen” in its liturgy I believe, but I don’t think non-members are actually expected to depart anymore).

    I just realized we do this in our little English-speaking congregation in the Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City. We are odd.

    Peace,

    Eric

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  3. Eric Lee

    I meant to add, those specifically seeking baptism into the church are dismissed for a bit during the Eucharist.

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  4. Kim Traynor

    The full mission statement is this; “to turn irreligous people into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ.” Cally Parkinson was not trying to sum up the why and whatfor of everything Willow does in her short statement to the paper.

    The amount of work that is going to be required of the hundreds of volunteers in order to accomodate the 50,000+ visitors that we anticipate Christmas week is difficult to even imagine. The idea that the people of Willow Creek are lazy, uncommitted and comfort-driven is goofy.

    I think if we are really talking about worship we should be asking why so many people have the misconception that the worship that best pleases God occurs only in a church.

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  5. Lee

    Hi Kim – Thanks for stopping by!

    No one was saying (at least I certainly wasn’t) that the folks at Willow Creek and other churches are lazy. I don’t think you all could do the kind of work you do there if that was the case! I apologize if that impression was given. And I can understand if the logisitcs of having a Christmas service that no one is going to attend were overwhelming.

    My worry is the more general one about what seems to be an identification of worship and evangelism – or worship understood primarily as a tool of evangelism, something that seems common to a lot of seeker-sensitive churches (which goes beyond the issue of whether or not to have services on Christmas). But people who are already committed Christians need worship too – to praise God, and receive the blessings of his Word and Sacrament. Heck, if the Book of Revelation is to be trusted, then the New Jerusalem will consist primarily of joyous worship!

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  6. jack perry

    A priest once told me that mega-churches were the way of the future. Perhaps this trend suggests that mega-churches aren’t such a great idea after all. Whether that’s actually the fact, I’m not sure — some of those ancient churches whose use predates and outlasts the duration of our country were arguably “mega-churches” — but it’s an idea that popped into my head while reading the comments.

    But, the worship experienced in common with other Christians in a church is with people who are more foreign to us than our families. This provides a substantially different experience from the worship shared only with family and friends. I would argue that this worship, by this very fact, is more fully Christian than that worship which is done at home (and in which I engaged earlier tonight with my family). Especially in America, where the “family” is very often a small unit of parents and children.

    In our age, people are increasingly isolated from their own neighbors and their own churches. Thus, the question isn’t whether worship in church best pleases God, but whether it ought to be available at all, or even emphasized for certain feasts precisely because it unites us more visibly to the entire world of Christians.

    PS: The Catholic Church has restored the practice of dismissing the catechumens at the Eucharist, but only during Lent.

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  7. Kim Traynor

    Thanks Lee. I apologize for being so defensive. You didn’t question the devotion of the folks at Willow and I appreciate that. However, I don’t see how you can take a couple of sentences from the newspaper and draw the conclusion that Willow Creek confuses worship and evangelism.

    I’m not exactly sure what you mean when you use the word “worship,” but if you mean the believers gathering together and observing communion, learning from scripture and singing hymns and praise songs that is what our midweek service (called New Community) is for.

    Seeker sensitive churches need to be believer sensitive as well, but after 30 years Willow has worked a lot of the kinks out of that problem. The more urgent problem we’re facing is the one Jack Perry brought up:
    In our age, people are increasingly isolated from their own neighbors and their own churches. How do you remedy isolation in a church that is so big you can spend two hours there and not see anyone you know?

    For a while it seemed like the leadership of the church had all their hopes pinned on small groups. Maybe that works perfectly for other churches, but at our church the tendency was for small groups to become little cliques. And they don’t solve the problem of isolation in the neighborhood. Randy Frazee, our newest teaching pastor, talks about the irony of “leaving the neighborhood to go to the community.”

    So now we’re in a new phase that puts the emphasis on neighborhood community and so far it’s been pretty amazing.

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  8. Lee

    Kim –

    You make a good point – it’s probably not fair to put too much weight on a snippet from a newspaper article.

    I guess my concern is the division between “seekers” and “believers” that relegates things like communion to a mid-week service, whereas I think of that as the very heart of Christian worship (along with proclamation of the word). I’m curious how a church like WC “transitions” people from one to the other? What does a typical “seeker”-oriented service consist of? The emphasis on neighborhood community is interesting too, what’s that all about?

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  9. Kim Traynor

    Communion is just as meaningful on a Wednesday as it is on a Sunday and once you get used to going to church on Wednesday evening it’s no more difficult than doing the weekend thing.

    But we probably don’t put the same emphasis on that sacrament as your church, not because we are seeker-sensitive, but because we are more in-tune with the Evangelical tradition than the Orthodox or Mainline traditions.

    You ask what a typical seeker oriented service is like. In the ten years or so that I have been around, seeker services have changed and evolved with the changes in non-believers attitudes toward religion.

    Back in the 90s people wanted to be convinced that the Bible was a credible source of information, and that Christianity was relevant to modern life. So seeker services were geared toward showing just how relevant and credible Christianity really is. There wasn’t much participation required from the attenders, it was more of a ‘sit back, take it all in and judge for yourself’ sort of atmosphere (and, rather controversially, those services steered clear of traditional Christian symbols and often used secular music.)

    But recently there has been a shift in the non-believers who visit the church. They seem less concerned with hearing the evidence for the resurrection and more concerned with making contact with God. There is a greater hunger for experience than for information. In response, more oppurtunities for participation are built into the service – things like praise, prayer and scripture recitation (and religious art and symbols sometimes make an appearance.)

    So seeker-sensitive isn’t as much a formula as an attitude.

    There are a lot of tools the church uses to help a seeker transition into a memeber. Small groups, sports teams, support groups, theology classes, serving oppurtunities, financial counseling…you name it. Usually baptism is the next bit step, followed by Participating Membership, a process similar to confirmation in other churches. There is no pressure and no timeline. It took me more than three years to be baptized and it was another year before I became a participating member.

    Neighborhood ministry is exciting! Historically, Willow Creek has been very white, very affluent, and very homogenous. That, obviously, is not an accurate representation of the body of Christ, especially for a church our size. So several initiatives were launched to get Willow moving in the right direction and the neighborhood ministry is the newest and most ambitious one of these.

    The point is to keep us from making the Willow Creek campus our fun Christian club house where we go to hang out with people just like us. By throwing parties and doing literally hundres of service projects in our own back yards we are trying to make ourselves available to the people God has chose to make our neighbors. One of our pastors compared it the “urgent care” centers that are popping up all over the suburbs. Rather than try to meet all the needs of the community in one centralized ER, local hospitals are branching out and building these urgent care centers all over the region. What the neighborhood ministry is meant to do is make the home of every member an “urgent care” center for the people in that neighborhood. The people on your street should know your name, they should know that you care, and they should be able to come to you for prayer, support or fellowship.

    Though the initiative is fairly new we’ve already had some really great results. We did a thirty day public service project to celebrate our anniversary last month and had really high participation with great feedback from our local communities. Many people have been amazed at the needs of neighbors that, until this started, were perfect strangers. (For great stories that have come out of this you can go to this link.)

    Thanks for the great questions and for the interesting discussion!

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  10. Joshie

    kool-aid, anyone?

    Reply
  11. Chip Frontz

    Lee,

    Thanks for hosting this great discussion.

    Something that needs to be brought up is that slowly the oldline/catholic/traditional/whatever churches have been trending towards catering to the needs of their “customers” too. Just look as what has happened to Epiphany and Ascension, two major festivals of the church, equal in importance to Christmas or Easter. These are not on Sundays. Most of the time the services are sparsely attended. We have had to exert enormous effort to get over 100 people to our conference-wide Ascension Day service. We do not hold a service on Epiphany, although every year on the Sunday preceding Epiphany we have a “Service of Prayer and Remembrance” which is to provide a service (that word again) to those who want to remember loved ones at Christmastime, and at that service we use the Epiphany texts. In the new “Evangelical Lutheran Worship,” Ascension Day itself will be a movable feast, similar to what has been done with Reformation Day and All Saint’s Day. It may be celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter. Last year we canceled Christmas services because Christmas fell on a Saturday. Most of the time we have very few at the Christmas Day service. We are moving to one service on Christmas Day this year.
    I have no doubt that if Christmas were not a national holiday, eventually, the Christmas celebration would die as well. (You don’t even want to get me started about the dad in our church who told me his daughter couldn’t participate in Christmas Eve services because the family opened gifts, drove around and looked at lights, etc., on Christmas Eve.)

    So it is not “just” the megachurches that are taking a more pragmatic view about when to hold worship services. You probably know where I stand about this, I hate it, but this is broader culturally than simply the megachurches. In an individualistic culture, tradition is malleable. Flexodoxy indeed!

    BTW, this article or something like it made the front page of nytimes.com this morning.

    Chip

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  12. Lee

    Chip, great point. Motes and beams and all that.

    One thing that I haven’t really seen mentioned anywhere is the role that economics plays in all this – not just at Christmas, but in setting the rhythms of our daily lives. I mean, how many people can afford to take the morning off work to attend an Epiphany or Ascension celebration? In other words, I don’t think individualism is the sole culprit here.

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  13. Chip Frontz

    Yes, but our service is at night. We have had conflicts with school concerts, etc. (Grrrrr).

    What we need are mass consumer-culture traditions based around Ascension (not).

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  14. Kim Traynor

    Wow Joshie, way to elevate the discussion to a whole new level.

    Chip,

    I hear your frustration and I’m sorry for the challenges you guys are facing but labeling men and women Jesus loves as “customers” sounds a little like the Pharisee who sneered “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners?’”

    Jesus answered “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Matthew 9:12,13)

    The mistake that the pharisee makes here, or that the older son makes in Luke 15, is one that we all have to be wary of. It’s incredibly common to human nature but absolutely poisonous in the church.

    Is there a place for the traditions we love in the church of today? Absolutely! But we need to keep it in perspective. Jesus said “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”(Mark 2:27)

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  15. Chip Frontz

    Kim,

    Thanks for the conversation.

    I think that my point about “customers” is not that people are “customers” but that is what consumer culture has defined people to be. Saying “we’re not going to have church today because the people won’t show up” is in effect to define “the church” as offering a service to customers who will pick and choose according to personal taste, felt need, etc., etc. I was not saying that people are customers. Far from it. “Church professionals” have begun to treat them like customers and themselves as marketers – witness the phenomenon of “church shopping.”

    Granted, one can hear a lot of judgment in the voices of those of us “traditionalists.” Some of it can be attributed to jealousy and fear. But there is also passionate concern for the Church and what it may be leaving behind -for example, the idea that every Sunday is a mini Easter Sunday, the day when the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, appeared to the disciples, and broke bread with them. In John’s Gospel every resurrection appearance of Jesus is on a Sunday. To cancel worship on a certain Sunday, after 2,000 years of the universal church worshiping on Sunday, because it would not attract people seems to be a denial of one’s ties not only with the church of tradition, but the church of Scripture as well.

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  16. Kim Traynor

    Hi Chip, thanks for clarifying.

    Saying “we’re not going to have church today because the people won’t show up” is in effect to define “the church” as offering a service to customers who will pick and choose according to personal taste, felt need, etc., etc.

    So what place do “felt needs” and “service” have in the church? If the church is meant to be the body of Jesus Christ then the gospels make me think they should have quite a lot to do with it.

    In the gospels we see that people’s needs determined how Christ ministered to them. He gave them what they needed, whether it was rebuking, healing, forgiving, teaching or a good old fashioned foot washing. This is how the “the church of scripture” (see the Book of Acts) conducted itself and this is how we ought to conduct ourselves.

    As for the Sunday thing, Willow is not cancelling worship on Christmas Sunday, we’re simply doing it from our homes with curriculum that will be given to everyone who attends one of the Christmas services at Willow between the 20th and 24th. Potentially 60,000 people across Chicagoland are going to be using this curriculum on Sunday, which is many more people than would have shown up at the building.

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  17. Chip Frontz

    Hey Kim – thanks a lot – this is fun! I’ve never blogged with “a real live Willow-Creeker” before! I’m sure it’s forcing me to rethink some assumptions.

    Regarding “felt needs:” To say that Jesus met the needs of people is not to say that he always met the “felt needs” of people. (For example, James and John did not need to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand when he came into his glory. They felt they needed to, however.)

    To reduce the Gospel to “meeting people’s needs” is to make the Gospel almost entirely subjective and (again) consumer-driven. I think that Willow Creek is probably doing a very good job at identifying what people feel they need and ministering to those needs. Perhaps it is inevitable in a consumer culture that this should happen. If people define themselves by what they need, and if they make choices on where to spend their time based on those needs, then they are defining themselves as consumers in a culture of gratification.

    The only potential problem is that historic Christian tradition has been constant self-examination as to the idolatry of our felt needs. Let me say that I don’t even know enough about Willow Creek (aside from owning one book by Lee Strobel) to presume to identify if there is any idolatrous need-gratification going on. But that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about – in a consumer society, where we define ourselves by feeling need and satisfying it, any talk of self-renunciation or taming desire of any sort is muted.

    Thanks for informing me about the Christmas curriculum thing. That is not a bad idea – obviously. In our church, we are trying to “knock down the walls” of the church as well and encourage families to worship and pray together in their homes. It’s just that itsy-bitsy inconvenient fact that the disciples gathered together “in the upper room” on Sunday, when Jesus came among them and breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” It’s inconvenient for our felt needs to think that Jesus is encountered “in the body” so that it might be truly “the body of Christ.”

    I’m not trying to score points, just trying to say why it hits some wrong that there’s no church on Sunday.

    Peace.

    Reply
  18. Kim Traynor

    Hi Chip, I’m enjoying the discussion too!

    If the term “felt needs” actually means “selfish desire” then I didn’t get the memo! I certainly don’t think Jesus came to earth to make us all comfy and wealthy! When I use the word “need” in a sentence (felt or unfelt) you can read it as “need.”

    As for whether the people at Willow know the difference between want and need…it seems sort of vulgar to talk about, call me old fashioned. If you do a little research I’m sure you’ll be able to answer that question. (I’m not trying to be evasive – if you really want me to talk about it you can email me at the link in my profile.)

    Ok, back to worshipping from home on Sunday. The founding of our church was basically inspired by two passages of scripture; Luke 15 and Acts 2.
    Luke 15 because in it Jesus makes it as clear as day why he has come to earth and Acts 2 because it gives us a model for what the church should look like.

    Here’s a bit of Acts 2:

    “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were joined together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

    This is the first church – they don’t appear to have favored any one day over another or to have required a desingated building to worship in. Instead you get the feeling that being the church was a 24/7 deal for these folks. That is pretty inspiring!

    This Christmas Sunday when I gather with my family in the name of Christ, I believe we will be in His presence. Jesus said “where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there in the midst of them.” (Matt 18:20)

    But that said, I’m perfectly happy with the tradition of going to church on Sunday and so is the rest of Willow Creek…this is isn’t exactly a typical experience for us!

    …and peace be with you! 🙂

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  19. Joshie

    If eveybody hasn’t moved on yet, could I ask you a question kim? Have you ever been a regular attender or member at any congregation other than Willow Creek?

    Reply

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