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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).

Read the rest of the article at I’m not into organized religion. Can’t I be a Christian without going to church regularly?.

What do you think?

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.

Read the rest of “Why Pray Together?” at the Bible Prayer Fellowship website.

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?

Share your thoughts!

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?

Read the full post at Youth Ministry Exchange.

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?

What do you think?

The Internet Monk is blogging this week about an especially difficult subject: mental illness, and how Christians do and should respond to it. His post “Is there such a thing as mental illness?”, and the comments below it, are well worth the read.

There’s a great deal of ignorance, confusion, and fear in Christian circles surrounding this issue. Where Christians in the past have been all too quick to blame depression and other types of mental illness on weak faith or Satanic influence, I suspect they’re more likely these days to try to ignore it—as a few wrenching testimonies in the Internet Monk post demonstrate. I grew up in a fairly close Christian community and never heard any talk of clinical depression, bipolar disorder, or other mental illnesses, although I learned years later that several friends and even family members had serious bouts with mental illness. This silence on the issue, and our reluctance to talk about medication and counseling outside the church, must make life very difficult for some of our suffering brothers and sisters in Christ.

The unease about mental illness is understandable, to an extent—anyone who’s lived through serious depression or knows somebody who has can tell you that it’s a harrowing experience that doesn’t lend itself well to inspirational stories or pat resolutions. I have often wondered if the church’s difficulty with the issue has its roots in a gnostic, unbiblical belief that our minds are completely separate and disconnected from the rest of our bodies. We readily acknowledge that our bodies can be afflicted by physical maladies, but we tend to imagine that our minds can be influenced only by God, Satan, and our own willpower.

What’s your experience with this issue? How has your church responded to instances of mental illness in your community, and was it a positive experience? Is the church finally getting a handle on the challenge of mental illness?

Is it appropriate for Christians to attend worship services for a different religion?

I think few Christians would object to the idea of learning about or reading up on another religion, but is there something special about a dedicated worship service that makes it spiritually unwise for Christians to attend? Is there a clearly identifiable line between attending such a service, and participating in the worship?

Share your thoughts!

How does your church react when a member of the congregation leaves?

Gordon Atkinson, longtime pastor (and blogger) has written a thoughtful essay describing the importance of gracefully listening to the “parting shots” of departing church members… even when what they say isn’t what you want to hear:

Most of the time when people leave our church, however, they just disappear. We notice their repeated absence after some weeks have passed. If I can track them down, they’ll often give me their parting shot, a short, abbreviated explanation of why they are leaving. These parting shots can be difficult to understand. Sometimes people are angry over a real or imagined slight. Some people cannot honestly address why they are leaving the church, so they convince themselves that they’re “just not being fed,” or they need a place with more music or better music or different preaching. Sometimes people just lie—they don’t want to admit that they’d rather attend a large church where no one notices when they sleep in on Sunday morning, so they point a finger at a theologically wayward Sunday school teacher, or at my sermons…

Being in the ministry requires us to develop a thick skin. We need to learn to spot the bull and let it go without wasting too much emotional energy on it. But we also need to cultivate the ability to hear what people are really saying by listening to what is behind their words. However painful it may be, we must listen to the parting shots of those who leave, because there is truth buried there—below the anger and the scapegoating and the general dishonesty. My advice is to ignore one person’s opinion of you or your ministry, and to watch for trends and patterns.

I imagine that’s much easier to say than to put into practice; it can’t be fun listening to people tell you that they dislike your preaching so much that they’re leaving the church. If you’re a pastor, I’d be interested to hear how you handle these “parting shots,” and if you’ve learned to dig beneath the words to discern what’s really being communicated.

But since I’m not a pastor, my interest in this topic is more in how I, as a typical churchgoer, should act when I feel called to leave a church. I’ve never left a church out of anger or theological dispute; it’s always been something more mundane, such as moving to a different city. But reading Atkinson’s article makes me regret that I have rarely sat down with the pastor or leadership of a church to explain what I’m doing and offer a (friendly and positive) parting shot. Many employers conduct exit interviews with employees who are leaving the company; surely there’s valuable information to be gained from an informal interview with a departing churchgoer.

Pastors, how do you respond when you learn that a church member is leaving the church? And fellow churchgoers, have you ever delivered a “parting shot” upon leaving a church, and how did it go?

Have you ever lived through the death of a church?

Since posting about photos of abandoned churches last week, “church death” has been on my mind. By chance, I came across a post at Mere Comments about church growth and church death:

To abbreviate a long and painful story, I joined the line of unsuccessful pastors, both liberal and conservative, who were not able to grow the church on the terms its traditions laid down—and at the end of the road it faced dissolution. [...]

I was reminded of this by a letter from someone sorrowfully anticipating the dissolution of her own congregation—a more “natural” death than mine died, for hers is not mortally diseased as mine was.  I think it’s just exhausted.  As a former pastor of a dying church, I feel quite strongly that such congregations should be allowed to die—that they, just like human beings, when they see the signs of impending death, need to take reasonable steps to dissolve in an orderly and peaceful way.  None should be assumed to last forever, and it may also be assumed that if God wanted them to keep going, he could easily and quickly supply the necessary resources, just as he could give any of us, if he chose, a greatly extended life span.  But as a rule he does not—in fact, he endorses happenings that lead us to death.  He expects us, when we are able, to make our preparations, and die well.

Does that resonate with you?

The default Christian advice to those facing adversity—whether in your personal spiritual life or in your church’s life—is to buckle down, keep the faith, and faithfully plug away in the hope that God will reward your persistence in the end. But is there a time in a church’s life when its failure to overcome the obstacles arrayed against it should be taken as a sign that it’s time to close it down and move on with our lives?

A friend of mine who is the pastor at a small local church recently went through a long and intense experience debating this question with his church. The church had, through a series of largely unavoidable spots of bad luck, experienced a major drop in membership and was faced with the question of whether or not it was worth continuing on with a greatly diminished community. After much prayer and debate, they decided not to call it quits just yet—but reaching that conclusion wasn’t simple or easy.

What about you? Have you experienced a church shutdown, and if so, was it graceful and prayerful… or was it characterized by denial? How do you tell the difference between obstacles that the church can and should work to overcome, and signs that it’s time to close down the church?

Have you ever witnessed, or experienced firsthand, “church discipline” administered by your church community? If the point of church discipline is to correct, not just to punish, what elements must be present in the act of discipline to ensure that it’s not just punitive?

Here’s how Lifetime Guarantee Ministries approaches this question:

Although they may both feel the same, there’s a huge difference between punishment and discipline. A punisher is angry at the punishee and takes out his hostility on him. The result is either fear-motivated conformity to the punisher’s will or rebellion. A discipliner, on the other hand, is not angry. He metes out the discipline despite the fact that it hurts him to do so. The one who is disciplined is motivated to change because of his love for the one who disciplines. Although both the punishee and the disciplinee may receive “three licks with the paddle,” the result will be vastly different.

Nowhere after the cross does the Greek text support the idea of God’s punishing new creations in Christ. The word is chasten, or discipline.

Read more at the Lifetime Guarantee website.

This is something I’ve thought and talked about quite a bit lately in the context of parenting. Our two-year-old daughter is entering a (temporary…. right?!?) phase in which her behavior is sometimes less than angelic. Some form of discipline becomes necessary at points, but how does one administer discipline in such a way that it encourages correction of behavior, rather than simple punishment for behavior? It gets especially tricky when the act of discipline—say, mandatory “quiet time”—looks the same whether it’s administered in love or anger.

All parents have wrestled with this question at some point. But this is also an important issue in the church, where believers are called to correct brothers and sisters who have strayed. Sometimes this correction takes the form of discipline (removal from a leadership position or even temporary removal from community worship) that might be seen as a punishment.

What acts of church discipline have you witnessed or experienced? What was present in the discipline that communicated love rather than anger?

What do you think?

Have you ever seen an abandoned church building?

At WebUrbanist, there’s a fascinating series of photos of abandoned church buildings, in varying states of decay and ranging from the strangely beautiful to the downright depressing. Here’s a sample:

I recently took a road trip through the American midwest and saw several abandoned-looking churches (although none as photogenic as these). I don’t believe that church buildings, simple or ornate, have any special quality of “holiness,” and so seeing these images isn’t a spiritual shock.

But they do raise questions, some of them a bit sad: what happened to the people who once worshipped here? Are they happily worshiping at another church today? What caused them to leave the church—was it theological disagreement, a slow decline in membership, collapse of the local economy? What was it like to worship in these churches for the last time?

Jeff Berryman has some poignant thoughts on these images:

Two hundred years from now, or four hundred—and I know it’s not the same for a thousand reasons—but imagine someone wandering through the ruins of the place where you worship, if you do.  What, they will wonder, went on here?  What happened?  How and why did such beauty get lost?

And of course, people are churches, many abandoned and worn down, the images of these abandoned rooms images of many spirits and souls.

What about you? Do you pass churches like these in your own town? How do these images make you feel?

The idea of a common cup during communion is a bit freaky to me. All those germs from all those mouths are a bit unsettling, but after reading Swine Flu and the Common Cup over at the Gospel Coalition blog, I’m beginning to think there’s something beautiful that happens when we indiscriminately share the cup.

Here’s an excerpt:

Often I’ll preach in churches about the Lord’s Supper and will call on congregations to go back to using a common loaf and a common cup. I’ll challenge the churches to recover the sign of bread being torn, not daintily picked up in pre-fabricated bits. I’ll call the congregations to drink the wine, together, passing along a common cup.

I’m not offended by people disagreeing with me on this. I’m just stunned by the reason they most often give for dismissing this ancient Christian practice: germs.

The common cup is, well, gross to many Christians because they don’t like the idea of drinking after strangers. That’s just the point. You’re not drinking after strangers. You’re drinking after your own flesh-and blood, your family. And the offense is precisely the issue. You’re recognizing Christ Jesus, discerning his Body, in the “flesh” of his Body the church around you. If drinking after your brothers is “disgusting,” then how much more eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. That was disgusting to an assembly a while back as well.

Now, I’m not calling on churches to pick up the common cup and the common loaf in the middle of a swine flu pandemic. That wouldn’t be prudent. But maybe now’s the time to start thinking about how our hyper-hygienic American culture might be leading us toward cleanliness and away from Christ.

I have been at services where we’ve literally torn from a loaf of bread before passing it. It adds a much more communal atmosphere to the ritual and I think gets closer to what Jesus and the disciples first experienced.

What about you? Does your church use a common cup?