By Len Hjalmarson

THE organized church in North America is facing a crisis.

David Bodine cites statistics from the World Evangelization Research Center: “Christians spend more on the annual audits of their  churches and agencies ($810 million) than on all their workers in the non-Christian world. The total cost of Christian outreach averages $330,000 for each and every newly baptized person.”

Worldly means

The church has adopted worldly and temporal means to achieve eternal ends. We seem to  believe that we can spend our way to a revitalized church, but we cannot. The crisis is taking shape as giving and attendance drop.

The deeper crisis may be a crisis of spirituality.  John O’Keefe at the popular postmodern  magazine Ginkworld opines,  “Over the past 15 years we have spent over $500 billion . . . and for the most part the church in the USAmerica has not grown at all; it has not even kept up with  the population growth.  In fact, the average attendance in church has declined over a 10-year period.”

The influx of cash hasn’t resulted in transformation. We may point to large buildings and  large congregations with wonderful programs, but these aren’t indicators of health.  

How do we quantify health?  Toward what goal do we move people?  Is it enough to be purpose-driven? Is it possible that the typical measures of health  actually cause us to attend to the wrong things?  

The currency in use for measuring church growth has been the ABCs: attendance, buildings and cash. If a church has these in measure and expanding, it has been considered  fruitful. But these are entirely secular values, imported from the business world in a capitalist  and consumer culture.  

A biblical set of ABCs would look different: perhaps authenticity, belonging and cultivating Christ. If God’s end goal is Jesus, if his purpose is to form people into the image of his Son, then transformation – formation resulting in new identity and new  practices – must be at the core of ekklesial health.    

Missional movements

In the past 50 years, we have witnessed a number of movements directed toward production of healthy and growing churches. Broadly speaking, church  growth movements tended to focus on what humans do; missional movements tend to focus on  what God is doing.  

How do we maintain our focus on God and his kingdom? How do we direct attention away from our false egos and our distorted desire to be saviours for the world?

In  Judaism, there is a distinct activity called kavanah. It is cultivated in order to maximize the inwardness of our actions.  It means to pay attention, to direct the mind and heart in order to  maximize the levels of intentionality of our actions.  

This applies to actions/deeds as it does to  the study of scripture and to prayer – but goes beyond these activities themselves to the notion of  attentiveness to God himself.  It is not primarily an awareness of being commanded by God, but  an awareness of the God who commands.

Martin Buber writes: “He who does a good deed with  complete kavanah – that is, completes an act in such a way that his whole existence is gathered in it and directed in it towards God – he works on the redemption of the world, on its conquest for  God.”

The Hebraic understanding is that there are only two realities in the world: the holy  and the not-yet-holy. The missional task of God’s people is to make the not-yet-holy into that  which is holy.  This is done by the directing of the deed toward God and by the level of  intentionality and holiness with which we perform our daily tasks.  

The real crisis is not one of church growth, but of spirituality and of faith. Spirituality values weakness and emptiness, while the world values knowledge, power and certainty. Spirituality is oriented first to the unseen world; science is oriented first to what we can measure.  To the extent  that the church has adopted worldly goals and ideals, she has abandoned the way of Christ.

Knowledge seeks certainty  and eschews faith. Knowledge seeks control, when we need more dependence. Rethinking the problem tends to result only in tweaking the system. The very foundation has to shift, and our patterns of living must change as we move from rationality to relation.

Relevant     to culture

Strangely enough, the hope for a church that is relevant to our culture, a church that is ready to spend itself for the kingdom of God instead of seeking power, a church alive to compassion  and the poor may be one result of the cultural shift we find ourselves in. It is only when we are insecure that we are open to change.

In Community and Growth, Jean Vanier writes: “When a community is born, its founders have to struggle to survive and announce their  ideal. So they find themselves confronted with contradictions and sometimes even  persecution.

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“These oblige the members of the community to emphasize their commitment; they strengthen motivation and encourage people to go beyond themselves to rely totally on Providence. Sometimes only the direct intervention of God can save them.

“But when a community has enough members to do all the work, when it has enough  material goods, it can relax. It has strong structures. It is fairly secure. It is then that there is danger.”

At the centre of any Christian definition of health rises a Cross.

It is difficult to integrate pain and suffering into a welcoming theology of wholeness and success.  And when we wed our ideals of growth too closely to physical and psychological measures, when we are looking for mass appeal, we end up cultivating groups of ‘beautiful people’ –  and excluding the ones Jesus  seemed to prefer.  

Yet Jesus came among us as one who was poor. He emptied himself of power and privilege and stepped down from a place of safety to a place of chaos and risk. He didn’t  hang out with the beautiful people.

Dallas Willard writes, in The Divine Conspiracy: “We must see from our heart that:  Blessed are the physically repulsive; blessed are those who smell bad; the twisted, misshapen, deformed; the too big, too little, too loud; the bald, the fat and the old. For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.”

Growth & chaos

We intuitively know that health involves growth and chaos: rhythms of ascent and descent,  movement toward greater integration, and the ability to embrace both light and shadow.

A certain amount of stress is important for healthy organisms. A tree that has no experience of windstorms tends to develop shallow roots. When the winds suddenly blow, that tree could topple to the ground – unless, of course, it is  sheltered by many other trees.    

Health must ultimately be related to Spirit. Health may be more a quality of relationship  than an outwardly visible quantity. Perhaps health is in the eye of the beholder. We are whole as we are beheld by Jesus: “How beautiful you are, my sister, my bride.”  

Health should be a communal measure, the loaf and not the grain of wheat; and a process,  not a static image like a snapshot. Perhaps it is more like video than a photo: a dynamic, changing, many hued image of process and growth.  

Diversity is crucial to health. Biologists are discovering that homogeneity is dangerous. Loss of diversity makes organisms vulnerable. A single virus can wipe out an entire species, whereas diversity equals flexibility and adaptability and survival.

Natural rhythm

Church growth is de facto a picture of expansion. But what if health really means something  more like a natural rhythm, embracing the God-given cycle of birth and death?

Recently, Organic Church author Neil Cole was asked about the way we measure success.

He responded: “We don’t care if our churches live a year, 20 years, or 100 years. We care that, while they live, they give birth. We may start a church that lasts a year, but while it lives, it births two daughter churches. That is a success. We think that if every church reproduces  in that way, then the kingdom of God will continue and grow.  

“But if we think that every church has to last forever, we will try to do everything we can  to keep it alive artificially, and that’s not good. We find fruitfulness most often in the  small, not the large. Growing larger does not seem to be the key. Massive attendance is not the key.”

Rhythms of practice are essential to health. Sabbath and work, study and prayer – the loss of rhythm produced by the  fragmentation, individualism and pace of Western culture leaves many feeling both alone and rootless.

We need communal practices. When we meet to pray, it may not matter so much what we pray – but that we pray  together. In this way, we are formed in a common rhythm – and we discover we are not alone.  

We need the empowerment of the Spirit of God to establish a redemptive presence. We need an identity which is imaginatively rooted  in people, and expressed in mobility and flexibility, and not in fixed and immobile buildings or temples.  

Perhaps we need to exchange the question of health  for a different question: how do we form a culture whose ears are attuned to the Spirit?  

In a  time when more and more voices demand our attention, in an age of burgeoning information and  decreasing wisdom, where there is less time to reflect and increasing complexity with which to  wrestle, we need more than ever to be a people who hear the voice of the Shepherd.

May God  grant us ears to hear!

More articles can be found at NextReformation.com.

April 2008