Audience of One

Who is the church for?

My cousin Mark wrote recently of the purpose of church meetings. From his knowledge of the Bible he cannot see that church meetings should have evangelism as their main purpose.

In response to his entry, I’ll talk first about evangelism. The word comes from the Greek word “evangel”, which means “good news”. Evangelism is therefore defined as “bringing the good news”. Christians believe that non-Christians fall under God’s righteous judgement; they also believe that there’s a way out. That is the good news which Christians are commanded to “bring”, or “tell” to others (Matthew 28:18-20.)

One of the current trends of a lot of churches is to give “seeker-sensitive” services – in other words, to create services that are comfortable to non-Christians, or services that are specifically aimed at non-Christians. The services may have shorter talks to stop people switching off; they might hand doughnuts around afterwards; they might have really modern-sounding music, or snazzy technical effects and visual aids.

While there’s nothing wrong in any of these things per se, what happens is that it is these things that end up attracting people. The Bible teaches though that it’s the gospel (the good news) that wins people for Christ; it’s the good news about Jesus that leads to people becoming Christians. In a way, this should be obvious. A lot of Christians seem to be embarrassed by the gospel though; it’s almost as if they’re tricking people into turning to Christ by neglecting the hard parts of the Christian message. Telling people they’re doomed – tactfully – is hard (yelling “you’re all going to hell!” generally isn’t effective, even though Christians would hold it to be true…). It’s not something we can gloss over though, and if we believe in the gospel then we should believe in its power to change people’s lives.

Back to church services. Setting aside a particular side of service (or creating a particular kind of church) to be particularly “seeker-sensitive” suggests that we have something to be ashamed of in our normal services. It’s almost as if we’re hiding something. Could it be the message of judgement? No, even that seems to have left many normal church services. People don’t like it – even Christians.

We have nothing to be ashamed of in our church services – or rather, we should have nothing to be ashamed of. If a friend is interested in Christianity yet you don’t want to invite them to a church service because it might “weird them out”, maybe there’s something wrong with your church service.

Every church service should be seeker-sensitive. That doesn’t mean that every talk or sermon should be aimed at the non-Christian – far from it. If an A level student goes into a university lecture to see what it’s like, he doesn’t want the content or approach changed just because he’s there. He wants to see what it’s really like; what the students really do.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for evangelistic events. Evangelistic events have their place; the apostle Paul speaks evangelistically on many occasions, for example. Where are evangelistic events without the gospel though? Often we only hear it watered down in seeker-sensitive services – somehow “made more attractive” for those who don’t want to hear about their eternal destination.

So who is the church for? Mark quotes William Temple, the Archbishop of Cantebury at the time of the Second World War, who says “church is the only organisation that exists for sake of its non-members”. While possibly not the only organisation that does this (and theologically not even an organisation), it is otherwise true. One of the purposes of the church (Christians as a collective body) is to tell others about Jesus. That is just one of the purposes though, and certainly doesn’t refer to the church meeting. As Mark rightly says, church meetings in the New Testament are for the purpose of building up and encouraging each other (Hebrews 10:24-25 for example). The major growth of the church seems to be caused not by non-Christians coming along to meetings that were specifically designed for them. The growth seems to come from Christians, fired up for God, telling others the gospel. Why were they fired up? They were encouraged by each other and by the word of God. This is the centre of meeting together as Christians. While the church is for the non-believers in that it encourages believers in evangelism, it is mainly for Christians. Churches (as collections of Christians, rather than the church as a whole) can certainly evangelise – but not at the expense of neglecting to teach and encourage those who already believe.

Matthew @ 17:27, February 21, 2005 to Discussions | Comments (6)