More on the evangelical church

I received a comment from friend on my post entitled "What Kind of Church do you Want?". My friend was lamenting the statistics Pastor Stevens was so pumped up about, and was concerned that (1) I endorsed this line of thinking, and (2) That the church assembly would even be thought of as an evangelical tool. The comment was well thought-out and scriptural, and here is an excerpt:

In this issue, starting in Ephesians 4:

4 There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; 5 One Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. 7 But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.

11 And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; 12 For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: 13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:

You see the job of the pastor/elder and teacher is train the saints for the work of the ministry. What is the work of the ministry if it is not evangelism and discipleship? The believers are to be soul winners not the pastors. If the pastor of an assembly is focused on evangelism, he has missed the point....

What the modern church (mainline, evangelical you name it) has done is create a body of consumers of spirituality rather than members of the body of Christ. Do you know that Barna has done research and found that 9 out of 10 professing evangelicals have NEVER shared their faith? If that is our primary mission what is wrong here?

By the way, my friend also has a great blog that you should check out. I responded to him via e-mail, but I wanted to post it here, too.

First of all, thanks so much for reading and contributing. I'd love for my blog to be the kind of place people can go and have this dialogue.

Second, I want to make it clear that I didn't agree with Stevens on my blog (or disagree), but I linked his post because I thought it was an interesting take on what could be some disturbing statistics. If I were to do the survey, I would want to see some further statistics... for instance, is there a correlation between how long someone has attended Granger and what they believe? In other words, by attending the church, are people being edified? If 10 year people have the same beliefs as one-year people, then I think the church is failing to make disciples and "teach them to obey my commands."

However, I don't totally agree with your point that the church shouldn't be about evangelism. If we look at the church in Acts chapter 2, we see people being intrigued and attracted by what goes on in the church assembly. On the day of Pentacost, when the Holy Spirit invaded the church, people (non-believers) came running from everywhere to see what was going on. What did Peter do? He didn't say, "Go away if you don't believe what we do." He didn't start speaking to believers. Instead, he immediately used what was going on at that moment (the "culture" if you will) to preach to non-believers. (Acts 2:14-41). This is the first picture we have of a church assembly after Christ's ascendancy, and it's the disciples use it to evangelize.

I also think that there are two reasons few believers share their faith. (1) If you grew up in the church I grew up in, you wouldn't want anyone to know. I think there are a lot of churches like that. (2) People aren't taught how to share their faith. And, how better to learn how than by a church that believes in sharing its faith?

That being said, I do think you can make a mistake and make the church assembly ALL about evangelism and not about making disciples. That's the balance we try to strike at Genesis. It's why we try to emphasize small groups for people who want to dig deeper (Yes, I know there are issues with the small group model, too, but it's close to the Acts 2 model of the church where people met in homes, broke bread together and worshipped). It's also why we tend to constantly rotate from series about horizontal relationships (man to man) and vertical relationship (man to God). We also try to mix series that are evangelical in nature with those that are edifying in nature. I know with Paul at the helm, we will do an even better job of this.

Finally, you should know that I don't think I have the right answer. This is a line of thinking that continues to evolve the more I pray about it and study scripture. I rest in the fact that I have the few important things figured out, and the rest we'll find out in heaven.

What do you think? Join the discussion by posting a comment...