Gospel.com Blog

With tax day right around the corner, it’s not surprising that finances—and in particular, tithing—is on people’s minds. Out of Ur is talking about this important, but often awkward to discuss, topic. In particular, they wonder if the notion of the traditional Christian tithe is due to be re-thought. The discussion springs from a CNN report that suggests that tithing is seen as increasingly optional in many churches:

There are a lot of different, related questions lurking beneath the simple “Is tithing mandatory for Christians?” The Bible clearly and repeatedly stresses the importance of generosity—but what does that mean in practical terms? Here are a few questions to mull over as you consider the issue of tithing:

Do you think the 10%-of-your-income tithing ratio is mandated by Scripture? If not, is there another formula mandated?

Should we consider outside-of-church giving to be separate from our tithe to church, or are they all part of the Biblical tithe?

Have you ever been torn between tithing to church and giving to other worthy, but non-church, causes?

How seriously does your church take tithing? If you went a month without giving anything to church, would your church take notice? Would they leave that entirely to your own discretion, treat it as a matter of church discipline, or something in between?

What formula or style of giving feels most appropriate and Biblical to you?

That’s a lot of questions, and I’d like to unpack some of them in future posts. But for now, watch the CNN video above and stop by Out of Ur to follow the discussion there.

I’ve always appreciated pastors who are willing to share their struggles and foibles with the congregation. By modeling humility they create an ethos of openness in the congregation.

What about you? What traits have you admired in your pastors?

Share your thoughts!

The “The New Tithe” (below) was the winner of this year’s Project Reason video contest. Project Reason is “nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.”

The video light on hard facts and gets some fundamental things wrong about what most churches do with their money (ie it’s not all going to huge salaries and fancy buildings). For every church that misuses its money, there are thousands—if not more—who are transparent and responsible with their expenditures. All that said, I do think it’s interesting that someone would make a secular case for “tithing”:

I’d doubt this video will convince many Christians to stop giving to their church. Plus, as the blogger over at unreasonable faith points out in his thoughts on the New Tithe video, most tithing Christians find their local churches to be worthwhile endeavors.

However, it does make me wonder how people outside of my church perceive our churches. Should that change how we use our money? And thinking along those lines, are there guidelines for how a church should use its member’s tithes? Should 10% of everyone’s 10% go to missions for example?

Out of Ur has begun posting a series of videos about the different viewpoints on women in ministry. The first video from Rose Madrid-Swetman is posted below:

The thing that stuck out to me most from this video was Madrid-Swetman’s point about how many churches sidestep the heart of the issue by wrapping it up in semantics. As she says, women can hold the title of “Coordinator,” but if a man were to have the same position and responsibility they’d be called the “Pastor.” Worship Coordinators are functionally the same as Worship Pastors; same for Children’s Coordinators and Pastors.

It’s inconsistent for churches to hide behind word games in order to appear as if they’re upholding their theological views on gender roles in the church. If you’re going to be a complementation church, I think you have to be consistent in the way you describe those roles.

I’ve been slowly reading a book called Introverts in the Church by Adam S. McHugh. As an introvert myself, I’ve found it to be a fantastic book. Every few pages there’s some anecdote that has me nodding along and saying, “Yes! I’ve been there!” I’m also finding that whenever I mention this book in Christian company the introverts in the room start to perk up and want to know more.

One thing that this book is instilling in my heart is that the church direly needs people spanning the spectrum of personality type. Right now the Church—in the United States at least—seems to prize the extrovert personality as the one true personality type. From what we call the ideal pastor down to how we teach people to evangelize, it’s primarily an extroverts game. It’s a shame though because that philosophy in turn makes it harder for some of the Church’s members to feel they can utilize their gifts effectively for the kingdom.

I don’t have a grand conclusion (after all, I’m not done with the book), but I did want to ask a few questions while they’re fresh on my mind.

For everyone: think about how your church practices openness to the variety of personalities walking through the door. Take a basic example: the time before and after church. Do you create a place for the contemplative person to prepare for worship? Or is it set up like a mixer? (If you’ve never thought of this before, have you ever wondered why some portion of the congregation tends to show up late and leave early?)

For the introverts reading this: what are some ways you feel like the church has supported you? We could come up with negative stories all day long, but I think it’s important to call out ways in which the church has been successful.

My church recently passed around a resolution for its members to sign. It thanked our local government for switching to single stream recycling—a simplified recycling system that’s much easier to use. My church puts a special emphasis on creation care, and welcomed the new recycling program as a very positive change. As an experiment in being good neighbors in our community, my pastor encouraged us to publicly thank the local leaders who decided to switch to the new recycling system.

It’s trivially easy to find reasons to complain about the government. I can’t count the number of times someone has asked me to sign something condemning a government decision. But few of us take the time to thank them for doing the right thing.

I signed my church’s resolution, but not without some hesitation. How far we should take the healthy separation of church and state. On one hand, this resolution is a clear example of the church involving itself with the government. On the other, it’s a one-time thing and largely amounts to simply saying “hey, thanks!”—a fairly trivial issue.

What do you think? Should the church ever thank the government for doing something right? When is the last time—if ever—you thanked your local leaders and politicians?

Does your church hold a Sunday evening worship service? Evening services have long been a staple of Sunday worship in many Christian traditions. But a recent article in my local paper shed some light on a discouraging trend in my own denomination: Sunday evening church service attendance is significantly down… in some cases, enough so that evening services are being dropped from the weekly church calendar altogether.

The survey [within the Christian Reformed denomination] found evening worship attendance is “plummeting,” down from 56 percent of members in 1992 to 24 percent in 2007.

Researchers wrote that the data “seems to suggest that evening service attendance has become optional.”

It’s a conclusion that may seem harmless, but to some it’s cause for concern about the integrity of the Dutch Reformed family’s faith convictions. For others, the tradition’s decline is a natural outcome of the church’s aspirations to evangelize a broader demographic.

“Many churches are substituting evening worship and putting their energies into other things,” said Jeff Meyer, pastor of Crosswinds Community Church, a 4-year-old CRC congregation in Holland [Michigan] that, like many new churches, does not conduct evening worship.

There’s a lot to unpack in the article. For some, the decline of the evening church service is a tragic breakdown of a long-running church tradition. For others, it’s a clear sign of apostasy and spiritual decline. But for many of the churches jettisoning their traditional evening services, it’s a matter of using church resources (and staff time) efficiently and realistically.

One of my close friends (who is quoted in the article) is the pastor of a church that recently changed its Sunday evening worship service in response to very low attendance. Instead of a full-blown worship service, the church instead hosts a less formal time of community study and discussion. For that church, it was partly a simple question of church resources: was it a good use of the pastor’s time to spend hours preparing a sermon that would be heard by only a fraction of the congregation? (The same could be asked about the time spent by worship planners, musicians, and other staff involved in preparing worship services.) Were there more effective ways that time could be used to serve the church than preparing for a poorly-attended evening service?

Speaking as somebody whose evening church attendance is spotty but improving, I’m not sure what to think. I do worry that the tendency to make evening church “optional,” while not sinful in itself, is one sign that churchgoers today are giving less priority to Christian worship and fellowship than they used to. On the other hand, I completely sympathize with churches looking for alternate ways of fostering fellowship and study. And I resent the idea (voiced by one pastor in the article) that the failure to observe a 16th-century human tradition makes one an apostate.

What about you—does your church hold evening worship services? How is attendance—and how is your attendance? Is evening worship an integral part of Sunday worship, or is it an optional (and possibly outdated) practice that churches should jettison if it doesn’t get adequate participation?

Is it OK for churches to be hip?

“Hipster Christianity” has seen a lot of discussion since Brett McCracken published a scathing article about what he calls “‘wannabe cool’ Christianity”. McCracken identifies hipster Christianity as just another manifestation of the desire to “rehabilitate Christianity’s image and make it ‘cool’.” What does that look like?

There are various ways that churches attempt to be cool. For some, it means trying to seem more culturally savvy. The pastor quotes Stephen Colbert or references Lady Gaga during his sermon, or a church sponsors a screening of the R-rated “No Country For Old Men.” For others, the emphasis is on looking cool, perhaps by giving the pastor a metrosexual makeover, with skinny jeans and an $80 haircut, or by insisting on trendy eco-friendly paper and helvetica-only fonts on all printed materials. Then there is the option of holding a worship service in a bar or nightclub (as is the case for L.A.’s Mosaic church, whose downtown location meets at a nightspot called Club Mayan).

“Wannabe cool” Christianity also manifests itself as an obsession with being on the technological cutting edge. Churches like Central Christian in Las Vegas and Liquid Church in New Brunswick, N.J., for example, have online church services where people can have a worship experience at an “iCampus.” Many other churches now encourage texting, Twitter and iPhone interaction with the pastor during their services.

But one of the most popular—and arguably most unseemly—methods of making Christianity hip is to make it shocking. What better way to appeal to younger generations than to push the envelope and go where no fundamentalist has gone before?

McCracken has also recently published a book on this topic, which is thoroughly reviewed at Religion Dispatches. McCracken’s book seems to present a more nuanced picture of “hipster Christianity” than his WSJ article: he distinguishes between authentic hipster churches that are born of sincere efforts to correct the Church’s course, and insincere churches that just pander to young people with a thin veneer of manufactured cool. The latter are just as phony as any stereotypical “old-school” church that turns up its nose at sinners and refuses to sing any song written after 1788.

It’s hard to know what to make of McCracken’s critiques. A lot of it is spot-on; every time I read an article about yet another provocatively-marketed sermon series about sex at yet another cooler-than-thou church, my eyes roll even farther back into my head. But at the same time, some of the criticism of hipster Christianity verges into the mean-spirited. We all recognize the danger of sacrificing genuine worshipfulness in the pursuit of cool; but it’s important to remember that the main alternative—traditional worship services “the way we’ve always done it”—carries its own risk of phoniness. Unless a hipster church’s “cool factor” actually pulls it away from orthodox Christianity and belief in Jesus Christ, I’m not inclined to criticize too harshly.

What do you think? Is “hipster Christianity” and its desire to make Christianity cool a dangerous trend that should be resisted? Is it a new generation just trying to avoid historical church pitfalls and worship Christ authentically?

Note: see also Molly Hemingway’s post on the topic at Ricochet.

Adam McClane recently reposted a comment he received from T.C. Porter about how Porter does church. I’ve read it a few times over the past few days and it continues to stick in my mind. The posture towards church that Porter adopts is both no-nonesense and rooted in the Bible. It’s also challenging to the status quo. For starters, their sermons are no longer than seven minutes, which leaves the congregation plenty of time to interact and support each other.

Here’s an excerpt from the Porter’s comment; you can read the whole thing at Adam’s blog on “Guest Post: Be the Church:”

- do it. stop talking about it. leave your church and do what you are saying. that’s the message i keep getting, and increasingly i have less time writing about church reform because there is, as you say, so much work to be done. people want this but we are on the leading edge and it is hard work. nonverbals are the message – what is our message – go out and get it done and build it; know that it will take a long time so you have to start now, stop writing about it folks. [...]

- a big trend that has to be bothersome is this rising chorus of critique against the church without a rising army of folks living out the alternative. gen x got its name from being meaninglessly, non-committal, and complacent. and i know too many of us who are not really engaged and fighting the good fight with a covenant community, we’re just saying things like “church is everywhere” and “love your neighbor” and yet it looks like a ministry of convenience more than anything. i like to write so i blog; i like to feed the hungry so i do that. i like beer so i drink with my neighbor. … all fine and good, but: are we becoming a generation of disciples and disciple-makers? is this generation being shaped and formed into Christlikness against he prevailing tides of individualism, hard-work, consumerism, well-touted charity, etc.

I’ve been writing for Gospel.com for a few years now, and before that I attended a Christian college. I’ve heard and read the “Church is failing!” argument more times than I care to count. Rarely, though, do people take all their anger about the church and turn it into something positive. It’s refreshing.

What do you think of Porter’s comment? Are there there things you wish your church did that were more in line with what Jesus taught?

In a recent post on edsetzer.com, Philip Nation writes about how his church, Two Rivers Church, handled a protest from Westboro Baptist. Here’s an excerpt outlining the five main points of Two Rivers’ reponse:

First, we prepared an answer…Whether speaking to the protestors, counter protestors, or the media, we were prepared to speak about what God is doing in our community.

Second, we told the congregation. One week earlier, Ed told the church we would be picketed and to expect the counter protestors and media to be present as well. But we also made it clear that church members should not engage either side…

Third, we appointed one spokesman for the church. For Sunday, I was the one. If the media wanted to do an interview or get answers to questions, they could talk to the representative from the church. This is normal for how we do things at Two Rivers.

Fourth, show hospitality. One of our staff members recruited several deacons to serve at a Baptist breakfast table: coffee and donuts. It was positioned near the protesters, counter protesters, and media. Anyone was welcome to come to the breakfast table.

Finally, we went on as usual. We gather to worship God in such as way that it bring Him honor and is comprehensible to those who are yet to place their faith in Christ. Two Rivers has become one of the hubs for relief efforts in the wake of the Nashville flood. We have been a command center for Samaritan’s Purse and housed a Christian school while their building is being repaired. Every week, we meet new people by clearing debris and offering grace. The last thing we have time to do is shut down because five people show up with offensive signs.

It can be extremely hard to respond with love when someone criticizes you, and relying on instincts and feelings in the moment often results in a messy situations. I like Two Rivers’ plan because it emphasizes their core value of love and gives the congregation practical steps to follow in order to channel their emotions.

Has your church ever had protesters or encountered vocal criticism? If so, how did you handle it? If not, what do you think of Ed’s advice?