Truth is ancient; it's grey hairs may make it venerable;
it comes from Him who is the ancient of days. --Thomas Watson

 

20 September, 2007   comments: (0) Today's Pragmatism   Small Churches MUST "Depend on Creativity"? UPDATED 9/30/07 - This one is a little too wordy to squeeze into the scrolling ticker, so I'll leave it here for a few days and then remove it. Every once in a while you run across a leader in the Church Growth Movement that has a verbal slip which reveals their thinking, and exposes the rotten root structure that this movement is based on. Now perhaps this church leader doesn't realize what he's just said, and his statement may not reflect his true beliefs, but have a look at point 3 in his list. He says: "It's important to learn from churches bigger and smaller then you. Churches that are smaller have to be even more creative, because their success depends on it". I certainly hope he doesn't believe that ANY church's success depends on human creativity. The Apostle Paul never talked like that; he spoke as though success depends on God, and he didn't want to do anything that would replace or "enhance" the Gospel with human wisdom and cleverness. Comments now open. This page discusses the post and comments found here. All of the text below this line was added on 9/23/07. Well, this post has certainly taken a few interesting turns over the past couple of days. Anthony (the pastor who wrote that blog post), sent me an email, not to address the concern that I had expressed in the text above, but simply to tell me that he's now added this bullet point to his post: "People will always call what you are doing a sham or fake...don't expect friends in the 'Christian Community'. Most of the time people don't have the guts to try something new, so they focus on pointing out the 'flaws' of others." His Senior Pastor then got involved and posted a comment about the usefulness of creativity, and that somehow got tied in with a reference to "scribes and pharisees". A Google search through his blog reveals that he's not at all adverse to labeling other Christians as "pharisees". Perhaps I am naive, but I thought there was a chance that these folks would want to make a correction to the statement about the need for churches to depend on creativity. In fact, I was so surprised to see a pastor openly espousing such a teaching, that I thought it might be a typo or mistake on their part. It's unfortunate that this was not the case however, as we now know. Some of the other comments on the post are interesting: Scott Ingersoll compares Anthony's creativity sentiments to more of a model for the business world than for a church. Brad Ball compares us to "Job's Friends" and "Sanballat" and advises that Anthony should not listen to the ones who are disagreeing with him. If you haven't seen the "Sanballat" comparison used before, be sure to read this post. Rita posted some sentiments that were similar to mine. Anthony followed-up on her kindly-written comment with perhaps a better explanation of what he was originally thinking. He states that it would be obtuse for anyone to think as we did, and goes on to say that: "The difference between fast growing churches and floundering ones are all of the little things. Methods, leadership, staff, teamwork, training, and prayer are all factors, but its a given that we depend on God for success." Well it's good to hear at least the words "we depend on God for success". Had that been in his post to begin with, I would not have linked to him. In his original point #7, he did say: "Visiting with Perry, Jason, and Tony reminds me that I couldn't open the doors that God has to help us [grow] and learn from people who are way smarter then us." But this just produces more human dependency questions, such as: Are you allowing God to grow the church (as is mentioned in Acts), or are you relying on God to help you via things like the "smartness" and creativity of Perry, Jason, and Tony? Also, the idea that what separates fast growing churches from the others is a bunch of things that humans do (Methods, leadership, staff, teamwork, training, and prayer) could seem to some as a conflict with his answer of "we depend on God for success". If Anthony responds to this on his blog (he's also welcome to comment here), I suspect that what he might say is that he is relying on God to give him the creativity that is needed by his church. But is that (creativity) something that the Apostle would have prayed? I don't think so, and besides the fact that Paul never emphasizes anything to do with creativity in Timothy's pastoral epistles, here's one passage the suggests a possible conflict: I've previously posted this short excerpt from the book Rethinking the Successful Church, but it's worth mentioning again, as it really gets you thinking about what role human ingenuity has. "And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God." -- 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 Isn't Paul essentially saying here that he chose not to employ brilliant ideas in bringing them the Gospel? Rather he was determined to deliver the message in a straightforward simplicity, relying on the power of God to make the message effective and produce growth. Jake Dudley, one of Anthony's other commenters, suggested that we are misunderstanding the type of creativity that Anthony is talking about, and what is really meant is the creativity to "find easier, simpler, cheaper ways to reach people". There may be some creativity in that too, however I don't think I'm off base in my comparison with 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 when I see videos of chain saws being used to cut apart tables during sermons at Anthony's church. This kind of thing is common in the Church Growth Movement, and likewise just a few of weeks ago I watched Steven Furtick smashing a table full of piggy banks with a hammer during his 80's Rock 'Giving' sermon. The thinking often is, when you do destructive stuff, it makes your sermon seem 'fun', and other pastors blog about how clever and wise you are. Regarding Anthony's success depends on creativity statement, Jake goes on to say: "I think everyone that disagrees w/ this statement is taking it out of context. Success is obviously not measured by the number of people attending your church. Success of the church is measured by how many lives are being changed for Jesus Christ." (emphasis mine) But is that correct? Are we to believe that "success" is necessarily dependant on anything quantitative? It would seem that Jake's first statement is a prerequisite for his second; in other words, the common thinking in the Church Growth Movement is that you want the maximum size audience so that you can have maximum quantitative impact. But as one megachurch pastor that I do agree with once said: "Size is not a factor to consider in judging the success of any church. Some churches blessed of God are very small, while some that are very large have little to no spiritual fruit. A church's spiritual life can't be measured by its numbers because it's easy to attract people. It's far more difficult to make disciples. Yet it appears as though churches across America are in a contest to build the biggest churches. In fact, conferences are held across our country to teach people how to do that. I've never gone to one, and I don't intend to. Size is irrelevant to God." Tim Reed from www.ChurchVoices.com is currently the last comment in Anthony's thread. He suggests that I'm one of those "ridiculous watchdoggies who can parse scripture to death" but it's the English language that I apparently can't understand. His comment also faults me for not knowing in advance what Anthony would later say in a comment that was to be written after I wrote my post. (Sorry Tim, prescience is something that only Supralaps have, and I'm just a lowly Infralap). It's also interesting that Tim disparages the concept of discernment watchdogs, when in fact - just last week, Ingrid had called-out the Emerging-friendly watchdog site that he's a contributor on. So that begs (as if for a bone) the question: If I'm a watchdog, and Tim's watching me because he's a watchdog, well then . . . who's watching Tim??? Hmm, maybe there's a new blog opportunity there for someone! Closing on a serious note, I'd love to hear what everyone has to say about relying on God for the creativity that some feel is needed. I'm not questioning that God uses man to help build and nurture His Church (insofar as preaching the Gospel, etc) but does it sound like Anthony is on the right track with the Perry/CGM system of creative church? I'm doing my best to not misrepresent him here, so by all means, we'd like Anthony to correct us if we are wrong about something that he said. This could be a good discussion. I believe it's in the best interest of the Church to have a right understanding of growth and what defines "success". UPDATE 10/23/07: Anthony has responded to this with a new blog post on his site entitled MODERN DAY PHARISEEs. For anyone interested, you can read John MacArthur's explanation of why many misunderstand the pharisees and how Anthony and many like him in the modern church are misapplying the term. UPDATE 10/30/07: Anthony's boss commented that our "argument is about semantics. Of course the churches success does not DEPEND on creativity. It depends on God ". And yet, Anthony continues to make it depends on MAN statements to the contrary. On his Sept. 26th post Anthony laments his church's "25 Baptisms and 23 Salvations". The concerning part is where he says "I think that stinks and we are vowing to do better". But, if saving souls is the work of the Holy Spirit, how can a human being vow to increase the number of salvations? Is this another case of 'semantics' or is it the same man-centered thinking again? Posted by: Jim B.   Link: http://www.oldtruth.com/blog.cfm/id.2.pid.780   Be the first to post a comment about this article        Home  |   About  |  Videos   |  Calvinism