tlehmann – Page 2 – Tim Lehmann

One of the main reasons the church is seen as irrelevant is because we have confused who we are with what we want to accomplish. We have lost our true purpose as the bride of Christ. Ironically we often tell those in our congregations that faith is about who they are in Christ not what they try to accomplish for God yet our identities as a church are largely about what we do rather than who we are. We really don’t know why we exist. If we say we exist for some type of win or task, we are basing our identity on what we do rather than who we are. In order to be relevant, we not only need to know who we are, we need to know why we are. What if for the last several decades we have been looking in the wrong direction?

Many churches developed a list after Rick Warren talked about the Purpose Driven Church. Often a church will develop 3 to 5 core values and a mission statement as to why their particular congregation exists and what their values are. They may be along these lines:

To evangelize their community and / or the world
To create fellowship opportunities for believers or a community of believers
To disciple and strengthen believers
To worship God
To be a moral guidepost in the community
You fill in the blank _________________________________________

Churches will often include most of these values to some degree but most often a church falls into one of three models. Think about it for your church. If push came to shove, there is likely one model that would rise to the top. Churches are either:

“Seeker” motivated – Evangelism driven
Discipleship driven – Bible study focused or
Community driven – the church primarily is a fellowship mechanism.

This is why we exist. We either exist to bring people in, to build them up and send them out in their faith or we exist to come together and do life/church together with familiar people who share our values. Do you recognize your church in one of these models? Most likely these models will look something like this:

Seeker Motivated – Evangelism driven: You will usually see a strong emphasis in making people feel welcome and comfortable in church. Emphasis is placed on greeting people as soon as they hit the parking lot and making sure the service has something for everyone. Though people may be challenged, we do not want to offend anyone. There will generally be very contemporary music, a significant investment in sound, lights and video production, careful attention to the timing of the service and a topical message about a felt need of people.

Discipleship Driven: In this model you will often hear the pastor teach expositionally or exegetically (digging deeply into a passage of scripture often going verse by verse) through the Bible. There is emphasis on learning the Bible and growing people up spiritually. Often there will be a missions emphasis as well. Growth is not only for growth sake but to lead others in to a relationship with Jesus. Less emphasis is placed on production technology and guest services and timing of the service. Not that these things are ignored but they are just not as high a priority.

Community Driven: This is generally a church that has been around for a while. The pastor shepherds the current congregation and preaches for life as it is in the current group. Most people know each other and they often do life together outside of church as well. This is a very familial feel in the church.

Do you recognize your church in any of these models? Likely you will see some of all of the models but one of these models will typically rise above the others in your experience in any church you walk into. Another attribute you may recognize in any church is a consumer mentality. People come to church for what they can get out of church and they will typically settle into a church model that they are most comfortable with. This further cements the church model because if the pastor deviates from the norm, he knows there will be pressure in some form or another to come back to the place where people are acclimated and comfortable.

Humor me for a minute. What if we have this all wrong? Seriously, what if none of these models is what the church was intended to be or at least not HOW it is intended to be. Of course we are tasked with evangelism, of course we must disciple and of course we must be in community but what if we have completely switched the cause and effect of the church. Each of the models above is quite different yet there is one thing in common in all of them. In each model, the focus of the church is on people. It is a horizontal focus or an others focus. If we are the bride of Christ, that cannot be. Our cause, our focus, our primary purpose must be for the groom, not for other people. We will dig into this cause and effect inversion a little later but let’s put a pin it that for now.

I have lived in a couple sports towns. These cities are insanely (I might even say pathologically) enthusiastic about their sports teams. In one of these towns it was a regular occurrence to fill a stadium with nearly 93,000 people for a football game. But that was only the culmination of the town completely transforming for the entire day. In the other city, basketball arenas were consistently sold out and fierce rivalries were the normal way of daily life. Yet I have never met an apologist for a sports team that has tried to recruit me to be a fan. Their focus is on the team and they could not care less about my thoughts. However, their enthusiasm is contagious. They are evangelists for their team simply by their loyalty and their passion. Their praise for their team says it all. There is no need to explain to me the logical and practical benefits of being a fan of their particular club. Such an exercise would be frankly irrelevant. Being a true fan is not about anyone around, its about the team.

These sports fans are exactly opposite of how we do church. They wear stupid clothes or paint their bodies, they speak condescendingly to those of us who do not share their passion, some of their announcers are excruciatingly irritating, they even sing songs at their events from decades ago that are irrelevant to today’s culture. Parking is a huge problem, no one is at the gate to welcome you, they are all about money – ridiculous ticket prices, outrageous concession prices and they even charge you for a program that is self serving and has already been paid for by advertisers. In the end none of that matters because these fans’ first love is their team and they express it passionately, out loud and without apology. The rest is just tangential. What is happening is actually worship.

Remember in Revelation 2 what Jesus says about the church at Ephesus?

“‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, . . . I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”

What if we as Christians worshiped Jesus as enthusiastically as sports fans “worship” their sports teams? What if our focus, our passion, our loyalty was so keenly on Jesus that people were drawn to Him simply because they saw that we were 100% convinced that He is our everything and He is worthy of absolute devotion? What if our praise to Jesus carried the passion and excitement of a game winning red zone drive with 20 seconds left or a 3 point buzzer beater? The truth is that when we focus on seekers, when we focus on disciple making or when we focus on community, we have already lost the game. Athletic directors know that focusing on parking or concessions or even graphic design on the program is of very little value. What is of supreme value is the team. Lest there be any confusion, the team I am speaking of is not the church staff. It has nothing to do with the church organization. There are only 3 members of this team. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Unless our sole, passionate, relentless, undivided focus is on our triune God, we will miss what the church was designed to be. When God is our cause, the effects will be more people coming to Him, more people growing in Him and people growing in community. When we put any or all of those three effects as our cause, we will never achieve them effectively and we will miss an essential relationship with God in the process. When we focus vertically on God and get to know Him deeply we are consumed by Him. As a result, we have more and more and more to share with those who do not know Him. When we focus horizontally on people we encounter God less and have less to share with others. The kingdom of God is paradoxical. Jesus said, “If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.” Matt 16:25 NLT The paradox is no less applicable to the church. If we focus on people, we will lose them. Want proof? Just look at the Barna and Pew Research numbers from the past 50 years.

From another angle, imagine a new wife who loved her husband. In fact she loved him so much that she wanted to tell everyone about him. Whenever she was with her friends she talked about him and built him up. Her social media was full of posts about her husband and how great he was. In fact, this wife became obsessed with telling people about her husband. She would travel and tell people about him. She even wrote a book about him. However, the result of all this praise and adulation was that she spent less and less time with the man she loved. They even began having separate lives and they became distant. What she knew about this man became shallow because she simply lost touch with him. While she began showing her love and admiration for this man by telling as many people about him as she could, she eventually became just a shallow admirer rather than a true lover of this man. Can you imagine a husband ever being honored by such actions? Of course not! A husband enjoys the admiration of his wife and that is important to the relationship but what he really wants is the relationship with her. He wants to be with her and do life together with her.

The church is the bride of Christ. As ridiculous as the example above sounds, it is how we behave as the church. How much more authentic would this young bride’s love be if she extravagantly loved this man through the normal course of life and focused her love on him. All those around her would still see her love for him but they would see that love in a daily, authentic and passionate devotion in a constantly growing relationship. That example is far more powerful than a hollow spoken tribute. What if we made so much of Jesus and we were so enthralled with Him that those around us were attracted to who Jesus is simply by our exuberance in Him? This is the bride of Christ. This is who we as a church were intended to be. If our true worship of God takes first place and center stage, the rest will fall into place. If we get it backwards, the house will crumble on shifting sands. Remember the church at Ephesus. Again, Jesus said, “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, . . . But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” Rev. 2:2-4 ESV.

But that leaves us with a problem. We have to truly believe. We have to be 100% convinced and committed. We have to be all in, not distracted by the things around us. We must be completely and unalterably transformed.

Prologue
Relevant?
Defining Church
The Purpose of the Church
The Radiant Bride
Worship
Worship in the Church
Holy Huddle
Myth of Church Growth
Our Focus

I love the church. The church is the one true hope on earth for a world that has lost all solid ground. Even as I say that I know there are some who will enthusiastically agree ready to give me an “amen” and a high five! Others will shake their heads and mutter “the church is anything but that!”

Some say that the church is irrelevant. From those who are not favorable to the church that is probably the best option. Many say the church is just judgmental and hypocritical while others say we are a deluded bunch of weak minded people believing in fairy tales. Some have only looked at the church from the outside but others were inside the church and were disillusioned and walked away. These groups are a symptom that, despite all the efforts of the church to attract them, something in the church is wrong. It’s not that we haven’t tried to be welcoming and accepting and it not that we haven’t succeeded at times but something is not right if this is the result.

As the church we should really lean in and take note. What the church has to offer is invaluable. The love and grace of God is far more valuable than anything that can be offered on this earth. Yet people not only walk away uninterested, they can be aggressively antagonistic toward the church. Why?! We can spiritualize an answer or we can say, “they just don’t understand.” But I think we need to look inside first. How have we messed this up so badly? Seriously, how can we turn something so good to be looked at with such disregard and distain?

Much of the church’s focus over the past 50 years has been about relevance. We have made strong strides to be more relevant. There are things that needed to change. It is safe to say that the efforts toward “relevant” church have impacted our style of worship, our methods of communicating, the technology and the media we utilize, programmatic elements like drama and dance in worship, speaking to people’s felt needs, what we wear to church even who we hire as church staff. Essentially the relevant church movement has bridged that gap so that on the surface, what we experience in our daily lives during the week is very similar to what we experience on Sunday morning. We have made church comfortable and culturally appropriate. In that sense, the church has made great strides in de-compartmentalizing and making the church relevant to the average person’s daily cultural experience. But have you noticed that over the years as the church has progressed, studies have shown that the church is being seen as less and less relevant and antipathy to the church is growing higher and higher. So seriously, why, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to be more relevant, are we falling further and further behind?

While we have made the church a more culturally relevant experience for people we have seen a rise in atheism, a drop in church attendance, a drop in people considering the church to be relevant to their lives, increasing expulsion of God in all areas of our society, an increasingly amoral culture, an increase of people identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation whatsoever and an increase of people simply leaving the church. In fact the rising generation has not only very little use for the church (only 20% see it as important), they are much more antagonistic to the church (35% are anti-church)(Barna). Beyond that we have seen our society redefine the institution of marriage against any biblical standard. Our culture embraces legal killing of unborn children as a virtue. History is being rewritten to exclude the Judeo-Christian influence of our nation’s founders. Our high level elected officials are now even seeking to disqualify candidates based on their Christian beliefs and expression. All of this is happening on our watch while we are trying to be relevant.

There is a striking contrast. Inside the church there is a feeling that the cultural gap has been bridged and the church is highly relevant to people’s lives. We are pressing forward and doubling down with our initiatives. Meanwhile on the outside of the church, culture is saying that there is not a time in recent history in which the church has been more irrelevant. The church is happy that it is seemingly attracting people and the cry from outside is growing louder that our culture wants nothing to do with the church.

The problem is not that the church has not done a good job of becoming culturally relevant in its methods and presentation, it has. Sure there are gaps but in large measure, the church has reached a meaningful presentational relevance especially in the mega-church world. However, if the church believes it is inviting and relevant to the needs of the culture but the culture is saying the church is irrelevant and they want nothing to do with the church, well, there remains a problem and it is a huge problem.

Are there solutions? Of course there are but they go deeper than a single blog post can contain. However it is important to recognize a few very important things.

First, Jesus told us that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church so despite what some may believe, the church will not dissolve or crumble. On the contrary, the church is the bride of Christ and she will never be extinguished. She may be persecuted and pressed down but she will prevail. That however does not guarantee that the church will prevail in our city, our culture or even our nation. Jesus may choose for His bride to thrive elsewhere if we do not value her appropriately here.
Secondly, there is no greater force, no greater organization, no greater entity than the church in the world today. The world needs the church now maybe more than ever. It is time for the church to rise up and be the light and the hope this world so desperately needs. But more importantly it is time for the church to be what God intended her to be.
Thirdly, we can be grateful for the strides that the church has made in being culturally relevant. There is a lot of good there. However, it is time to move on to more important things. The world is not that impressed with colored robotic lights, smoke and cool videos. They need real answers. They need something far bigger than they are.

What if for the last 40 years we have focused on the wrong thing? Did some of those things need to change? Of course they did. But in focusing on the felt needs of people, in many cases we have lost the true urgency of the gospel and the vastness of an infinite God. In focusing on the style of music we have lost the meaning of true worship. In creating a seeker driven environment we have literally redefined “church”. And in focusing on being relevant to the world we have lost what matters most.

The church is both the beautiful bride of Jesus and His hands and feet to those around. The church has the opportunity to demonstrate God’s love to a world that is aimlessly searching for some sense of hope and meaning. More than the government, more than an economic system more than any other entity in this earth, the church has the opportunity to bring peace, to bring hope, to bring love and justice with truth. The church has the single answer that will last for all eternity.

I think it is time to move on to Relevant church 2.0 but first we need to define what the church really is.

Prologue
Relevant?
Defining Church
The Purpose of the Church
The Radiant Bride
Worship
Worship in the Church
Holy Huddle
Myth of Church Growth
Our Focus