Doug Rea

How wonderful to start a church in a home or similar small space.  We were all so excited to simply have people gathering in a family environment.  Their opinions mattered, and their needs were met.  The tiny congregation felt at home with the leaders, and with each other.  There was no event, no performance, no dress codes (that includes casual) and no rules. True connectivity took place between people and leadership, with each other and with God.

But the whole time this wonderful ministry was functioning, it wasn’t complete…at least not in our minds.  We in leadership had a driving agenda.  We did not hide it. In fact we promoted it to the forefront.  We leaders let them know that these meager beginnings were only a start. “Someday we will look back on this as laugh.”

For centuries, ministry was about the building; The “House of God,” and dare we defile it.  The church building was the holy sanctuary of the Christian faith.  There we could once again have our sins resolved, our offering taken, our songs sung, and our service to God performed. (Sound familiar?)

Even as late as the 20th century, ministry successs was defined by the facility.  How many it could hold, family life centers, and coffee shops redefined what the church has become.  Now we had praise teams, choruses and projected our words using the overhead.  Finally we come to today. How silly to wear a 3 piece suite like the 80’s and to use hymnals. Now we can now relate the message to people in a manner that is relevant thanks to video, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, blogs, and other means of modern communication.  I am pro-use of all these things.

But I have to ask, “Has anything really changed since the Gothic days of cathedrals?”

I am speaking of those days where a certain pattern of behavior known as worship was performed each and every Sunday, by a few trained professionals, to an audience who was basically spectators.

I submit little has changed.

Just as in the days of old, the pinnacle of ministry is about a facility and not a people.  The defining moment in the life of a church is more often the first service in the new building than it is how the people meeting the needs of one another.

Think I don’t “get it?” If your organization will be honest, you are probably praying that the Lord will “bless you” with the right facility…and for the right leaders, to form the right ministries, to attract the right people, to the facility.  Any of that sound familiar? I commonly hear comments like, “If we can get a good worship leader” or “If we can ever get our sign up” – or whatever, it still speaks about a facility and not people.

Nothing has changed.

“For most” (my disclaimer), we will have “arrived” once the building is complete, the trained people in place, and some 80-90% of all income goes into making the facility go.  Of course we have to have a pastor who writes, has a couple thousand Twitter followers, and a moderately priced hair cut…and an iPhone.

I think there is a better model than that of a weekly pep rally with forced energy and a good media promotion and production.

It’s deep but here it is:

Ministry is about people – period.

We tell people to come to this building, act a certain way, sing a certain song, and “go do ministry.”  Then we have the audacity to call it a “service” to God, and wonder why they aren’t “getting it.” I can sit a group of people in a room and show them a golf club, have Tiger come in and speak to its physics and strategies, but that won’t make them golfers.  How are we really equipping them?  We are not.  We are simply providing a Christian education.  No real ministry, for the most part, is taking place in what we call “church.”

Where would we be without our facility?  Would the Church, His Body, know how to feed the hungry without a “feed the hungry day?”  Would we even HAVE a facility if we had to pay taxes on the property?  Could the people worship without a worship team?  Can the worship team worship without the team?

Here’s what I ask myself: “am I preparing a bride for her wedding day or am I building a church?”  I would say that more of the latter is true in most so-called ministries.

I can’t think of any other non-for-profit organizations that only give away 10-20% of their income.  Look at the local shelters in your area.  They would NEVER consider buying or building anything that didn’t speak to the immediate needs of people.  Our local Goodwill will gladly receive the old stuff from your church in an attempt to minister by giving jobs to a certain group of people.  Who’s got ministry figured out in that illustration?

There was a time, early in most of our ministries, where we would have honored to take a semi-working sound system, decent chairs, and a workable seating arrangement.  Now we have made ministry NOT about people first, but the facility housing that Sunday event, hoping to get “some saved.”  This model is nowhere in the New Testament.  We made it up.

As I see it, nothing has changed since our Gothic roots.  We have it arranged differently, using a 21st century flair.  But most of everything we do will be more about creating masses of spectators as opposed to truly connecting with people and meeting them at their needs.

I know what you are thinking – we have small groups for that.  I would argue that if small groups are so great, get rid of all the overhead of the facility and go 100% small groups giving the rest to the poor.

We use terms like “every member in ministry.”  What we really mean is that our goal is to have as many as possible working as a volunteer to feed the needs of the facility so we can bring in more people to the facility.  The cycle never ends.

To our benefit – we are getting better…but not by much.  We are not much different than our fathers before us with the exception that we do it in Prada.

I am not impressed by anything ministry has to offer except one thing – “How have you equipped the Bride of Christ to minister to the world around them?”  The rest is rather irrelevant man-made religious efforts to impress God.