Sunday, March 04, 2007

Smaller is better, sometimes!

It is said by those that know me that I am a reader. My dear friend and adopted father(after my father died) has said more than once that if you want me to know something, write it on a piece of paper and stick it in front of me. While the blogs that I love to read the most are my friends and others in the Church describing how God is working and blessing where they are, I do also read a variety of other blogs, spiritual and non-spiritual alike. I have found that the non-spiritual often have content that can be applied to the spiritual. One that I often read is one written by someone named Seth Godin. He is an author and speaker in the area of business. Many times the ideas he writes about, have applications in the spiritual sense, at least in my mind. The last two entries have made me think about a couple of different things.
The first that I came across was this one. It talks about how everyone wants to be in the big markets. Is this not true in our work in the Church? Everyone wants to have a large church. Now don't misunderstand, I know that God wants us to grow. And I by no means believe that God wants us to remain small. But, if you have a smaller church, it is insane to try and keep up with the mega churches. Our jobs are to work where we are at. A smaller church has many things to offer that I see no way a mega church can. One instance that I can think of is that in a smaller church if you miss a service, you are missed. In a church of thousands, how can one be missed? Now maybe there is something I am missing, but I just don't see how it can be done. I am not being critical of mega churches, just saying that smaller churches offer an intimacy that cannot really be duplicated in a mega setting. We must work where God puts us.
In one way, I don't see The Church of God ever getting to the point where this would be a problem. Our practice usually, is that whenever we get a large church, some people from that church start a new church in another location, thus making the previous congregation a little smaller, until it grows a little more. This creates many smaller centers of outreach in the middle of number of communities, instead of one large center in the middle of one community.
Another post that Seth had most recently, here, talks about companies hiding things that they feel consumers would not want to know. Do we ever do this in the Church? Do we ever gloss over things that we think would make people turn away? In his post, he goes on to say that people will eventually find out the secrets anyway. We know that this is completely true. This is biblical. So why waste time and energy hiding anything. It is useless, and if you are like me, you don't have time to waster. On top of that it would be hypocritical and dishonest. That is certainly not the first impression that we want to give people is it? Let us just focus on helping people and telling them about Christ. Let us just give them the truth.
Hopefully, I have made somewhat clear the track that these posts have made my mind follow. I have neither the time nor the space to explain in full, but hopefully this will spark something in your mind and heart as well.

God bless

1 comment:

Momma Tammi said...

Really good thoughts. Thanks for sharing.