What's Broken with Church

I went to church this morning - kind of a rare occurance these days. So I thought I would share a few opinions regarding this subject today.

Let me start by explaining my point of view and background. I grew up going to church. I like to joke that I was attanding church 9 months before I was born. My mother was the church pianist and my father was Chairman of the Deacons. Both were leaders within the church and well respected. I was 13 years old before I missed my first church service on Sunday. I started off attending a pretty small church and then eventually switched and started attending what was the world's largest Baptist church at the time. I was always involved in Children's ministries, Youth ministries, Music ministries, Missions ministries. If there was a ministry, I probably was tied to it in some way. I became a Christian when I was 6 years old. I was baptized a week later.

In 6th grade, I started attending a private, Christian high school. Between my 10th and 11th grade years, I went on a mission trip to Africa that lasted for 6 weeks. It was a mind blowing trip to see the need, the culture, the hopelessness of those that I encountered. I returned from that trip on a Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning, I woke up and left for Acapulco for a Youth Choir trip. My entire summer that year was spent involved in ministry and I felt like I had found my calling. I surrendered my life to a call from God to be a full-time minister. Although I wasn't quite sure what area of ministry I would be involved in, I knew this is what I was supposed to do.

My senior year of high school, I was introduced to our new youth minister at our church. He had already heard about me. He invited me to come and work in the youth offices after school and with him during the summer. I agreed and became an intern for the largest Baptist church in the world. Again, this helped me to realize what area of ministry I would be involved in. For 18 years, I served in churches as a Youth Minister/Music Minister. During those 18 years, averaged more than 100 people per year that became Christians under my ministry. Add that up, and more than 2000 people are Christians today through the ministries that I led.

Sounds pretty good, huh? Well, there was another side to ministry that few others knew about. My first church that I ministered in full time fired me. There reason was that I brought too many kids into the church without their parents starting to come. Why does that matter? Because those same people were now having to fund a large youth group of 100 instead of a group of 3-4 kids. Amazing? It gets better.

During my 18 years, I was spit on, received death threats, and had my character trashed by everyone who felt challenged by my leadership and the message that I preached. I was passionate about the ministry that I had and quickly had to become thick skinned, but eventually my skin wore too thin and I just couldn't go on.

Now please understand that I am not blaming all of my troubles on other people. I made mistakes too. I was very vocal and opinionated. Rarely was I subtle. I consistently worked more than 100 hours a week for many years, neglecting my family and paying the price for that decision. I could have done many things differently. But the issues that I will discuss are things that go beyond my issues - they are things that were consistent in each and every church that I attended.

Broken Item #1: A church cannot be owned.

It was amazing to me how many people felt like portions of the church belonged to them and that they had the final say on what would and would not happen in it. When someone new came in, either paid staff or volunteer, they were met with instant opposition if they dared to inject any new ideas or thoughts.  The church cannot have people who "own" portions of it. 

Broken Item #2: A church cannot measure success in business metrics.

Too many churches measure success with nickels and noses. What are the offering totals? How many people attended? Believe me, I always knew how many people attended from one week to another. I always knew the magic number that the offerings must total for the church to pay its obligations. But to make this the primary way of knowing if a church is effective or not is simply not true. In many cases, I would tell a church that I was comign to that attendance and offerings would go down at first because of me coming in, but that they would soon be replaced by new people. (see #1 as the reason people would leave when I came)

Broken Item #3: Change is good.

So many churches are so predictable from one week to another that the people attend soon become very robotic about coming and their actions when they attend. Would it be so terrible to change things up from week to week and make people anticipate what might happen? 

Broken Item #4: The people.

All churches have some really good, moral, and true Christian people attending. Also true is that all churches have some very evil people in them. They don't know or recognize that they are evil - but they are. Some of the meanest, rudest, most self-cenetered people that I have ever met have been in churches (many in leadership positions). Ghandi once said that he would have become a Christian if it weren't for the Christians.  Lou Alcinder contemplated and studied all the major religions of the world, and he came to the conclusion that Christianity made the most sense. But he could not get past the people that he knew that called themselves Christians, so he became Muslim and changed his named to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Those are just a few of the problems. I'm sure I'll pick up this subject again in the future. There are some things that are very right about church too and that will be a subject to write about soon as well. As I mentioned, I don't attend church regularly anymore. Perhaps I can share more of the reasons why in another post.

Share your thoughts. I'm always anxious to hear and possibly even debate some of them.