What’s Boston Legal got to do with Church?
At the start of this season, John Larroquette joined the show I love as “Carl Sack” (that’s him on the far left). As always, when a new cast member is added to a show I watch regularly, I went through some worrisome times. What was going to happen to the relationship between Denny and Alan? How was Shirley going to fit into all of this? (especially once I realised that Carl and Shirley were in a serious relationship).
You see, I regard the people at Crane, Poole & Schmidt as part of my family and I worry about things happening that may cause changes.
In a comment on an earlier post of mine, Rebecca made the following comment about Salvation Army small corps (local churches):
We just don’t seem to think like that in the Army, for good or for bad. From a divisional perspective, most of our corps struggle to accommodate a small handful of new people in their corps, let alone large growth. And for many of our 30-60pax congregations, growth beyond these numbers means a considerable change from familiarity to not as much (ie you might not know everyone’s name on a Sunday).
Regrettably, I think Rebecca’s right on this, people are thinking exactly this way, scared of change because that may upset their comfortable family life.
Here’s the catch though. The network that owns Boston Legal knows that they can’t think of the show and its cast as a family. They’re there for a purpose (to entertain and thereby make money) and the decisions made around the show reflect this strong mission orientation.
In the church, I believe we’ve got to start basing our decisions and behaviour on a strong mission orientation. The first aspect to this is for everyone in our congregation to realise that:
- The church belongs to Jesus, not to the individual congregational members; and
- That Jesus stated the church’s mission as being there for those who are not yet in church (see the great commission).
Then and only then will we overcome this struggle of people being resistant to changing from being a comfortable church that meets members needs but doesn’t reach others, to being a church that honours Jesus instructions to make disciples of all nations.
God bless
good post
exactly why “bringing people into a relationship with God” has been the core value at the centre of SAJ since before inception … and the measuring stick we apply to (almost!) everything
Quote is from an article I read earlier this week (URL is included)
“It means that an organization, a church let’s say, that was considered to be the best of the best at one point in time is likely to lose most of its advantage when there’s a massive historical change or, as Barker puts it, paradigm shift. If that organization doesn’t take the changes seriously and ask what they mean and make suitable adjustments, it will find itself losing ground, maybe going out of existence. In fact, it’s not just suitable adjustments, it may mean total reinvention.”
To read the full article look here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/001/21.88.html
I don’t have any problem with the statement “the church belongs to Jesus, not to the individual congregation members” from a theological perspective, but I wonder if ownership, or lack thereof, is one of the reasons the church might not be growing. As we all know, we get excited about things that belong to us – I’ve just been to home group and friends of mine are pretty darn excited about their new baby. They want to share her, they want us to admire her and play with her etc etc. Something happens to us when we have a strong sense of ownership. From my observation, it seems that many corps are ‘owned’ by a small group of people, AKA leadership team/corps council etc. The buildings, vision, plans, details of what’s happening in the church matters to them, seemingly more than to the average congregant on a Sunday. Ownership = Investment. If this is true, then perhaps we should be searching out ways for increasing ownership to be had by increasing numbers of church members. If people feel a strong sense of ownership of the church and therefore an excitement about what is going on, perhaps they will be more likely to want to share that. But it’s not just about church, is it? It comes back to our personal faith. So perhaps if it’s an ownership issue, then do we have integral ownership of our faith? Is it so foundational to who we are that we not only WANT to share it, but NEED to share it? Undoubtedly a combined ownership of faith and church would make powerful evangelism.