on discipleship and church (s)hopping (or recovering the priesthood of the believer)
Yesterday Jen and I were trying to brainstorm and re-think the way we approach ministry a bit. It's tempting to fall into patterns of competition--the idea of finding a church "brand" and using that brand to attract the kinds of folks we want to minister/serve with. There are a hundred things wrong with that approach, but there is the cold, hard reality that the most basic level of marketing is, in fact, necessary,
I received yet another e-mail today to remind me of the "one-day early-bird sale" for a conference featuring two of the countries more prominent pastors/leadership gurus. For teh bargain price of $95 I could be privy to the keys to the mega-community church kingdom. My cynicism is showing here a bit, but I have to be honest and say my offering of a "family church where everybody knows your name" is as crafted and technically indebted to "Cheers" as the gurus are to John Maxwell.
What I hadn't thought about until today is the implications of this on genuine discipleship. I decided to dust off some Bonhoeffer for the teenage crowd tonight and wound up with a somewhat similar presentation to what I posted last week. It's again, incomplete and precise, overly generalizing and overly nit-picky, but I thought it was worth throwing out there for thought, comment, or at least stirring the pot a bit.
The only other foreword is Jen's from our drive-time conversation last night
"We're raising a generation of church consumers, not disciples of Jesus."
