A POTLUCK PARABLE

“Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others” (I Pet. 4:10).

The Saturday Supper Society

For as long as she can remember, Ashley and her parents have eaten Saturday dinner with the Supper Society. For them, if it’s late Saturday afternoon, their response is almost automatic: they head for the dining hall. Ashley knows that, with a name like Supper Society, the group must have begun ages ago. How long? She has no idea.

Another weekend is here, so Ashley and her parents make their way to the customary meal. As usual, Chef Charlie has prepared it well. Ashley, always curious, asks if she might tour his kitchen. “Of course,” he says. His diverse array of cooking tools amazes her. And just above a large, gray file cabinet—which she assumes holds his recipes—hangs his framed culinary degree.

Tonight, Ashley sees fatigue lines in Chef Charlie’s face. For 17 years he has come up with menu ideas and meals every week. Seeing him on the verge of burnout distresses her. And, to be honest, even in herself she detects a lack of eagerness. The same-old-same-old nature of the gatherings has made them highly predictable.

Ashley wonders if that filing cabinet in Chef Charlie’s kitchen holds any untried entrees. On opening the top drawer she finds recipes galore. One aging folder, tagged “History,” intrigues her. It’s the backstory of the Supper Society. Nearly 150 years ago, a young couple had begun inviting friends and neighbors over for Saturday potluck meals. Someone had painstakingly recorded a whole year of who-brought-what. For example, Johansson: Swedish meatballs. Rossi: pasta. Chan: sweet and sour pork. Williams: scones with strawberry jam.

How, Ashley wonders, had they gone from share-the-cooking potlucks to depending completely on chefs like Charlie? The rest of the file reveals how the transition took place. Food-preparation had gotten wearisome. It took time and trouble. People began showing up empty-handed, expecting to eat what others had prepared. Oh, yes, everyone enjoyed and wanted to keep the togetherness. But they wanted it without having to sacrifice for others.

So they had hired a chef to take over the Saturday-meal chores. All began paying dues. They compensated the chef to do what they had originally done for one another. As she closes the file drawer, Ashley’s mind bursts with fresh ideas. The following Saturday, she arrives with notes for a brief pitch. Her main points:

1. Chef Charlie is overworked.

2. Each of us has an adequate kitchen.

3. We can all cook—even if that ability needs to be discovered and developed.

4. Proposal: We should break with tradition and return to the original potluck model.

5. Our founders proved that potlucks work.

6. Our menus will be less predictable—more varied and interesting.

7. Chef Charlie can use his training and experience to help us expand our cooking skills to serve each other.

“Please think on my proposal,” Ashley says to the group. “Let’s vote on it next week.”

___________________________

What do you imagine the Supper Society decided to do about Ashley’s proposal—and why?

From this little story, what might we learn about church gatherings?

If you are part of a small group of Christians, how could you discuss this parable with them?

(Your comments are welcome. See below.)

A Shared-Church Classic

Several authors have urged a return to what I call “shared church.” But their books don’t appear on best-seller lists, and few Christ-followers know about them. This blog is the fourth on such books.

Ray Stedman wrote it nearly a half-century ago. But his classic book about shared church still speaks a much-needed message to us in the 21st century.

Billy Graham valued the book’s message enough to pen its Foreword. He writes: “In Body Life, Ray C. Stedman uses the leverage of the Word itself to bring us back to the Church’s real meaning and mission. With strong, convincing argument he points to the weaknesses within the institutional church and clearly reminds us of the strength inherent in Christ’s body, the true church.”

Ray Stedman served 40 years as pastor of the Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, CA. During those decades, he and the elders established a shared-church meeting environment. Stedman tells the story of that church in Body Life, originally published in 1972. In 1995, Discovery House Publishers issued an updated version. Some of the quotations in this blog come from that edition.

A Tragic Unawareness

What blocks us today from experiencing the full-of-life church we read about in the pages of the New Testament? Stedman explains in his Preface: “The major factor that keeps this from happening today is ignorance. Most Christians are tragically unaware of the biblical pattern for the operation of the church.”

At the core of this ignorance, Stedman says, is that Christians are oblivious to the Holy Spirit and his gifts. “It is obvious that there can be no hope of ever getting the church to operate as it was intended to do until each individual member recognizes and begins to exercise the spiritual gift or gifts which he [or she] has received.” So it comes as no surprise that Stedman devotes two whole chapters to the Holy Spirit and his gifts.

Gifts for Church and World

God gives these gifts—even today—not only for the building-up of the gathered church but also for the benefit of the scattered church in its various ministries. “The gifts of the Spirit are not only for use within the church,” Stedman contends. “They are for the world as well. Some who have the gift of teaching ought to be exercising it in their homes. Some who have the gift of helping ought to be using in the office, the shop, or wherever they are.”

He asks, “Have you ever noticed that the really important figures of the New Testament are not the priests and religious leaders? They are shepherds, fishermen, tax-gatherers, soldiers, politicians, tentmakers, physicians, and carpenters! These are the ones who occupy the center of the stage. So it must be again today.” This, of course, requires a paradigm shift in the way we understand church roles: “It is not the pastors who are on the front lines of ministry; it is the people—all the saints—whose job it is to go out into the world, to land on the beachheads of the world, to take the territory, to win the world by the quietly transforming resurrection power of Jesus Christ.”

How can this happen? “You can tell the good news of God at work around a water cooler in an office if the occasion is right. Or over a lunch bucket. You can heal a hurting heart as you’re going home in the carpool. You can teach the truth that liberates people over a cup of coffee in a kitchen or the back fence. You can pray the prayer of deliverance beside a sick bed. You can interject Christian insights into business transactions or governmental problems—and the insights you share may mean the difference between conflict and strife, hope and despair, or even heaven and hell for the person whose life you touch!”

The Situation a Half-Century Later

Now—nearly 50 years after Stedman wrote Body Life—has his message been widely put into practice? Many more recent books suggest otherwise—books such as, You Lost Me, by David Kinnaman and Aly Hawkins; Unchurching, by Richard Jacobson; and Church Refugees, by Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope. Even among those who remain in the institutional churches, many lament the lack of body life and the increasing move toward platform-driven, theater-like, sit-watch-and listen church meetings.

That trend had already begun, even back in Stedman’s day. He spoke of “a gradual transfer of ministry responsibility from the people (whom we now call the laity) to the few pastor-teachers (whom we now call the clergy . . . ). The scriptural concept that every believer is a priest before God was gradually lost, and a special class of super-Christians emerged who were looked to for practically everything, and who came to be called the ‘ministry.’ Somehow, the church lost sight of the concept, so clearly stated in Ephesians 4, that all Christians are ‘in the ministry.’”

What resulted from shifting ministry to the clergy? “When the ministry was left to the ‘professionals,’ there was nothing left for the people to do other than come to church and listen. They were told that it was their responsibility to bring the world into the church building to hear the pastor preach the gospel. Soon Christianity became little more than a Sunday-morning spectator sport, much like the definition of football: twenty-two men down on the field, desperately in need of rest, and twenty thousand in the grandstands, desperately in need of exercise.”

What, Then, Shall We Do?

What needs to be done? “Pastors, particularly, must restore to the people the ministry that was taken from them with the best of intentions.” This still leaves pastors with a lot of very important work to do. “Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastor-teachers exist not only to equip the members of the body to do ministry but also to build them up and support them in a mutual ministry to each other, so that the entire body will be vibrant, vital, and effective.”

Stedman recognizes that shared church has drawn opposition during most of church history. “Throughout the Christian centuries, no principle of church life has proved more revolutionary—and more bitterly fought!—than the declaration of Ephesians 4 that the ultimate work of the church in the world is to be done by the saints—plain, ordinary Christians—and not by a professional clergy or a few select laypeople. We must never lose the impact of the apostle Paul’s statement that apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers exist ‘for the equipment of the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:12).’”

Shared Church in Operation

In Chapter 12 of his original book, Stedman asks, “Will [these principles] work today as they did in the early church? The answer is a resounding Yes!” To demonstrate his point, he closes the chapter by reprinting an article from the May 21, 1971, issue of Christianity Today that begins with these words: “It happens every Sunday night. Eight hundred or more people pack into a church auditorium designed to seat comfortably only 750.”

The article goes on to describe a Peninsula Bible Church meeting that includes open and honest sharing, singing in which those in the congregation call out song selections, teaching that provides opportunity for questions, and prayer with joined hands. “We determined,” Stedman says, “to make a place for this ministry by wiping out the traditional structure of the evening service and using the time to invite a sharing of needs and gifts by the people.”

But with 800 people? “It may surprise many to discover how much larger meetings of Christians can be characterized by such a spirit of loving, non-judgmental acceptance, that many deeply personal problems can be shared openly without fear of rejection or giving rise to scandal.”

Quotations have been taken from both the original 1972 edition and from Body Life: The Book that Inspired a Return to the Church's Real Meaning and Mission © 2011 by Ray Stedman and used by permission of Discovery House, Grand Rapids, MI 49501. All rights reserved.

Clarifying Our Calling to Ministry

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.” If only that old proverb were true. But words can harm us, especially when distorted. Our religious vocabulary can barricade us from moving toward shared church. Take the words calling and ministry. As Paul Stevens says in The Other Six Days, “almost the only people who speak of being ‘called of God’ are ‘full-time’ missionaries and pastors.” It seems God calls just a few special people to serve in official church roles. The rest don’t see themselves as having any calling. Why not, then, just sit back, watch, and enjoy listening to those God has called?

So, preparing Christians for participatory church gatherings will require teaching on God’s calling. “Calling,” writes Os Guinness in The Call, “is not what it is commonly thought to be. It has to be dug out from under the rubble of ignorance and confusion.” The word ministry, too, has gotten buried under centuries of debris. Part of the muddled thinking comes about because calling and ministry often show up as conjoined twins: “I was an engineer before God called me into ministry.” Are Christian engineers uncalled? Are they not called into ministry?

Paul and Peter repeatedly use the phrase “you were called” when writing to Christians in general. We become Christ-followers only in response to God’s summons, his invitation, his “Come to me.” God’s calling initiates our life of faith. So, every believer is called. Wrapped inside that calling is a second calling—to a life of ministry. To minister, in New Testament Greek, means to serve. Paul wrote that God gave the church its leaders “to prepare all God's people for the work of Christian service [ministry]” (Eph. 4:12, TEV). 

If, week in and week out, the ecclesiastical professional shoulders most if not all of the spiritual workload during a Sunday gathering, the New Testament concept of a shared ministry gets blurred and even blocked. The Message paraphrase paints the participatory church vividly: “When you gather for worship, each one of you be prepared with something that will be useful for all: Sing a hymn, teach a lesson, tell a story, lead a prayer, provide an insight” (I Cor. 14:26). Paul wrote this letter to the whole church in Corinth. So, “each one of you” means everyone in the meeting was to come prepared to minister to—to serve—all the others.

Our church traditions, though, have conditioned us to think that only the ordained or those on a church payroll are called into ministry. Os Guinness says “there is not a single instance in the New Testament of God’s special call to anyone into a paid occupation or into the role of a religious professional.” Check his statement out for yourself. Guinness adds: “Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. . . . Our secondary calling . . . is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live and act entirely for him.”

As I say in Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, “. . . getting our vocabulary right is critically important, because the terms we use become the tools we think with. Just as a hammer is the wrong tool for fixing a leaky pipe, the wrong word can never repair a damaging idea. Does this mean we should expunge the word ministry from our lexicon? Not at all. Instead we need to extend ministry (service) so that it applies to all forms of God-honoring work. In addition to the ministry of the Word, there is the ministry of education, the ministry of construction, the ministry of automotive repair, and on it goes.”

What, then, is the work—secondary calling—of pastors and teachers? It is to serve fellow believers by helping them discover and develop their own secondary callings, their own unique works of ministry. We can see this pattern in Paul’s instructions to Timothy: teach others who will teach others who will teach others (II Tim. 2:2). If we actually practiced this, think of the spiritual workforce it would unleash in and from the church!

Recently I was asked to bring the sermon in a church meeting. My text came from Romans 6 on the truth of our having been set free in Christ. To illustrate how God liberates us from sin’s rule in our lives, I invited a young woman (I’ll call her “Joan”) to share in the message by telling her story. She related how she had gone virtually blind by the age of four. Starting out from an abusive home life, she descended into a life of addiction. Along the way, Joan gave birth to five children, losing custody of them all. Although initially resisting God’s call to faith in Christ, she finally yielded. She began devouring Scripture and experienced God’s deliverance from her former prison. Joan told that she now has a job and for the first time is able to pay child support to those caring for her children.

After the benediction, many from the congregation rushed to surround and thank Joan for her testimony. For weeks afterward, I kept hearing church people talk about what she had shared. Just the other day I learned she will soon give her testimony in another church. In the traditional, distorted sense of being “called into ministry,” Joan never was. Yet there is no doubt that God has called her. And he has clearly given her a ministry.

Church congregations everywhere are filled with Christians who are experiencing God at work in their families, their neighborhoods, and workplaces. Some will need coaching to learn how to tell their stories effectively to their church families. But, like Joan, when they are given opportunities to share what God is doing, believers are built up and God is glorified.

Did Fast Food Change the Church?

If you google on “Why are people leaving the church?” you’ll find more websites than you could possibly open in years. Various authors, of course, explain the exodus in different ways. In his book,  British author John Drane says some of the trouble has come from The McDonaldization of the Church.

He borrowed the fast-food reference in his title from The McDonaldization of Society, by George Ritzer. Drane explains that “when I . . . applied Ritzer’s four characteristics of the McDonaldization process—efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control—to the Church, I began to see some of the reasons why so many of today’s people struggle so much with it.”

Drane taught Practical Theology in the University of Aberdeen’s Department of Divinity. That role put him in touch with leaders from a great variety of churches across Scotland. “I soon realized,” he says, “that if our faith was to continue to make a difference to our nation in the twenty-first century, we could not continue to do the same things as our forebears had done before us.”

Squeezing More Out of Less Effort

McDonald’s now sells burgers in more than 100 countries—in part because the chain has turned efficiency into an art form. Drane sees a similar priority in churches.  “I have come away from too many churches feeling that I have been given the same sort of pre-packaged ‘welcome’ as I might expect in a fast-food outlet where the server will routinely enquire about my day, but really has no interest in either me or my life.”

In the McDonaldized church, “somebody else does the thinking for you, predigests it, and serves it up in an efficient manner. It is the spiritual equivalent of fast food, and unlike the home-prepared meal it requires no preparation, no cleaning up afterwards, and no involvement in cooking it.”

In my own book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I describe church meetings in which “all elements . . . are preplanned, in which the voices heard are prearranged, and in which any words spoken or sung by members of the congregation are preselected by someone else and provided for them.”

Running by the Numbers

Drane sees calculability as the second characteristic of McDonaldization evident churches. As he puts it, “Christians are not immune from this obsession with numbers and quantity.” But our counting does not end with bodies, buildings, and budgets. Drane contends that “most churches just have far too many gatherings that they expect their people to attend, midweek as well as at weekends.” Christians serious about their spiritual lives, he says, are likely to remain unimpressed.

Drane includes an example from the experience of a pastor friend: “He had started with just seventeen people, and ended up with more than 3000, but in the process the church had become a depersonalized machine. . . . Growth led to increased numbers, which required a bigger space to contain them, which called for fund-raising and building projects, which necessitated a mortgage to pay for it all, which demanded efficient marketing and sales techniques to maximize the attendance in order to raise enough money to meet the payments, and on and on in a vicious spiral of cause and effect. When all of that came together, it created a system that, in terms of human relationships and real spiritual growth was pathologically self-destructive—but which was apparently necessary in order to maintain the trappings of ‘success.’”

Avoiding Surprises

Admittedly, says Drane, “The security of what is predictable can indeed help people to feel safe—but the downside is that it all becomes routine. . . . Pragmatically, the Church’s love affair with this aspect of McDonaldization is a major stumbling block to effective evangelism in today’s post-modern culture.”

In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I quote a blogger who wrote, “Routines are convenient and make for a comfortable, easy life. They make you think less. They let you predict the future. In essence, routines make you lazy. They make your life and you boring. Routines won’t provide you with stories to tell.” Even so, in some churches regulars don’t even have to read the order of service in the bulletin to know what will come next.

Managing the Event

“This issue of power and control,” Drane says, “is at the heart of all the other factors that are at work in a McDonaldized style of being.” As an example, he points to the typical church practice of offering self-tests to help people discover their spiritual gifts.

“While we say we are wanting to be sensitive to people’s skills, and open to using them in the life of the church, the possible ministries that are on offer invariably have an over-emphasis on particular areas—all of them carefully chosen to ensure that we identify in other people only those gifts that are not going to challenge the position of the established leadership.”

The Shared-Church Connection

What does all this have to do with shared church? I’ll close with one more quotation from Drane when he says that today’s world will require the church in its worship services to “place the mutual sharing of stories of faith at the center of its search for meaningful human community, not to mention its obedient commitment to the gospel.”