Prodigal Church (eBook)

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What This Book Is Not

I dare you to read this book.

I don’t dare you as someone who aims to make you mad (or sad), but as someone who himself has been dared to read things that have challenged his own assumptions and presumptions—which benefited him greatly in the long run. I just want to appeal to your desire as a leader to stretch and grow and be thoughtful and have firmer convictions than ever before. I just want to ask you some questions. I want to show you some things. I want you to consider some different lines of thinking, even if they end up leading you right back to affirming what you already thought.

If you don’t like the book, return it and ask for a refund. Tell them I’m an idiot and these pages should line birdcages. But please give me the chance to earn your rejection. And if you will make the commitment to hear me out to the very end, I make these promises to you:

This Book Is Not a Rant

I’m pretty good at rants. Or at least, I feel pretty good when I rant. But this book will not be a grand venting. Who wants that? Not you. Not me. We’ve all had enough yelling in the Christian world, I think, or at least enough yelling about things that don’t need yelling about.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got LOUD NOISES fatigue. When someone who disagrees with me thinks the only way to convince me is to trigger the All Caps button and lay heavy hands on the Exclamation Point key, I tune them out right-quick.

When I came up with the idea for this book, it began as an extension of things I’ve been thinking, writing, and preaching about for nearly ten years now, but this project is really the culmination of twenty years of life and ministry. I’m not writing purely from theory but from experience. But I also knew that some of the ways I’ve written about issues related to church models and methodology in the past would not be suitable for this book. Not because those previous ways were wrong, necessarily, but because they were often for different audiences, perhaps too often for the already convinced. Like many of you, I have that “spiritual gift” of sarcasm, but too often that kind of humor is used in harmful, cutting ways, in ways that are counterproductive. Like lots of people, I can too often vent my frustrations rather than plead my case. I want to take the Bible seriously when it says that venting is foolish (Prov. 29:11).

There’s definitely a place for harsh words. We see them used in a variety of ways in the Bible, including to correct wrong belief and wrong action. But what I want you to read here isn’t intended as a rebuke. I don’t want to appall you; I want to appeal to you. I won’t snip at you or nag you. I might pester you, but I definitely don’t want to pick on you.

I’m also not writing this book to preach to the choir, which is all that ranting really ends up accomplishing. Preaching to the choir can be fine and good (the choir needs the preaching, too), but I know that if we expect others to not just hear what we’re saying but also to actually consider it, we have to be kind, respectful, and affirming of all that we can affirm. So I won’t lie and say this isn’t a manifesto. It is. But hopefully it will be a gentle one. You can be the judge of whether I succeed or not.

This Book Is Not an Argument for a Traditional Church

You may think I want to sell you on a particular way of doing church. I do. I absolutely do. But I hope you will relax as it pertains to music styles, clothing styles, or almost any other kinds of styles, because this isn’t that kind of book.

Many times, when a person complains about the so-called “attractional church,” people understandably assume that the person is arguing for a “traditional church” instead. If I complain about the superficiality of certain contemporary worship songs, the response can be something like, “So you think we should just sing hymns?” Hymns are great. More churches should sing them. But there’s nothing intrinsically holy about old music. When someone argues that too much contemporary Christian music is superficial or theologically suspect, it is not a call to give up songwriting but a call to write better songs.

I was once part of a rather large church that fell apart. The elders had to dismiss the lead pastor for a variety of sins, including ongoing verbal abuse of numerous staff members. The pastor announced a public meeting, which I attended, to give his side of the story, part of which consisted of saying the elders had kicked him out because they wanted to make the church more traditional. This was not true at all, and most of us saw right through it. But the pastor knew it would gain some traction because many people in our church were there “in recovery” from bad experiences of legalism and lifelessness in traditional churches. Traditionalism had become a handy bogeyman.

There are all kinds of churches in the world, and there are good ones and bad ones among all those kinds. There are good traditional churches and bad ones. There are good contemporary churches and bad ones. But when, faced with critique, the contemporary church holds up an idea of the traditional church as boring or fundamentalist or backward, it is the cheapest kind of defensiveness and self-justification.

So in my critique, I hope this kind of response will be set aside. I am not asking anyone to give up their guitars or their coffee bars—just, perhaps, to reconsider what they do with them. This is not an argument for a more traditional church so much as it is an argument for a more biblical one.

This Book Is Not a Reactionary Rejection

It has been said that the prophets of one generation become the Pharisees of the next. Maybe that’s true.

What we see in the cyclical nature of the church in the Western world is how each generation in some way rebels against the values and establishments of the generation before it. Some track this reactionary cycle through the generations of church models, as well. It is possible that the rise of the so-called “seeker church,” with the primary influences of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois and Saddleback Community Church in California, precipitated a reactionary movement of similar churches against the traditional—maybe fundamentalist—churches before them. Then my generation, often called Generation X, began to flirt with things like liturgy, creeds, more structured worship, even candles and incense. In response to the loosened-up church style of the Boomers, the Xers went further back than their fundamentalist grandparents even, and adopted some sort of merging of contemporary church with elements of high church formalism, seeking less relevance and more reverence. We might say the movement known as the emerging (or emergent) church came from this reaction.

Today the church world is a bit fractured, with tribes springing up all over the place. The mantle of the Boomers’ “seeker church” has been passed through the “church growth” movement, on to a new phase in contemporary church styles predominant in the American megachurch movement. But we have to be careful there, because not all megachurches are created equal. There are very big traditional churches and very big contemporary churches. The bigness of a church is no indicator of its style or approach to worship. Similarly, the seeker church paradigm can be found in hundreds of smaller churches around the nation.

The emergent church seems to have fractured off from evangelicalism altogether. Although there are certainly evangelicals in the emergent church movement, as a stream of church life it seems to have found itself more at home within the denominational mainline, where religious and political liberalism are more common.

The tribe sometimes called the “neo-Reformed”—or alternately, the new Calvinists, the neo-Puritans, the “young, restless, and Reformed”—is another offshoot of the contemporary church that ran parallel to the emerging church for a time. Those of us who identify with the slightly larger tent we might call the “gospel-centered” movement would align more with the neo-Reformed, but there is plenty of variety denominationally and stylistically even in this group. Just get the Presbyterians and the Baptists talking about baptism, for instance, or the traditionally Reformed folks and the Acts29 Network gang talking about church music.

There is a beauty in all of this diversity. It is legalism when we place a burden on another local church body to look more like our own than Christ’s. So in all this beauty lies a great danger, and the danger is this: assigning a level of spirituality according to one’s stance on an open-handed theological issue—that is, important but nonessential issues that we hold more loosely than the essential tenets of orthodox Christianity, which of course we hold very tightly in a “closed hand.” We must be very careful that our modes and models of church are sincere attempts to contextualize our common faith to our particular mission fields and communities. In this vein, it is just as narrow-minded to suggest that a traditional church is necessarily boring and legalistic as it is to suggest that a contemporary church is shallow and worldly.

We’ve got to get out of reactionary mode. When we find ourselves making particular transitions from one way of doing church to another, we have to be on guard against shaking a fist at those in the places we leave behind.

I have deep concerns about the current approach to what used to be called the seeker church, what some today may call the “attractional” church. I...