Gospel.com Blog

I’m not attending any church or ministry conferences this year, but I have in the past. In my experience, conferences can be fantastic times for reconnecting with old friends, worshiping God and planning for the future. There’s something about gathering together for a solid block of time with like-minded people that manages to be helpful and fun.

What about you? Are you attending any church or ministry conferences this year?

Share your thoughts!

I’ve been to churches where the order of service hadn’t changed in decades. There’s an unspoken rhythm to worship in such a church that’s calming in its predictability. Having a worship structure set in stone means worshipers don’t expend mental energy following a new order of worship; they can just focus on the service. But that same predictability can also make the service rote or boring.

I’ve also attended a church whose service never seemed to be the same from week to week. The service would start a few minutes late as people filtered in; the worship band would sing three songs or five and the pastor took as much or as little time as he wanted to deliver his sermon. Sometimes the service would make you miss lunch appointments; other times, you found yourself with an extra 20 minutes after the service.

What about your church? Does your church follow a strict order of worship or does it change things weekly?

Earlier this year, the Chicago Tribune ran a fascinating and moving story about a church that welcomed Jim Deichman, a mentally ill man, into their congregation. What elevates this story from inspiring church newsletter material to a national news report is the fact that Deichman ended up burning down the church building. Despite this, the church has responded with love and forgiveness.

There are many good questions raised by the story (see GetReligion’s discussion, for starters). Did the church behave responsibly in this situation, both toward Deichman and toward the rest of the congregation? What is the place of forgiveness when mental illness is involved?

Despite the inspiring grace and forgiveness shown by the church in the aftermath, the story doesn’t have a satisfactorily happy ending. Mental illness upsets our ordinary understanding of guilt, responsibility, sin, and forgiveness. Whether Deichman serves jail time for arson or (as the church hopes) receives treatment instead, it’s unlikely that anyone (even Deichman) will ever be able to answer “Why?”

Yet this remains an inspiring story—the patient love shown to Deichman by his brother, and the enthusiastic welcome extended to him by the church, are the very definition of Christ-like grace. And I think it’s a miracle—in the genuine act-of-God sense—that nobody was hurt or killed in the fire.

What’s your reaction to this story? Can you relate to the church’s actions—their embrace of Deichman and their forgiveness of his crime? How has your church interacted with mentally ill people in your community and congregation, and what have you learned as a result?

Below: striking video footage of the church fire.

The role of deacon has a rich Biblical history and includes in its ranks famous early Christians like Stephen and Philip. The early church took the office of deacon very seriously, requiring that deacons and their families exemplify Christian virtues in all areas of life.

Since joining my church’s council as a deacon earlier this year, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning about the role of deacons. Growing up in churches with Presbyterian-style councils, I always assumed that a deacon’s primary area of responsibility was church finances and benevolence—ensuring the church’s financial survival and making decisions about the people, ministries, and causes to generously support.

But I know now that finances are only part of the picture of a Biblical diaconate. In my denomination, the deacons’ stewardship extends beyond money. It includes encouraging the congregation’s spiritual gifts and helping to connect churchgoers to ministry opportunities that fit their talents. For example, the deacons in my church are currently working with individual church members to identify their gifts, so that when a need or an opportunity crops up (as they often do, without warning), they know who in the congregation is best equipped to respond.

I know that different Christian traditions have various understandings of the role of deacons. Does your church you have an official diaconate? How are deacons selected, and if so, what are their responsibilities? Have you ever served as a deacon?

The image above depicts Stephen, a deacon (and martyr) in the early Christian church.

Last year I moved and had to find a new church. During the search process, I found that the members of each congregation I visited were eager to share the foibles and history of their church. A simple question like “What’s the history of this church?” could easily lead to the full backstory of the building, pastoral staff, and denominational issues.

I’ve learned that every church split and denominational difference has a unique and sometimes complicated history behind it. When viewed from an outsider’s perspective, the reasons behind a particular distinction might seem trite or overinflated, but at the time there was a clear doctrinal or theological difference whose only solution seemed to be a new church or denomination.

The existence of different denominations within the global Christian church poses an obvious problem for a faith that values fellowship and unity. A denomination provides structure for believers who hold to similar doctrines to worship together. However, as this article at gotquestions.org observes, true Christian denominations never compromise on the basic doctrines of our faith:

As believers, there are certain basic doctrines that we must believe, but beyond that there is latitude on how we can serve and worship; it is this latitude that is the only good reason for denominations. This is diversity and not disunity. The first allows us to be individuals in Christ, the latter divides and destroys.

In the past six years I’ve been a regular attender at five different churches from five different denominations. Despite differences in style and practice, each of them has been fully committed to the Gospel. There are many minor issues that can separate members of the Church universal, but it is the core of our faith that binds us together, not our personal tastes.

Do you think there should be fewer or more denominations? Do you think they’re useful or harmful?

Share your thoughts!

On Good Friday, my church held a joint worship service with several other local churches. Combining services seemed more appropriate than leaving each individual church to host a separate—and sparsely attended—service.

I do think that an important aspect of being part of a church is regular weekly attendance, but sometimes we have to miss a service or two (or more) throughout the year. Maybe there’s no service that day, or maybe you’re just on vacation; whatever the reason, we all find ourselves away from our home church for some reason throughout the year.

Do you attend multiple churches throughout the year? Why? How do you choose those churches that you visit?

Share your thoughts!

Part of being a member of the Body of Christ is recognizing that each person has valuable gifts and abilities to offer, and even though we might try, we can’t just rely on one or two people to carry the church.

It can be easy for lay people to assume that the pastoral staff has it all under control—after all, they’re “professionals!” However, as we read in this devotional from Our Daily Bread, it’s impossible for church leaders to carry the burden of the church by themselves:

The “professionals,” the pastor and others who are trained to lead the church, face a task they can’t do alone. It’s often a struggle to get the work of the church done until laypeople join in and work alongside the leadership.

This was the situation in Acts 6. Some people in the church were being neglected, and the “professionals,” the apostles who were leading the church, realized they couldn’t do everything by themselves. Only when seven laypeople pitched in to help the leaders could the church proceed.

How can you come alongside your pastor and other leaders to help keep your church moving ahead?

Read the rest at odb.org.

What do you think of their question, “how can you come alongside your pastor and other leaders to help keep your church moving ahead?”

At the Experimental Theology blog, Dr. Beck posits that the reason millennials aren’t going to church is because of Facebook and mobile phones.

His argument hinges on the assumption that the majority of online social interaction happens between people who know each other in the real, offline world. According to research he’s done for the university where he works, most people easily distinguish between their true friends and random acquaintances on Facebook.

Here’s a meaty excerpt from Dr. Beck’s post, How Facebook Killed the Church:

Young Christians and non-Christians tend to feel that the church is “unChristian.” Too antihomosexual. Too hypocritical. Too political. Too judgmental. That’s how young people see “the church.” And it’s hard to blame them.

But my argument … was that the church has always been this way. Is the church of 2010 much different from the church of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s? I don’t think so. So, yes, the church is screwed up. Always has been. The church has been a depressing constant over the generations. So the change isn’t with the church. The change is with the Millennials. […]

So why has mobile social computing affected church attendance? Well, if church has always been kind of lame and irritating why did people go in the first place? Easy, social relationships. Church has always been about social affiliation. You met your friends, discussed your week, talked football, shared information about good schools, talked local politics, got the scoop, and made social plans (“Let’s get together for dinner this week!”). Even if you hated church you could feel lonely without it. Particularly with the loss of “third places” in America.

But Millennials are in a different social situation. They don’t need physical locations for social affiliation. They can make dinner plans via text, cell phone call or Facebook. In short, the thing that kept young people going to church, despite their irritations, has been effectively replaced. You don’t need to go to church to stay connected or in touch. You have an iPhone.

Sure, Millennials will report that the “reason” they are leaving the church is due to its perceived hypocrisy or shallowness. My argument is that while this might be the proximate cause the more distal cause is social computing. Already connected Millennials have the luxury to kick the church to the curb. This is the position of strength that other generations did not have. We fussed about the church but, at the end of the day, you went to stay connected. For us, church was Facebook!

I think his idea has merit. Even though the physical distance between me and my friends from high school and college has increased, I still have a fairly good sense of what’s happening in their lives. When we reconnect in person, our conversations are littered with “Oh, I saw on Facebook that…” or “I read your tweet about….”

Rather than supplanting or diminishing our interaction, social networking has more closely connected us to the daily ins and outs of each other’s lives. This kind of interaction is something that I used to only experience during extended chats before and after church functions. Without the social necessity of church, I can easily see how church has become “unnecessary” in the eyes of some.

What do you think of Dr. Beck’s argument? Has social networking changed, or even replaced, your interaction with your church community?

It’s hard to think of a topic less pleasant than sex abuse, and when that topic is linked to the Christian church, it’s even more upsetting. But unless you’ve managed to completely avoid reading the news recently, you’ve read about the abuse scandals currently plaguing the Roman Catholic Church.

I’m a Protestant, and it’s easy to imagine, while reading these reports, that this is a “Catholic problem.” But human nature being what it is, it’s almost certainly an issue in Protestant churches as well. A report from a few years ago claims that Protestant churches aren’t immune to this danger:

The three companies that insure the majority of Protestant churches in America say they typically receive upward of 260 reports each year of young people under 18 being sexually abused by clergy, church staff, volunteers or congregation members.

The figures released to The Associated Press offer a glimpse into what has long been an extremely difficult phenomenon to pin down—the frequency of sex abuse in Protestant congregations.

Religious groups and victims’ supporters have been keenly interested in the figure ever since the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis hit five years ago. The church has revealed that there have been 13,000 credible accusations against Catholic clerics since 1950.

Protestant numbers have been harder to come by and are sketchier because the denominations are less centralized than the Catholic church; indeed, many congregations are independent, which makes reporting even more difficult.

In other words, no matter what denomination or branch of Christianity you belong to, your church has to be on guard against abuse perpetrated within its community. The Your Church Blog provides a brief list of things your church needs to have thought through before abuse takes place, as well as guidelines for responding in the horrible event that abuse happens.

Several years ago, not long after the church-abuse scandals of the early 2000s, I noticed a very positive shift in my own church’s attitudes toward the possibility of abuse. Background checks were instituted for church workers and volunteers (even ones who had been volunteering for some time); care was taken to make sure that multiple adults of both genders were present with children in the nursery or other children’s activities; and so forth. I’m not privy to the results of those policies, but I do know that they communicate a clear message that the church takes the issue seriously and would listen if I had a concern along those lines.

What about your church? Have you had to confront abuse in your community? What steps have you taken to ensure that it doesn’t happen, and that if it does, you respond quickly and wisely?

In a recent post titled Unity in Diversity, Adrian Warnock discusses his approach to listening to voices within the Church that he doesn’t fully agree with.

The impetus of the post is the reaction of some members of the Christian blogging world to Rick Warren’s invitation to speak at the Desiring God conference. That John Piper would let Warren talk at the conference rankled some people so much that they publicly denounced Piper, and even went so far as to question the validity of his ministry.

The specifics of this situation aren’t all that important (if you’re interested, I’m sure google could help you find more information), but it does serve to showcase the sort of disagreement that happens frequently online. When we disagree with an action or statement a person makes, we want to dismiss everything they’ve done.

Warnock’s makes the point that regardless of how much we disagree with certain Christians, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss them. He points to Mark 9:40 in which Jesus states that “Whoever is not for us is against us.” In Warnock’s view, outright dismissal of people we don’t agree with is rarely—if ever—prudent. At the very least, carefully listening to them might help us learn more about ourselves.

Here’s an excerpt from the end of the post that discusses the value of listening to voices from different cultures within Christianity:

There are many different Christian cultures about. We have each developed our own ways of doing church and doing evangelism. We each have our own languages. This can lead us to misunderstand one another and talk past one another. The truth is, we can learn much from each other. Warren’s roots in a very different wing of the church are, to me, a fascinating thing that offers an opportunity for me to re-examine some of my own assumptions that may be almost unconscious to me. By asking why Warren does things the way he does, without judging him for it, I can learn more about why the people around me do things the way we do. Even if nothing changes in the way we do things, the end result will at least be that we have learned more about ourselves.
[…]
We must learn to function more like one army of Christ, while respecting and maintaining our differences, unless fully convinced by Scripture to abandon them.

Read the entire post over at AdrianWarnock.com.

Have you ever been surprised to find that you agree with someone you previously thought you disagreed with? Do you think that we can learn from someone even if we have deeply theological disagreements?