How does your church fare in this regard? Would a disabled visitor feel welcome, able to fully participate in worship and church life? What does your church need to do better?
Ed Young, pastor of the 20,000 congregant Fellowship Church, was recently accused of keeping financial secrets from his congregation by WFAA, a Dallas/Fort Worth news organization. Among the report’s claims are that Young owns a private jet and has a 10,000 square foot home valued at $1,500,000.
Oh, he also reportedly makes a million bucks a year from the church.
Suffice to say, the claims put forward by WFAA have been summarily rebuffed by Young and a few of his church’s board members. You can see Fellowship’s side of the story in the 25 minute video below. The truth seems to be that they lease the plane because of Young’s international speaking engagements and tight schedule, and the home is closer to 7500 square feet. The salary? Not so much.
Regardless of who is right in this circumstance—and from what I can gather from a token amount of internet research, the facts seem to be stacked in Fellowship Church’s favor—this presents a great opportunity to discuss an issue that I think is becoming increasingly important in the Internet age: how should a church handle critics?
Most churches over a certain size and age have had to face a PR nightmare of some sort. Maybe not on the scale of Fellowship’s, but a nightmare nonetheless. Perhaps, it’s something as simple as a bad reputation, or perhaps as terrible as a high profile scandal. More likely, the pastor is just really good at incensing a very vocal and disagreeable crowd.
That’s when blog posts, newspaper articles and gossip start. Pretty soon, googling the church’s name brings up the church’s homepage as number 1 and number 2 is a slanderous news or blog article. In the case of Fellowship, they chose to directly answer the criticism, but other churches ignore the naysayers.
How do you think a church should respond to critics? Do you think that Fellowship did the right thing in this situation? How have you seen churches effectively handle criticism?
Of course there are—no matter how well-dressed they are or how sincere in their worship, everyone in the church struggles with sin in their personal lives. Lust, anger, greed, jealousy… we know for a fact that these sins plague us all, and yet it’s all too easy for us to look at the congregation gathered around us and imagine that there’s nobody out there who has these “issues”… or even worse, to feign shock and surprise when sin comes to light in the church.
This devotional from Delve Into Jesus asks us to imagine how our churches would respond if the congregation knew all of your secret sins:
If all those gathered at your church on a Sunday morning knew of these sins, would they be as gracious as their Lord who suffered and died for these very sins He forgives?
There would certainly be a great deal of hushed whispering between friends in empty hallways, but most of it would consist of feigned disgust and manufactured outrage. We all know from personal experience that sin remains an ongoing problem after we give our lives to Jesus, yet many remain incredulous that anyone at their church could be battling any given particular sin. It makes them uncomfortable but at the same time it’s interesting and curious. And so, in order to maintain the pretense that everyone in their own circle of friends, at least, would never indulge in that particular sin or vice, they reassure one another that it’s a heinous sin to which none of them would ever fall victim. When this phenomenon gets really bad, as I’ve seen on a few occasions, the whispers escalate into staring glances and loud talking which halts abruptly when the person who is the topic of conversation walks into the room. The people being stared at and talked about are not oblivious – they know exactly what’s going on and what’s being said about them behind their back. It won’t take long before these people move on to another church where they can battle their sin in loneliness and anonymity.
There is only one acceptable motive for talking about someone else’s battle with sin, and that is to ask, “How can I help?” If there is something tangible which we can do to help, then we have an obligation to offer that help. An offer of help does not in any way suggest that we condone the sin. It’s entirely possible to demonstrate great love and compassion even as we let the person know that what they’re doing is at odds with God’s will for their life and that we want to help if we can.
The proper response to sin when it crops up in the church is to offer love, prayer, and help—not disgust, outrage, or smugness. When sin appears in your church, which reaction is more common?
Martin Luther King, Jr. famously declared that “Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week.” Is it still accurate to say that about the American church in 2010?
A Time article recently explored this question and discovered that racial segregation is still a fact in the church… but megachurches like Willow Creek seem to be making the most progress in bridging the racial divide. Willow Creek’s efforts have not met with complete success and raise plenty of questions, but over 20% of its congregation is made up by racial minorities—a ratio that leaves most churches (regardless of their predominate racial makeup) far behind:
Call it the desegregation of the megachurches — and consider it a possible pivotal moment in the nation’s faith…. David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame studying the trend, says that “if tens of millions of Americans start sharing faith across racial boundaries, it could be one of the final steps transcending race as our great divider” — and it could help smooth America’s transition into a truly rainbow nation.
Hybels and his Willow Creek church are already headed down that path. Though Willow is not the most advanced example of multiracial church, it makes an excellent window into the new desegregation because of its size, its influence and the ferocious purposefulness with which Hybels has deconstructed his all-white institution. Willow may also be emblematic in that Hybels appears to have stopped short of creating a fully color-blind church. His efforts illustrate both the possibilities and the challenges that smaller churches may face as they attempt to move beyond black and white.
The key questions are, of course, how segregated is your church today, and what is it doing (or not doing) about it? Simply replicating the success of a megachurch like Willow Creek isn’t an option for the average American church; megachurches have resources and reach that most churches don’t.
My own church, for example, is relatively small and located in a part of town that is predominiately white; the congregation is, by a vast margin, primarily white. Nobody in the church would disagree that “desegregation” would be a wonderful thing for the church, but how does an established, comfortable church (in a city already packed with every type of church you can imagine) take steps toward that goal? And is achieving racial desegregation in the church a a critical end goal in itself, or is it a secondary goal that churches should welcome but not invest too much time in pursuing?
That’s a lot of questions. The article paints a hopeful picture of a desegregated church, but it’s a challenge to connect that dream to the everyday, non-megachurch congregations that encompass most of American Christainity. What do you think?
I recently moved and am in the process of finding a new church. In doing research and visiting churches, one thing that’s surprised me is how is how each church seems to have a target demographic: student, young professional, middle age, kids, no kids, asian, black, white, etc.
You name it, there seems to be a church out there for you. Oddly enough though, most—if not all—of them purport to value the diversity in their congregations. Do you think that churches should target specific demographics?
How do childhood and teen engagement connect to adult spirituality? The research examined four elements of adult religious commitment: attending church, having an active faith (defined as reading the Bible, praying, and attending church in the last week), being unchurched, and switching from childhood faith.
When it comes to church engagement, those who attended Sunday school or other religious programs as children or as teens were much more likely than those without such experiences to attend church and to have an active faith as adults…. In comparison, less frequent participation as a teenager correlated with less frequent adult participation.
Measures of disassociation – being unchurched and changing from childhood faith – were also correlated with activity before age 18. The highest proportion of unchurched adults was found among those who had never attended as children or teenagers. Weekly activity as a child and weekly or monthly activity as a teen were connected with the lowest levels of disconnection from church attendance.
The study also found that people who were “heavily churched” in their youth are less likely to switch to a different religion as an adult.
All very interesting, although the question is so big, and the nuances of “religious” and “active faith” so varied from person to person, that it’s hard to know how to interpret it all. But at the very least, if you were worrying that forcing little Johnny to attend Sunday school every week was going to damage his faith in the long term, you can breathe a sigh of relief. (The jury is still out about whether or not youth group games of dodgeball inflict permanent psychological and spiritual damage on the participants.)
How do these findings resonate with you? Were you heavily involved in church activities and education, and if so, do you see that experience as one that strengthened your faith over the long term? If you came to the faith without the benefit of childhood religious education, do you think your faith was stronger or weaker as a result?
I’ve been in churches that do it every week and others almost never. They all have their reasons, but there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on how often we should celebrate the Lord’s supper.
How often do you think Christians should celebrate communion?
Let’s say a person became a Christian some time ago and just never got around to finding a church. They read still read their Bible and pray, but they’re not a member or even an active “visitor” of any organized body of Christ. Are they still a Christian?
Is Church attendance required to call yourself a Christian?
Here’s an answer from the ministry of Faith Facts:
Yes, at least in a very technical sense. Salvation is not dependent on actions. God judges one’s heart.
But let’s be honest. The Bible says that we are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). If you say you are a Christian yet do not attend church regularly, how can you say that you really love God sufficiently?
Jesus emphasized the importance of his church. The Bible further emphasizes that regular worship, Bible study, fellowship with other believers, and service to one another are important. Likewise, the Bible warns against willful and persistent rejection of God (Hebrews 10:26).
One aspect of church worship that’s always been a challenge for me is communal prayer. Partway through the church service every Sunday morning, a designated member of the congregation leads the church in community prayer, incorporating prayer requests from the community and sometimes asking the rest of the congregation to add their voices to the prayer as they feel called to do so.
Community prayer doesn’t come easily for me. I’m a private person for whom public and community prayer doesn’t come naturally. But there’s something powerful in a group of believers gathered together for prayer, and Bible Prayer Fellowship argues that it’s a crucial part of Christian worship:
Every congregation and all believers everywhere need united agreement in prayer and faith. True, we can play privately, but we must also come together with the church expecting to find one accord in prayer. The church in Acts began in one accord in prayer (Acts 1:14; 2:1). United prayer was a top priority of the apostles and the people (Acts 6:4; 4:18-33; 12:1-25; 15:1-30). United agreement in prayer is necessary because of who we are.
We are related to Christ and each other like the members of our natural body are. Our head coordinates the life and action of all the parts of our body (I Corinthians 12). Christ is the head over all things to the church.
We are one family. We pray to “OUR Father.” Andrew Murray said that it is unnatural for the children in a family to always meet with their father separately and never know a shared relationship with him.
What’s been your experience with communal prayer? What does it bring to worship that private prayer doesn’t? Have you seen tangible effects of community prayer in your community?
Has your church or ministry ever had to make the difficult decision to give up a “sacred cow”? After running the numbers, praying about it, and discussing it with the community, have you ever had to put an end to an activity, event, or practice that you’d been doing “since forever”?
For Adam McLane at Youth Ministry Exchange, that sacred cow was youth retreats, a longstanding and beloved tradition that, upon careful reflection, just didn’t make sense for their ministry to keep doing. Here’s his closing challenge; if you’re not a youth pastor, replace “retreat” with any other activity in your church and see if it holds up to scrutiny:
It’s easy to get caught up in a sacred cow syndrome. It’s easy to get caught up in doing something just a little different and a little better than the year before. It’s easy to go with the flow. It’s easy to do something simply because you’ve budgeted for it. It’s easy to keep doing retreats.
But have you been able to measure their effectiveness over the past several months? Have you noticed it getting a little harder to fill the roster each year? Have you had a fluke or two? Have you wondered if they were worth all the trouble? Have you asked students why they are coming?
Please don’t read this as a vilification of retreats or retreat ministry. It is hardly that. All I am simply asking you to do is be open to rethinking how retreats fit into your philosophy of ministry. And if you find that they are ineffective or putting pressure on your students artificially are you willing to take a break? Are you willing to retreat from the “must do” retreat mindset?
What about you? Have you ever been in the difficult position of having to put an end to a ministry “sacred cow”? How did you reach that decision, and in retrospect, was it the right decision to make?
