Amazing Grace/Churches of Christ in Decline?: Transitional Issues, Part 3

8. Members with no time.

Now, this is a very tough one, because of the nature of society today. Compared to 40 or so years ago, when most wives didn’t work, now the great majority have full-time jobs. Moreover, where children once were largely left to unstructured play, they now play in highly structured sports, dance, etc. Even our children have far less free time than they once had.

And work is often far more time-consuming. Hourly workers are often asked to work overtime, and salaried works often travel more and work more late hours. Americans work far more hours than people in most other countries (although we don’t work the most).

Our obsession with work and play significantly detracts from the availability of volunteer hours. There’s no denying it. You’d think this would be less so in more affluent congregations, where fewer women work, and in congregations with many retirees. But even our housewives and retirees manage to get themselves so committed that can’t work in ministry.

In a planted church, the members have all committed to volunteer for church events designed to reach the lost. However, even they don’t have time for events that aren’t truly intentional and missional.

Part of the solution would be for our members to rearrange their priorities, of course, but that’s not so easily done. And the church has to cooperate as well by, for example —

* Not asking members to spend precious time on events or programs or ministries that aren’t fully missional. If the event doesn’t actually bear fruit — if it only has the unrealized potential — it has to be either fixed or terminated, no matter how popular. The fig tree analogy applies.

* Not getting involved in matters secondary to the Kingdom. We have no business, for example, asking our members to get involved in political fights that aren’t truly about God’s mission. Getting a Republican or a Democrat elected will not save souls. There is a place for politics, but it’s rarely what the political parties are calling us to do.

* Scaling down the time we ask from our members for our internal benefit to the bare minimum. It’s really hard to justify two one-hour classes per week, plus a sermon, plus a communion meditation, plus a small group class in terms of actual educational needs. We could be far more intentional to teach what really matters in less time and do much better by our members.

Think about it. That’s 150+ hours a year of continuing education. Not even brain surgeons get that much! On the other hand, as our continuing struggle with legalism shows, we really need to be in class! We just need to be in class on the right subjects.

In the Church of Irresistible Influence (read this book!), Robert Lewis explains how his church, which is deeply involved in community service, requires new members to spend 3 years in class. After that, they are expected to go to work. Class is over!

That’s probably too extreme for Churches of Christ, but we can certainly stand to shift our priorities from education to action.

9. A different attitude toward children.

I’ve been dreading getting to this one. It’s hard to explain. In fact, I’m not sure I even know why this tugs at me so much.

Pretend that you’re a missionary in a foreign land — say, Romania. You have a wife and two children. Who do you think is going to teach your children about Jesus?

Here in the US, we get upset when the public schools don’t teach our children about the Bible. But we figure we at least have the church to do it for us. But a missionary is going to take the primary responsibility himself.

And what will the missionary expect his child to deal with in school? Well, his kid is likely to be the only Christian there. So the missionary parents will talk to their son or daughter about dealing with being different from everyone else and also about how to defend his or her faith, right?

Hence, to some extent, the children of missionaries have to become missionaries themselves. They have to know how to live in a non-Christian world that may be overtly hostile to their faith. They have to know how to defend what they believe. And they will be encouraged to share their faith in school.

In the US, parents obsess over whether their children will be popular or accepted by those who hold very non-Christian values. As our daughters will be judged by their looks, we make sure they are judged well, and in so doing, we teach them that their looks and how others judge them are what matter the most. As our boys will be judged on their athletic ability, we work to be sure they are judged well, and so we teach them to judge themselves by how well they perform on the field.

It’s just plain hard to teach children a set of values that differ from the world’s. And it’s hard on the kids. But if we keep raising our children to conform to worldly standards, we’ll keep raising worldly kids who either leave the church (well over 1/3 do) or who stay in church but have no heart for God’s mission (it’s a large percentage, isn’t it?)

Just so, if the missionary-parents get their children involved in sports or ballet or the spelling bee, well, they’re in Romania to seek and save the lost. So they’ll use these activities to meet new people and invite them to small group or worship or to a service project or community event or whatever. These activities become, for a missionary, an opportunity for outreach.

But for US parents, these activities become either something that gets in the way of going to church or else a place to escape the world while we participate in sports with other believers only, hiding our light under a bushel basket.

And for many of us, by the time our children have graduated college, they’ve never been friends with a non-Christian. They’ve been in church school from preschool to B.A. if not M.B.A. And so they are particularly ill-equipped to work with the lost of this world.

Now, this is not always true. It’s not. But my observation is that the fruit borne for Jesus in church-league sports and children’s sports is very sparse. (I hope someone proves me wrong and tells me how we can do better!)

This is nothing against sports and ballet. Rather, it’s a lament on the lost opportunities we have. We live in a world where it’s hard for many of us to be evangelistic at work. We may be the boss and have to be careful not to impose our faith on our employees, or our co-workers are all believers already. We often live in neighborhoods where we have little interaction with our neighbors. Sports thus becomes for many of us the best chance we have to make friends of non-believers, and yet we form church leagues to avoid even that! I don’t get it.

Worse yet, our very understandable concerns that our children be happy in school often so warp our priorities that we make them as worldly as their friends.

Now, how do we make the transition? I don’t know. The obvious answers are —

* Lots of classes on parenting, but few of the books cover these topics. You can cover some of Dobson’s books front to back, for example, and not come across a single chapter on how to raise your child to be a faithful disciple of Jesus! You see, many of these books were written at a time when we could confidently count on society to help us Christianize our children. It’s just not true anymore. (It’s an astonishingly common gap in parenting literature, much of which could be taught just as well in a secular setting!)

* Preach it. If it’s not important enough to preach, it’s not important to do. At least, that’s how most members will think.

* Be really careful about the ministries you create. Are they missional? Or do they comfort the comfortable? How many scholarships will that Christian school offer the poor and needy (other than athletes)? Just what good will church league softball do? Train your members to think this way and ask the members to hold their leaders accountable.

* Do something big. Kill a program or two on this very rationale and suffer the heat. Explain why to the church. But first meet with those involved, tell them what changes they have to make to save their program, and give them a chance to be missional with it. Better for the program to be successful than an example.

[to be continued]