Your church isn’t supposed to “feed” you

Posted in Leadership by Matt Marino

This is cute. But we aren’t babies.

I have lame Christiany-sounding excuse fatigue. Here is the latest: “I am leaving this church because it just doesn’t feed me.” Pardon me but your church is not supposed to “feed” you. It probably isn’t your fault, though. You were probably sold this bill of goods by the church that talked you into coming their way the last time you were feeling spiritually bored.

Consider the “feedlot” model: We pick a church, like we pick a restaurant…one that dishes up what we like and are in the mood for on a steaming plate set before us. Then we sit in judgment. “That was good this week.” Or perhaps, “That sermon was a little mushy, and cold…like overcooked broccoli, pastor.” We tip if the service was good and expect to go home full.

Yes, I do know the term “pastor” is the Greek word for “shepherd,” but shepherds protect sheep. Sheep eat for themselves. Besides, the Lord is our shepherd, not your pastor. Your pastor is a human not the Holy Spirit.

There is a legitimate role for pastors. It is found in Ephesians 4. Pastors have been given their gifts “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.”

Consider God’s purpose in the giving of all of these gifted “apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers”: It was EQUIPPING YOU “for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” Rather than being passive recipients of a meal, this is a picture of a community sharing its gifts with one another as it engages in mission.

The early Christians had a love that “compelled” them into the world in invitation and self-emptying service (2 Cor. 5:13-15). Please don’t bail out on your church because it doesn’t passively “feed” you. The church isn’t supposed to be a restaurant with waiters that pre-chew our food and dribble it into us like the SNL soft-teeth skit. It is supposed to be culinary school. Think about what culinary school gives someone: tools, knowledge, practice, confidence and helps you find a job cooking in the real world. Both visions of the church will change you: One will make you fat and passive. The other will change both you and the world as you serve it, adding flavor and taste to those around you.

So before you put a grotesque and distorted burden on your church, ask yourself how discipleship happened historically. Hint, it wasn’t sitting in a class memorizing gospel presentations or Bible verses on overcoming temptation. It was life on life: walking with Jesus. The disciples hung out around the fire with the Master for three years as he prayed, taught, modeled, questioned, healed, demonstrated, prayed some more and finally sent them to…”go make disciples” and to “obey all I have commanded.” Every bit of this was active.

This is possibly a very different model from your church. If your church is using you as a passive recipient of the staff’s teaching, doing all of the evangelism themselves and merely using you as an “inviter” and the sanctuary as an evangelism platform, then perhaps you might want to ask them to STOP feeding you! Ask them instead to start equipping YOU and the rest of the church to “do the work of ministry.”

So stop asking your church to feed you. Ask them to equip you.

If you like this you might like: The Church is Christ’s bride. Not his baby mama.

or: The church isnt a restaurant its culinary school

17Sep2013

David Kinnaman is wrong: How the church really lost the millennials & what we can do to keep the next generation.

Posted in Millennials, Relevant Church by Matt Marino

(A letter to youth pastors, senior pastors, parents, and church boards)

David Kinnaman is really smart. He writes good books too. However, I question the title and premise of his book, You Lost Me. Did the church “lose” our young adults, as Dr. Kinnaman asserts, by being fearful, anti-science, controlling and hostile? I would like to suggest an alternate theory: The church didn’t “lose” the millennials at all. Youth were simply never actually in church to begin with.

At this point it is axiomatic that millennials are in an unprecedented exodus from the church.* Books are being published, “You Lost Me” conferences held, and churches are going to great lengths to address the issue of young adults distancing themselves from evangelicalism.[1] These efforts usually result in passionate appeals for market-driven changes to the practice and theology of the church. But rather than beginning with what young adults say, let’s first examine the context that led them there.

How Did We Get Here?

Young adults in Barna’s qualitative studies have compelling stories to tell about the church being fearful, controlling, anti-science, and mean to the LGBT community. Surely those stories need to be listened to. But when we stop and ask ourselves, “What was the last ministry those millennials were a part of?” For most, the answer is the youth ministry. And when we consider that the 15-year-old youth group member of a decade ago is the 25 year-old non-attender of today, a question starts to form: Did something happen in the youth room that might have caused this? Follow my line of thought through the dots of what we did in our youth rooms and see if the millennial abandonment doesn’t seem a natural, if unintended consequence…

It Seemed Like Such A Good Idea At The Time

In the 80’s and 90’s, while mainline churches disinvested in young people, evangelicals began imitating successful parachurch ministries to “attract” students with games and activities. But what the parachurch did in neighborhood living rooms with careful evangelistic purpose was a bit less purposeful (even if “Purpose Driven”) in most church youth rooms. Regardless, evangelism was in. Rigorous discipleship out.

As we moved into the 2000’s, bands, fog machines and light shows became the youth room rage. Tim Elmore dubbed today’s young adults, “the overindulged generation.”[2] The church gladly played along, “wowing” students with noise, technology and millions of pizzas. Students were segregated away from the grownups on Sunday morning in a new idea: the “youth service.” Early on this model of removing youth from the sanctuary was dubbed, “The One-eared Mickey Mouse.”[3] The youth service essentially turned the “student ministry” into a parachurch ministry on the church property – perhaps Christ-centered in its message and developmentally appropriate, but segregating youth from the larger faith community in order to do programs “attractive” to students.

Segregation: The Drug Of Choice

The entire church embraced this paradigm shift. It was the drug everyone wanted: Parents wanted their kids to like church. Pastors wanted undistracted parents listening to their sermons. Worship leaders wanted to avoid the complexity of pleasing multiple generations. Youth Pastors liked the numbers and accolades. Kids liked the band and shorter message. On top of that, donors were excited to write large checks to build expensive facilities with the promise of reaching lost and hurting kids. And if our metrics are seats filled and positive satisfaction surveys, it looked as if it was working. But what are the long-term effects of segregated, program-driven student ministry?

Many students graduate from high school…without having ever seen the inside of the sanctuary or meeting the senior pastor. In effect, without having connected with the larger Church.

In the new model, students develop the crucial affiliation bond not with the church or its leadership, but to the youth pastor and youth program. Because youth pastors have high turnover, new youth pastors have to continually “win” over the last youth pastor’s group. Students get used to being “won” and begin to expect adults to cater to their desires and preferences. The One-Eared Mickey Mouse, led by people with great entrepreneurial gifts but little theological training, became what the market demanded: the great show kids desire and the teaching parents wanted: just enough “God” to motivate kids to avoid drugs and sex.[4] Because youth pastors are generally people of spiritual passion and commitment, many students graduate from high school having had a real experience of the holy but without having ever seen the inside of the sanctuary or meeting the senior pastor. In effect, without having ever connected with the larger Church. In this model, older adults no longer have a role in the formation of the young; parents, who have outsourced their children’s spiritual formation, often oppose a rigorous transformational faith, and the young have no interest in taking their place in the councils of the church…so students graduate from the youth group into the next thing that will cater to their preferences…the local Starbucks.

An Assembly Line To Build the Self-absorbed

In fairness, this didn’t start in the youth room. The church shuttles our young down an assembly line from the nursery to the children’s rooms, then to the junior high room, then the high school “youth service.” Then we graduate them to college groups. No one seems to notice that nowhere in that system did we bother to connect our young people to the church at all.

We have treated students as a market to be pandered to in order to fill youth rooms. And, now that it is time for young adults to take their place in extending the Kingdom of God through the life of the Church, they are, as one would expect, wondering what we are going to do next to woo them. Should we be surprised that they are failing to become mature Christians, participating and leading in the body of Christ? Rather than “equip the saints for the work of ministry,” we have infantilized them. [5]

How did we not see this coming? How did we fail to connect the dots? Instead of connecting them to God and his church, we, with Pavlovian discipline, conditioned our young to jump from church to church as consumers of glitzy religio-entertainment. We systematically taught those with the most to give how to take and take and take.

Are there other factors? Of course there are. For one, parents have largely stopped passing on the faith in the home. For another, the evangelical church has lowered its ecclesiology to something akin to “we exist to be entertain you.” However, right between those two polarities stands a ministry that could bridge the gap: the youth ministry. How? To start with we can drop the misshapen narrative – the narrative that we “lost them” by giving the young too rigorous a theology and by being hostile and negative. Although problematic, fear, negativity, and rigor simply do not tell the whole story at thousands of churches. And trying to un-lose a generation by again pandering to whatever the latest market research says millennials want to hear is not only to fail to be faithful stewards of both the Gospel and them, it is to repeat yesterday’s mistakes.

What now?

The exodus of young adults from the church is a reality caused, not primarily by cultural change or negative message, but by ill-advised leadership decisions by youth pastors, senior pastors, parents and church boards. We did this to ourselves by investing in segregationist youth ministries that proved ultimately unhelpful. What we can do in response? We can repent of where we failed them in their youth rather than by again pandering to where we have left them as young adults.

Then, Youth pastors, pastors, parents and board members, lets put students into the sanctuary on Sunday morning. Reclaim rigorous discipleship, multi-generational relationships, and youth serving as full members of the church. Challenge and equip parents to spiritually lead in their homes. Re-invision youth ministry as youth who DO ministry, pursuing and extending the faith connected to the entirety of the community of faith, the church.

Together lets make sure the next generation of young people does not leave the church when they leave our youth rooms.

*A followup post by a Millennial: How do millennials experience your church?

Continue reading →

16Sep2013

The Cloud of Unknowing: 7 steps to successful blogging

Posted in Culture by Matt Marino

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde created a cloud in a room.

To my surprise, people have begun to contact me for blogging advice. The question usually goes like this: “Can you help me do what you have done?” What they mean is, “How did someone with no media distribution get hundreds of thousands of hits in the first year?”

Always one to “share the love,” I will gladly reveal my “secret sauce.” Caveat: My advice could be summed up in the title of the Christian mysticism classic, “The Cloud of Unknowing.”

Step One: Have an eccentric motive. I needed to stay awake in 4 hour theology class lectures. I started blogging to create stress by multi-tasking. That and youth pastors I train kept saying, “I wish you would write this stuff down. This is not what we are hearing at youth ministry seminars and conferences and we need to digest it.”

Step Two: Be clueless. I told a friend I wanted to blog. He said, “Download WordPress. Attach a picture. Tell people who you are. Start posting stuff.”

Step Three: Be un-focussed. Blogs are supposed to be about, to quote Jack Palance in City Slickers, “One thing.” I blog about whatever is floating through my grey matter when I have time to type: youth ministry, milennials, the church, liturgy, esoteric conflicts among Anglicans, leadership, marriage, ethnicity…

Step Four: Entertain Thyself. It helps both you and readers be entertained if you have a catchy title.

Step Five: Scratch your head in amazement when thousands click on your posts because friends forwarded your stuff around on Facebook. That one is really something. One day a friend in North Carolina will fb you and say, “Hey, your article is going around!” You check the blog stats and wonder, “O my gosh! How did this happen?” Then you show the stat page to your wife and ask her to pinch you. Then you refresh and say, “Quick, pinch me again, while you were pinching me 72 people clicked on my blog!” That rapidly grows old as you realize, a) your wife is not going to spend her day pinching you and b) pinching doesn’t actually make people click on blogs. That is just magical thinking-a holdover from adolescence.

FB is not only responsible for 15x more traffic on my blog than ALL other sources combined, it is indirectly responsible for virtually EVERY hit I have since my very first page view. That was my wife. She wondered why I wasn’t using my time more productively. Those other sources in the photo (with the exception of Twitter) are folks who discovered “the gospel side” from a Facebook forward.

Almost every hit is from fb. The ones that aren’t found me on fb.

Step Six: Write Mark Zuckerberg a “thank you” note for your newfound friends and colleagues from all over the world. I actually haven’t done that. But I should.

Step Seven: Be nice to people. For heaven’s sake, if someone cares enough to take their time to not only read what you wrote, but to write back to you, treat them with respect.

Blogging is a privilege. The newfound connections and reconnections with people I have not seen in years has been a surprise and a blessing…and the dialogue with people who comment helps me think more clearly and be less insulated than I ever could have been otherwise.

So have fun and blog away!

13Sep2013

You don’t seriously think…”man’s rules” matter, do you?

Posted in Liturgical Church by Matt Marino

“You don’t seriously think…” is a format for responding to reader’s questions in more depth.

All traditions are not created equal.

Greg, responded to this week’s “Why I dropped church” post on his blog thependulumeffect. He writes:

I AM a traditionalist…I traditionally believe that we should love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength…we give Him our lives in faith. THAT is tradition. The rest is just man’s rules…Jesus…teachings are devoid of anything dictating whether or not we have stained glass windows, acolytes, liturgies, music, organs, guitars, pews, coffee, candles, multimedia and light shows, or even church buildings…Christians should test everything we believe and practice against Christ’s teachings. If anything doesn’t pass the test, do we have the courage to abandon such beliefs?

Hello Greg,

Thank you for responding to my post in your blog. It is a great complement when others write to you, even more when they blog in response to your ideas. The simple answer is: “No and Yes.”

I am right there with you, Greg, when you say that the main thing is to “love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.” However, faith as the main thing was not in question in my post. It was assumed. My purpose was the search for a deeper discipleship.

All Traditions are NOT created equal

Your argument, in essence, is: Since faith is what matters, traditions do not. From your list of “traditions,” you appear to mean “practices in historic worship.” I am curious as to why you view those as categorically opposed to faith? Traditions might be irrelevant. However, “traditions” that teach faith, shape faith, and form faith matter specifically because of what they accomplish: the building of faith. To say anything else is to say that the actions of a Christian DON’T matter, something I am pretty sure you would not say.

Any faith practice can be perverted, subverted and elevated beyond recognition. They can distract or bury the Gospel…this is true of modern “traditions” as well as ancient ones. “Traditions” can also be used as they were intended – to cause a greater surrender to Jesus, a growth in grace and mercy and as deep discipleship to send Christians into a lost world to bring the Good News of Jesus.

The “Rules of Men”?

There is a big difference between “the rules of men” (rabbinical teachings added to the Law), and “the practices of Christians in worship.” Let me use one of your examples: acolytes. I have never met anyone who would say that an acolyte is a worship necessity. However, many would say that the procession in which acolytes march is edifying: The Cross of Jesus is brought into the place of worship, reenacting the consecration of pagan Roman sites for the worship of the Lord, Jesus Christ. It is the reclamation of Roman processions in which Christians, forced to bow before the emperor when he came through town, were now able to bow before the emblem of the real King who had come to establish God’s new Kingdom. That is a “tradition” about a new citizenship in a new Kingdom-one for the benefit of “men” but most definitely not about “men.”

In thegospelside I try to get people to question uncritically held assumptions about the way we do things and where they lead…the backsides of every coin. Everyone can see the downsides of dead tradition. Although we are beginning to see a change, people are still embracing unquestioned mega-multisite-evangelical virtual-popery.

Preferences. Schmeferences.

I do not write about preferring one style over another. I point out two essentially different visions for Sunday worship: One is worship as “an experience for the unchurched.” In this model, the Sunday worship “environment,” is “church for people who don’t like church,” as Andy Stanley and North Point Church articulate quite compellingly. In the relevant model the Christian exists as an “inviter” for the high-horsepower preacher and the sanctuary exists to evangelize the lost. In the ancient model, church was to “equip the saints for the work of service,” to quote Paul in Ephesians 4, in order that individuals would each go to the world to evangelize it. The relevant model utilizes the gifts of the gifted to accomplish what the gifts can accomplish. My assertion is that use of gifts in the sanctuary to do the ministry rather than to equip others to do it is a new “tradition,” one divorced from 2000 years of Christian tradition…and one that will not help us in the long run.

Historic Christian worship was to accomplish the purposes of building faith and equipping the believer through things such as having us kneel before our Savior in the public confession of our sins…come to the Lord’s table with outstretched hands to receive rather than “take communion.” Humans take nothing in grace. It is all receiving. In The Church of the Great Tradition one bows before the cross and at Jesus’ name, not out of legalism or tradition, but out of a reminder that there is a Lord, and he is not me.

Greg you asked: “Christians should test everything we believe and practice against Christ’s teachings. If anything doesn’t pass the test, do we have the courage to abandon such beliefs?” I ask you the question back. How much of what your church does on Sunday is in Scripture? The worship pattern of popular evangelical Christianity is bound by song and sermon. The pattern of the early church was Scripture and Supper-based on synagogue and Temple. Those elements were narrative based, and symbol rich. They had a purpose, purposes we lose if we subtract the symbols and narratives.

So, Greg, I thank you for reading and also for keeping the main thing the main thing. That does not mean, however, that all roads to the main thing are equally biblical or equally formative in their effect. And that was my point.

*Greg has an interesting and well-written blog: thependulumeffect

9Sep2013

Why I dropped church and joined The Church

Posted in Liturgical Church by Matt Marino

A German Mass during WWII

I came of age outside of the faith. At eighteen God found me. From that day forward, and with a love that was not my own, I have not been able to help but love Jesus back and work for the welfare of others with the overflow of that love. Yet, even with all that love, I am sorry to say, I did not love church. Oh, I liked the idea of church. I liked lots of people at church. I just didn’t like church.

At least not until I discovered the Church: The Church historic. In the Church historic; orthodox, catholic and reformed, I found something larger than I.

I came to value Christ’s bride when I wandered into an expression of it that immersed me in a different and embodied narrative: the grand story of God’s creation, fall, redemption, and working toward final justice. The Church, described by the Creeds, nourished by the Sacraments, defined by the Scriptures and led by the Holy Spirit through the 3-fold ministry, is something one can stand lashed to when the storms of life come.

Don’t get me wrong, I am indebted to the church of my conversion. The godly men and women of that movement introduced me to faith, fed me on the Scriptures, and challenged me to serve. Now, however, in the Church I am no longer adrift in a world that is a Jesus add-on to a life of my American culture’s creation. In the Church, I am connected to the original eleven “sent-out ones” by touch and by teaching. In the church of my conversion, “The gates of hell,” did, in effect, “prevail against it” from the close of the canon until the Reformation, or maybe the Second Great Awakening, or, for some, the coming of the evangelical explosion of the 1980s.

The Church is rooted in history, unchanging, with worship patterned after that of the earliest Christians. Lancelot Andrewes described the Church of the Great Tradition as bound by “One canon, two testaments, three creeds, four ecumenical councils, over five centuries.” She clarified those creeds in the Reformation. Her lay and clergy were missionaries of the Awakenings. In this Bride, the Holy Spirit is gloriously alive and balance is maintained in public worship by praying the safe, vetted words of the Church. In the Church, the old battles are not forgotten. So they do not need to be refought.

What put me off about church was that it was so like me – feeding me a steady diet of myself: my wants, my preferences, my music. It was quite “relevant.” I came to realize that I actually needed church to be UN-like me: to be transcendent. The Church is unconcerned with “relevance.” It cares not for my preferences. When I ask it to change it grins gently and asks me to change instead. In the Church, when one panics about something and accosts the clergy at the door, the chances are good the priest will say, “We have been in God’s presence in the liturgy. How about we enjoy that for a bit? Call me on Tuesday.”

The Church is maddeningly un-fearful. It is not subject to politics or fads. It does not do focus groups and market research. It is not trying to impress me, win me, or woo me. Instead of bending to my whims, it seeks to conform me to the image of Christ through immersion in patterns: daily in the Scriptures, weekly in Sacramental feeding of the Thanksgiving meal of the family of God, and living out God-time in the Christian Year. As a man of flesh, these patterns marinate me in the Gospel, bringing forth flavors in my life I never imagined.

In church I could write my own wedding vows. In the Church, self-made wedding vows, narcissistic holdovers of the 70’s, are not on the table for discussion. The Church calmly says, “Our job is to be conformed to God’s will and God’s words, not our own, so we will use the vows that have withstood the test of time, thank you.”

Many genuinely love the relevant church, I am sincerely glad for them. But for the growing group for whom church-lite is wearing thin, for whom the four songs and a sermon liturgy delivered by latte-toting pastors in skinny jeans is holding up as well as a Walmart shirt, there is an alternative. That alternative is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It follows a pattern that was old when Justin Martyr described it in 150 CE. It is both sacred mystery and deep discipleship. A faith in which the words and movements all tell a story. And ultimately, shape lives into the image of Jesus.

A few questions for discussion:

If you are a “relevant church” person, do you love church? Or are you giving up on it? If so, why?

Are you one of the people that goes to an expression of the Church that has a plethora of service options. (One of the Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox churches that offer services along a continuum from chanted 1700 year old liturgies to modern “relevant” models.) If so, do people move between the offerings?

Are you in one of growing numbers of modern churches experimenting with ancient liturgies? If so, how is that going?

6Sep2013

Parent Privilege: The youth worker/parent relationship

Posted in Youth Ministry by Matt Marino

Joel Joa and family at his baptism

The one thing I wish someone had helped me with when I was young in youth ministry: Relationships with parents. Like many young adults, I was a bit intimidated by parents. After all they had 10 to 20 years on me. In truth, I didn’t think about parents very often-mostly when one was upset because we didn’t return from an event on time. If someone had asked, I might have described the youth ministry as a sort of stand-alone program. But mostly no one did ask, as the rest of the church saw us as a stand-alone program as well. Our calendar was full and parents and their concerns were not really part of the classic youth ministry model. The disconnection from parents is even more pronounced if you are working in a parachurch organization, or if the student rather than the parent is the connecting point to the church.

Becoming a parent caused me to see through new eyes, though. For the first time I took seriously the scriptural call to the family to be the front line in the spiritual formation of children (Deut. 6, Ps. 78). It is parents who are tasked with the responsibility to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Prov. 22:6). The Scriptures are supposed to be taught to our children in the home (Deut. 6) in order “that generations to come might know…and put their confidence in God” (Ps. 78:5-7). Youth ministry does NOT exist to replace parents. Or be smarter, cooler or more spiritual than them either. Youth ministry exists to come alongside of parents in their God-given role in the spiritual formation of children. This is true whether the parent is a follower of Christ or not.

Here are four things I wish someone had told me to do:

1. Pray for parents: Learn parent’s names. Keep a list and pray for them weekly.

2. Connect with parents: Meet a parent a week for coffee. Let them know that you support them. There are three things that I would love to hear from my kid’s youth leader: 1. “Your children are the most important thing in the world to you, and I want you to know that I take this responsibility and your trust seriously.” 2. “You have a great kid! I really appreciate______ about them.” 3. “It must be fantastic to be a parent on a good day and nearly impossible on a bad one. How can I pray for you?”

3. Resource parents: This one might take a bit of budget and involve other folks on the church staff-which is a good thing.

Ask your parents what sort of help would be “helpful” help.
See if there is a seminar or class they are interested in that your church could host.
Let them know what you are teaching and doing in the youth program. A monthly email might be a good way to do this.
Read a couple of parenting magazines and include “tips from experts” in your email. (But make sure the “tips” are not manipulatively aimed at something a particular parent is doing that you are frustrated with.)

4. Support parents: Adolescence is a time when kids are distancing themselves from their ‘rents. This is a developmental necessity. However, if a teen’s only alternative sources of relationships and information are their peers and the media, our young people will be in real trouble. That is why one core task of a youthworker is to be the trusted Christian adult who will say what the parents say but simply not be the parent when they say it. When you earn the right to be heard, use part of that capital to help kids understand where their parents are coming from. Our job is to not to replace parents, but to point their kids to Christ and be a dependable adult Christian leader in their life.

Someday you will most likely have kids. Be the leader you would want someone to be for your children. You can choose to see parents as a pain. Or you can choose to see them as a privilege. Parents are neither a curse nor a necessary evil: They are God’s means to bless their kids…and you too, if you cultivate your relationship with them.

Blessings to you, fellow youth workers, as you seek to impact not just students but partner with their entire family for the extension of God’s Kingdom.

Matt+

3Sep2013

Hey hateful hater, big churches can be beautiful too.

Posted in Relevant Church by Matt Marino

Or: Some churches I like and why megachurch pastors should be reading the cultural tea-leaves.

Even friends are beginning to ask, “Why are you so anti-mega church?” I would like to say once and for all that I am NOT against churches being large. I hope every church preaching Jesus grows. I want the Kingdom of God to be extended. I believe the local church in mission to the world is the biblical, historical, and reasonable way for that to happen.

I am also not against large church pastors. Some of my best friends are large church pastors (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one). But, honestly, I don’t know a single large church pastor who does not love God and want others to know Christ. I am certain there are pastors who are shysters-there are shysters in every profession. I just don’t know of any of those, and I know a pile of pastors.

So what am I doing critiquing the dominant model of church on the American landscape? Merely raising questions about uncritically held assumptions. Why? Because EVERY good thing has a downside. Unanticipated consequences exist for every “win.” God can and does bring good out of bad…but correspondingly, every good thing has bad that can come from it. I am simply looking at our current popular ministry practices and asking, “Does anyone see the backside of this coin?” Is anyone asking, “Where will we end up if we keep driving down this road?” I have been quite surprised at the defensiveness this has caused. A defensiveness, not of core issues of the faith, but of a vision of the church less than 40 years old.

Be that as it may, I do believe big can be beautiful. I would like to list a few large churches that I really like. This is not an exhaustive list of “good” churches but a brief sample of some doing things well…

Redemption Church, Phoenix: (6000ish) They are multi-site, but each site has its own teaching pastor. They develop lots of mission-thinking preachers and leaders. Each pastor teaches the Bible in 45 minute sermons, and are packed with youth and young adults seeking “meat.”

Scottsdale Bible Church, Scottsdale: (7000ish) They planted churches and then began to do multi-site video-venues. I don’t like that part. However, they have trained and developed leaders for their own and many other churches, and they have actively given their people and money away to scads of other churches.

Mission Community Church, Gilbert: A large, fast-growing suburban church that reinvented itself as the Micah 6:8 “Do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God” church. They have an army of suburbanites thinking about giving time, talent and treasure to create good in the world.

New City Church, Phoenix: (600) Discovering liturgy, developing young adults, trying to take people deeper. This fast growing church is riding the wave of young adults moving to downtown Phoenix.

Church of the Resurrection, Chicago: (1300ish) They have tripled in the last five years, almost all with college and young adults. Liturgy, charismatic gifts, an army of rotating musical genres, robust Christian education from Wheaton College professors, and a youngish senior pastor who might be the oldest guy in the building.

Church of the Incarnation, Dallas: (1500ish) A fast growing traditional church in the central city. Lots of different musical genres, solid liturgy, strong teaching. Decided they needed to raise double-digit millions to expand. Raised almost twice that much.

Church of the Holy Cross, Sullivan’s Island: (1000ish) Great youth ministry led to great men’s ministry. A church specializing in venues of 300 or smaller for services to become the church where “everybody knows your name.” An interesting vision in a small beach town.

St. Barnabas on the Desert, Scottsdale: (700) Not a large church, but my money is on them becoming one. They have several hundred folks involved in contemplative practice, preach from a humbling level of prayerfulness (the senior pastor prays like 25 hrs a week), a group of retirees will serve anyone, anytime, anywhere, and they have a creative young staff.

There are a lot of churches that love people, have committed volunteers and want to share the Good News of Jesus. What do the churches on this list have in common?

1) They teach the Bible 2) They value young people 3) They foster relationships 4) They have a desire to take people deeper in Christ and do that by helping them engage in Christian practices and serve rather than just learning dogma 5) and more and more, they are exploring the totality of Christian history as part of those practices.

So, there are big churches that I really like. And, yeah, in light of a growing mountain of data[1], I do have serious questions about the way popular Christianity is doing Church and whether it has staying power. Again, I am not criticizing motives but rather methods. I am leery of the way the Church has hitched its wagon to the culture of preference. When the culture changes, and it is changing rapidly, what will a church built on being “relevant” and “just like” the culture do? Will it give up beliefs and sit with empty buildings? Or will it change its theology to remain “relevant”? For centuries large swaths of the church embraced slavery to keep the seats filled. What will this generation’s slavery be? What will pastors be willing to preach or willing to stop preaching to keep the lights on?

Pastors can defensively criticize the messengers or look at the data and try to be in front of the trends when they arrive. The failure to anticipate change in a big-box facility has catastrophic potential. If current directions continue, the donut hole of young adults will become entire missing generations.

The original mega-church, the Crystal Cathedral, was sold in bankruptcy to a new Roman Catholic diocese in 2012. The Crystal Cathedral will not be an isolated instance. That is not “hating.” It is sounding a warning before our suburban churches, built as surrogate main streets for housing tracts without town-centers, become ghost towns. Big can be beautiful. It can also be sold at auction to the highest bidder when the culture takes a left-turn evangelicalism missed.

[1] Including: Luis Lugo’s, “The Decline of Institutional Religion”(goo.gl/DiR6A), which describes 2008’s Pew Forum report that those in their 20s and 30s attend church at one half the rate of their parents and one quarter the rate of their grandparents. Brett Kunkle listed seven other such research reports in 2009 (goo.gl/s1vnv). Depending on the researcher, between 60 percent and 88 percent of churched youth will not attend church in their 20s (Time, 2009, Lifeway, 2010). Last year the Pew Forum confirmed the data in a follow-up carried in USA Today (http://wp.me/p2Gq9e-4u). As did this year’s “Hemorrhaging the Faith” study from Canada.

30Aug2013

The Latino challenge for an all-too-White Church

Posted in Multi-ethnic Church by Matt Marino

A week ago our bishop had our clergy and key lay leaders attend a day-long meeting to contemplate evangelism in the Latino community. He received a great deal of push-back, including comments like, “Those just are not our kind of people.” Below is my emotional reaction in this family-fight in defense of my bishop (whom I support and love) and his vision for us to embrace the message of the signs we place in front of our churches, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You”…

I have noticed something: Most people like diversity. As long as the diversity is a lot like us – People in our social class, who tell the same jokes, like the same music and watch the same tv. We like diverse people…as long as they aren’t too diverse. We like Inclusion. But it is always easier to include those who like what we like and look like we look.

Eight months ago I was asked by the Diocese of California to preach in a predominantly Anglo church in a predominantly non-Anglo neighborhood. They asked to be pushed on their racial disconnect. The leaders there previewed the sermon and, for the first time in my life, sent it back asking me to up the level of challenge. They were willing to be pushed. Are we?

Latinos represent a challenge for us. Latinos will be a majority in Arizona by 2020. According to Wikipedia, non-Anglos will be the majority in 13 other states by then as well. And first generation Latinos do not get our jokes or like our church music. Many don’t speak our language.

How will White Christians respond? We can cloister our churches until, like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, we are the last Anglo in the neighborhood. We can put the “for sale” sign in the yard and move where people “like us” live. Or we could re-engage to reach those God is bringing our neighborhoods with the Good News and hope of Jesus.

I am not talking about doing what Jesus did and actually, “move into the neighborhood,” as Eugene Peterson translates John 1:14. I am just talking about not moving out of it.

There is an obvious question that many of my upwardly mobile friends don’t want to talk about: How can White Christians take seriously the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) to “GO and make disciples of ALL nations,” if we move away from those “nations” to live behind a gate somewhere else? Many of us are aware that the Greek word for “nations” is “ethnay”- literally “Ethic groups.” So we are specifically commanded by Jesus to take the Good News of Jesus to those who do not look like us. God included them in the Great Commission specifically. How can the Church exclude them with our avoidance? How can we exclude them with worship services that are painfully non-welcoming in their mono-ethnicity?

I realize how much easier it is to paint “Welcome” on our sign than to write it upon our hearts. It is easier to make inclusion a slogan than a smile as we stick out our hand and say, “Hi my name is ____ and I want to invite you to worship with me this Sunday.”

Mark DeYmaz wrote a decade ago that the average church is 10x more segregated than the neighborhood it is situated in. Unfortunately, the research also tells us mainline churches, which pride ourselves on “inclusion,” are significantly more mono-ethnic than evangelical churches.

It is no secret that many of Phoenix’s early suburbs are in serious decline. Manicured grass replaced with dirt and weeds. Trees lined streets are stark and stump laden. Cars that don’t run sit on deflating tires. Apartment screens hang from windows like the flags of defeated nations. The parents who supervise no longer allow their children to play in the streets for fear of the “bad element.” These things are not an accident. They are what happens when leadership leaves a neighborhood – when we pack up and move somewhere “better.” Even as our urban cores are renewed, the poor are being pushed out of the donut hole of poverty that were once inner-cities, to first and second ring suburbs. Now, dispersed throughout the donut, the poor no longer have easy access to services. The poor, of every ethnicity, need our engagement.

It is our new reality that makes me long for the vision of Zechariah 8 in which “Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of great age. And the…city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.” That is a beautiful vision of what our decaying suburban neighborhoods could be once again. A vision of what God wants to do through his people – All of them.

Christians are “foreigners and exiles” in this world. (1 Peter 2:11) How can those who name the name of Jesus, extend anything other than welcome to fellow exiles? (Deuteronomy 10:19)

30Aug2013

Tickled!

Posted in Youth Ministry by Matt Marino

Imagine my surprise to find out that my article made the cover of one of my two favorite magazines! If you haven’t read The Living Church it is chock full of interesting and deep stuff. The article is information-rich and offers another view on the young adult exodus from the church not common in the literature. The narrative didn’t make it through the editorial process, so it could be more entertaining, but the ideas have challenged my views and ministry practices.

(FYI, my other favorites are The Atlantic, This Old Boat and the new Immerse Journal.)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/164325436/Renewing-Youth

28Aug2013

The Price of the Gospel

Posted in Liturgical Church by Matt Marino

Lauren Wright, college-aged daughter of my friend and veteran Episcopal Church youth minister, Dave Wright, wrote an interesting piece about serving in a Christian ministry that would not allow the young volunteers to speak of their motives for serving: Gratitude for God’s great love in Christ.

The Adventures of Lauren

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 Andthe King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,[a] you did it to me.’” Matthew 25:35-40

Work this past week was a real eye-opener! I have been to the streets of northern Philly that are clothed with drug abuse and poverty. I have cleaned some of the…

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