Putting “Church Reset” On Pause

This has to happen first...

For years I’ve been captivated by the idea that the modern church structure is that of a business pointed at attracting consumers rather than a family pointed at making disciples.

That was the focus of my 2020 book, Church Reset: God’s Design for So Much More. Since that time, I’ve turned my attention much more toward cultural issues, to mixed reviews. Writing on how the church should be more of a family and how much closer we could be got a lot of amens. Writing on culture, the home, politics, and the like—not so much.

But this has been an intentional choice.

While striving to push greater unity in my own church settings, I’ve run into the hard wall of reality that it’s going to be very hard to unite people who don’t think, talk, or live anything like each other. Where the Bible should create a uniquely Christian culture among God’s people, we often have nothing of the sort as everyone “does what is right in their own eyes” outside of a few shared church practices.

In other words…

You can’t create a united church family out of people who live as radical individualists Monday-Saturday.

We have not let the Bible shape us into a like-minded people, because that’s painful. If you pull the Bible out for all we do from Monday-Saturday, all of our toes are going to be stepped on at some point. If people won’t tolerate the toe-stepping as the Spirit molds us into Christ-likeness, the easiest thing to do is to compartmentalize the Word and let it legislate little more than church practices.

But, again, everybody loves the idea of a closer church. If that’s all it took, this would be easy. Self is the god of our culture, and killing our gods is the painful necessity that has to happen before church can become what it’s supposed to be. How do we find those pain points?

When you’re poking around with the tweezers trying to find a splinter, the spot that hurts the worst is probably where you want to look.

The greatest pushback I get is when I talk about the family.

“It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18)

“For the husband is the head of the wife” (Ephesians 5:23)

“Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28)

“The fruit of the womb is a reward” (Psalm 127:3)

“Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6)

Nothing brings more of an immediate backlash than writing about the basic principles outlined in these verses. Exceptional cases are turned into human shields, inspired Old Testament principles are trashed as outdated and useless, and there is a loud insistence that we should not be talking about these things.

Christians under the influence of individualism insist that no choice is better than another and God does not care about whether people get married, whether they have kids, what the home’s hierarchy looks like, or how you raise your kids. It’s “do what makes you happy” culture as applied to Christianity. It also has no view toward future generations of both the church and the lost. All is focused on us and what we want today.

These are just a few examples, but they are the most consistently relevant as these are the values we live out every day.

We could ignore all of this to keep a tentative peace, but that just creates a shallow unity based on theological minimalism. It tells people Jesus neither is, nor wants to be, Lord of their entire lives. And it does so because Christ’s Lordship is bad for business, if you’re in the numbers game. So, you end up with shallow unity in the desire to bring in better numbers.

In other words, theological minimalism leads right back to the consumer Christianity we’re trying to eliminate in the first place.

“Submit to one another in the fear of Christ” (Eph. 5:21) is not a switch you can turn on on Sunday after leaving it off Monday-Saturday. There are no effective, tight-knit families without sacrifice.

Everybody has to submit in some way or another, and that submission to Christ has to define our entire lives. It won’t work if it’s only part of our religious lives. Why? Because Jesus is Lord and we would do well to live under the guidance He has benevolently given us.

So, I still pray for the day the church can give up her widely-held consumerism. But until the god of self is shattered and ground to dust like the golden calf, it’s not going to happen.

For more on this subject, see “What Christian Culture Should Look Like”

To clarify, the “pause on Church Reset” is about my current shift in focus away from content on church structure - not an intention to take a hiatus. Sorry for any confusion!

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