Micah 6:8

Church Services

I’m up in Dease Lake right now with Joel and my kids while he is doing an elective at the medical clinic. It’s really beautiful up here but very cold and remote. We’re seven hours from any town of more then a few hundred people. I’ve been bored still and under stimulated so this entry isn't going to be very insightful. The most exciting thing that I’ve done in the last week and half was attend the little local church here. It was a very typical service in many ways but what was a little weird was that it was only eight people not counting my family. Someone did mention that they did have a few more members that weren’t present at the time. The pastor and his wife led the worship time with microphones and slides on a television screen and then he took an offering and preached. We then ate our little square of bread and had our thimble full of grape juice. Why couldn’t we have had a whole piece of bread and cup of juice, or even a meal?! (There was a potluck afterwards but it wasn’t considered the Lord’s supper.) Why couldn’t we have sat around and shared our struggles with obedience and then prayed for each other? We were only 12 people in total. Instead we got a silly little ceremony that left me wanting something authentic. I’ve become so accustomed to the house church model over the last couple of years that this just screamed bizarre.

I got to thinking about why they were running a service this way for so few people. I’m sure that the majority of the reason is simply tradition and the usual inability of people to think outside of the normal way of doing things. I think that there are many reasons that this model of church ministry has come into place. To start I think that this model of church is the easiest for everyone involved. Nobody really ends up needing to vulnerable with anyone else. The lay people don’t end up having to do anything for the local body at all if they don’t want to and the pastor just needs to put of a little service once weekly and he’s done his duty to the congregation, well, at least mostly. It’s easy to come to church, get your spiritual batteries charged and then go out into the week on your own. It’s hard to be vulnerable and sacrificial with fellow Christians that you may not particularly like. It is plain old hard to live in real community with fellow believers.

I think that the main difficult thing about the typical church model is that it requires a lot of money to maintain a building and pay any staff. One of the announcements was that the church would be starting a finance committee. Why in the world should a church of 15-20 people really need a finance committee? Why couldn’t they just talk about the money that they wanted to spend together? If they met in homes they could have been using the offering money to help the poor rather then provide for their building which was actually just a small trailer then had been redone church style. Surely someone in the church could accommodate the group or possibly people could take turns. I just wish people would start to think about things and being willing to experiment with better models.