When Life Touches Life

I don't think I've read a better statement than this on why attractional church is not working: "We have gone to great lengths to fix up the barn, but the wheat is still not harvesting itself."  Wow, I wish I had said that!!

However, the issue is not as simple as buildings or no buildings; programs or no programs.  It is what we do around a building or program that impacts it's effectiveness.  It is whether we have intimacy, invitation, relationship, and incarnational lifestyles as the heartbeat of our evangelism and discipleship.

I wrote a (partly) tongue in cheek post about Iron Men earlier this week.  I'll be interested to see what kind of a response I get because the post implicitly bagged discipleship programs - and that's just not fair.  My walk with Jesus has been greatly enhanced over many years by a range of Bible study materials and church based programs.  You see, programs are not the issue - they are simply aids to a better relationship with God and with others; we can't place our hope in them.  And buildings are not the issue - they are simply functional structures that enable more effective mission and ministry - except that they tend to become the centre and suck us into their vortex so that ministry revolves around what takes place inside them.

My personal experiences with models of church planting - both inherited (traditional) and fresh expressions (emerging) - where we deliberately stayed away from ownership of buildings and a dependence on programs - lead to the conviction that it is through telling and living out the gospel story through relationships that evangelism and disciple making best happens: when life touches life.

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Comments

[beth]

My experience certainly concurs with this...especially because buildings and programs seem to bring out our desire for defined leadership and responsibility roles, which all too easily limit the scope of what can happen because we think the leader has to be doing it/authenticating it. Not that these are bad, but I've seen the gospel community nearly strangle itself by needing everything to go through THE LEADER and creating a bottleneck. It's frustrating for a church and excruciating for a leader. It can happen at the level of the pastor, or even at the level of a small group, where all initiatives must be 'programmed'. Heaps of goodnews stuff can happen spontaneously: a couple of (iron)women who decide to meet for a local prayer walk one morning a week. Several blokes who work in the city meet for lunch each fortnight for 'ironman' accountability. A few families invite their school buddies for lunch in the park and a hit of tennis after church on Sunday. None of this might necessarily be programmed.
Of course there are things that we want to pull together, be well co-ordinated and well resourced for...my question would be : what is our process for discerning those things that require greater structure, and then delimit and free ourselves for the spirit's stirring for other things beyond our imagination.

Are our buildings and programs the mission, the rocket, or the launchpad?