ARE WE A PEOPLE AT HALF TIME? - Leadership Network

sage one day. “We form local congregations
as if they were clubs. And then we
behave as if they were clubs. But clubs are
anti-growth.” Tully added, “Working to
keep a church at a comfortable number is
almost always self-defeating. Organically,
that’s stasis, and it spells death eventually.
A church that consciously grows will learn
to ask of everything that it pursues, Does
this help us grow Or, does this keep us the
way we are”
It is not accidental that the latest generation
of large churches, with their huge
auditoriums and balconied atriums, some
with food courts and fountains, resemble
secular gathering places. (Banks and colleges
used to build their buildings to look
like Gothic cathedrals.) By adopting nonthreatening
architecture, the large churches
are finding another way to lower psychological
barriers against the church edifice.
The multi-use church facilities open their
doors to every kind of community group
for meetings.
Experience has taught these churches
that after the initial exposure, size can soon
alienate the potential new member. The
small-group system that Willow Creek
gave its own expression to, which has itself
been widely adopted by even not-so-mega
churches, encourages every new member
to join a cell of usually no more than ten
people, led by a lay person. Such a cell,
says Willow Creek’s small-groups czar,
Jim Mellado, “is the basic unit of church
life.”
The perfume of these groups may be
Christian, but their integument is social.
Ideally if not always practically, your cellmates
are the ones who are there for you
when your parent dies, or when you’re lugging
your stuff to a new apartment, or
when you have to go to the doctor all of a
sudden and you need someone to pick up
the kids after school. Relationships, that is.
Neighbors. Family, when so many people
seem not to have a family anymore. What
used to happen naturally, at least in the
small-town America we mythologize,
today needs a little more deliberateness.
“We have to work at keeping the village,”
a small-group enthusiast at a church in
Minneapolis told me.
A THIRD FORCE
What may at first go unremarked when
one beholds all the small-grouping and
service being provided for people who
come to these
churches is the
service being
provided by all
those people
who are already
there. Teaching
Sunday school
and arranging
flowers and passing
the plate
have long been
the formal obligations
of any
Protestant congregation’s
core.
But the degree
and intensity of
participation in
the Next Church
is on a wholly
different scale.
The churches,
even the ones
with enormous
paid staffs can
truly be said to
be led and staffed by their laity.
The overwhelming reality is that the
bulk of the people who make the church
function are volunteers. One of the basic
elements of large-church management is
identifying the “gifts” of people in order to
fit them to the church’s various ministries.
What brings people to their gift of service
is a desire to do something that—perhaps
unlike their day job, perhaps unlike their
evenings—matters. Among the things that
they didn’t realize they wanted when they
came back to church, in the view of many
people I met, was not just a changed life
but the chance to change the lives of others.
Peter Drucker has written approvingly
of what he calls the pastoral churches as
yeasty new sources of nonprofit-sector
volunteerism. In the view of Drucker, these
churches are an integral part of a potent
and largely unseen “third force” of volunteer
productivity and philanthropy that is
picking up what the private sector has forsaken
and the public sector has squandered.
Drucker says that
Americans today go to church
for reasons very different
from those of two generations
ago. Then attendance was
steered by heritage, habit, and
social status. “Now,” he told
me recently, “it is an act of
commitment, and therefore
meaningful. It is no longer an
act of conformity, and therefore
meaningless. People
need community, yes, and
they need a spiritual identity,
yes, but they also need
responsibility. They need the
feeling that they contribute.”
GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY
Willow Creek Community
Church, the Fellowship of Las
Colinas, Saddleback Valley
Community Church, Mariners
Church, Wooddale Church,
Calvary Chapel, the Church
of the Open Door, the
Community of Joy, House of
Hope, Gateway Cathedral, New Life
Fellowship... these places have something
in common: they whisper no word of a
denomination.
In some cases that’s because the church
belongs to none. The Next Church is sui
generis, a house built of local materials and
independent pluck and zeal. In other cases
the church would just as soon not mention
that it owes allegiance to any remote earthly
institution. In a few cases the church
doesn’t even call itself a church.
Though many congregations in the
Next Church retain nominal membership
in mainline or evangelical denominations,
and some are thriving as parts of a greater
ecclesiastical whole, what they are concealing
in the names they have chosen is at
the heart of the great convulsion going on
in American church life: the challenge to
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