We need a new way to think about church

What should a church service actually be? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with over the past few years.

I am in the privileged position to be leading a church that is willing, and in fact want to, change. The challenge that sits in front of me every week is what kind of church we want to be.

I know that when most people think or talk about “church” what they mean is a weekly gathering where there is some singing, some talking and maybe a bit of praying and reading.

Up front, I know we must rediscover that what happens on Sunday (or whenever your service happens to be) is not the church. The church is the people, and what we call a church “service” is meant to serve the church, not be the church.

That said though, there does seem to be a biblical imperative not to give up meeting together (Heb 10:25), so what should that meeting look like?

What kind of church service would you create if you could lead a group of 120 or so people once a week?

Our current experience of a church service has been shaped by many factors,  most of which were more about the culture in which the church found itself when they were instituted, rather than anything the bible instructs us to do. I also see that, almost without fail, what might have been a radical response to finding an appropriate way to worship in one moment of history, becomes a tradition we find hard to let go of in another.

For instance, Charles Wesley wrote over 6000 hymns many of which are still sung in churches today, and one continues to be one of the most popular Christmas carols in the world (Hark the Herald Angels Sing).

In Wesley’s day, most church music was written for choirs and accomplished musicians (Handel’s Messiah was written when Charles Wesley was 35) and most people who were coming to faith because of the ministry of his brother John Wesley were poor and uneducated.

Charles Wesley wrote hymns that could be remembered and sung by ordinary people. He also wrote hymns to educate people about theology. Wesley’s hymns were a radical response to the needs of the people of his day.

I remember going to churches that sang Wesley’s hymns while I was growing up and feeling like they used words and tunes that seemed out of touch.  They were. They are 300 years old and aimed at illiterate English labourers.

I am not advocating that we get rid of Wesley’s hymns, but I am suggesting that we need to understand the context and the audience in which they were created and then need to also be wrestling with the questions of our moment in the same way Charles and John Wesley did in theirs.

Which brings me to a realisation I have had. I think my generation and the one before it (the Boomers and Gen X) might have become a blockage when we think about the nature and shape of church services that are appropriate for our moment.

We get cable television free with our internet service at home and as part of the package, I get both the Hillsong Channel and the Australian Christian Channel.  I find both channels to be a fascinating sociological study of the state of the global church. Both predominantly feature telecasts of church services, and what has struck me is just how similar they all are, and how that level of sameness has become the norm across the world.

Most contemporary churches have adopted the model of church that Bill Hybels pioneered, (using understandings first articulated by Donald McGavran),  along with people like John Wimber and others through the 70’s and 80’s. Basically, it is “church as a soft-rock concert,” with a full rock band, multicoloured lights in a darkened room, big video screen and the occasional smoke machine.

After the concert is finished the speaker comes on, and according to church growth data, the church rises or falls on his capacity to communicate. I say “his”, because there simply aren’t many examples of women in this role, and none regularly on either the Christian Channel or Hillsong Channel.

The speaker is usually called the “senior pastor” which is actually a misnomer because their primary function doesn’t seem to so much be one-on-one pastoral work but this 30–45 minute inspirational speaking slot in each service.

The reason I am saying Gen-X and the Boomers might be getting in the road of the next chapter of the development of the church is that my generation loves rock concerts. We love rock stars and we love a good guitar riff. ‘Church as rock concert’ and ‘pastors as rock stars’ works for us.

I am increasingly convinced though that this model doesn’t work for the next few generations, and if we are honest while it is something we enjoy, it is not a way of doing church that changes us or challenges us in any significant way.

Firstly I need to point out something to younger readers. When my generation was growing up we all listened to the same music. I am not overstating that. It is true.

In fact, there was a weekly radio program called the “Top 40” which told us all which were the songs we should listen to. Many of us would sit beside our cassette radios and record those songs from the radio that we could then listen to on our walkmans. We also listened to albums. Albums were things that artists put out on vinyl records and cassettes that had ten or twelve songs on them, and we would listen to those same ten or twelve songs over and over again.

My very first album on cassette was Voulez Vous by ABBA which my grandfather gave me. My first album on vinyl was “Red Sails in the Sunset” by Midnight Oil which I got for my birthday, and the first album I bought for myself was “Business as Usual” by Men at Work. Back then we would pay the equivalent of about $50 in today’s money for a single album.

Every generation had a ‘sound’ that freaked out their parents and gave them a voice. My generation turned to heavy metal, the generation before me had punk and the generation before them (around the time Bill Hybels was growing up and planting his church) had rock and roll. The generation after me had gangster rap. There were also always Christian versions of the different genres (although they usually lagged about 5–10 years behind the curve).

The reason I say all of this, is that for my kids this experience of music is as foreign as my experience was with Charles Wesley’s hymns.

When Bill Hybels launched “church as soft-rock concert,” it was breaking new ground. It was bringing the sound of the ordinary person into church, just like Wesley was. It was all so very controversial. The symbols of the revolution were organs and drum kits. The churches that were cool had drums and the churches that were out of touch had organs.

Hundreds of hours were spent arguing over what kind of music should be allowed in churches. As I write this it sounds ridiculous, however we all know it is true.

I have a sense that now, though, Church as Soft-Rock has  effectively become the organ and our generation have become the ones holding onto an outdated approach.

The problem is that soft-rock is not the sound of the ordinary person any more.

What is particularly challenging about Generations Y and Z is that they don’t really have a “sound” that we can use to shape a church. My kids playlists include the Beatles, NF, Guns and Roses, Les Miserables, U2, Eminem, Toto, Hamilton, Boomtown Rats, Bieber and Bublé. They carry around 30 million songs in their pockets!

At the very time when the world is moving away from the Top 40, the internet and Christian Copyright Licensing seems to have had almost the opposite effect on Christian contemporary music.

Steve Grace lamented to a friend of mine at one point that the only way to survive as a Christian artist these days is to write a song on the CCLI Top 40. There does not seem to be the same demand for Christian artists in the different genres of music anymore. The few that do ok are ones like Switchfoot or NF who bridge the gap and win secular acclaim.

I say all this to point out that a church that is really reflecting the ‘sound’ of this generation will not be playing songs from a Top 40 which are all based on a similar sound, but instead will be featuring a broad variety of musical styles and possibly also playing music from a wide variety of eras.

The music though is not the biggest challenge that the “Church as Rock concert approach” has. This model is about being a spectator, and being a spectator at a great event can give you a range of pleasant feelings and also some new thoughts, but it probably won’t affect your character.

Before Bill Hybels became the latest leader to fall in the #MeToo era he admitted that the model of the church he had pioneered was “not doing as well as we thought when it came to spiritual growth.”

Ephesians 4:11-16 indicates that the outcome of the church working well is that people are becoming mature, which Paul seems to indicate is measured by being less reactive to external circumstances. If being mature and not reacting to life truly was the key performance indicator that the Apostle Paul intended to give the church, (and I think it was) then I think we can all agree that whatever models of church we are currently employing need some work

Bill Hybel’s more recent history points to the other huge weakness in our current model of church. Whenever we turn anyone into a rock star we are asking for trouble. The idea that a single person should be the centre-pole for a big group of people is simply unbiblical and a recipe for problems, as we keep seeing over and over again.

So… All of this leaves me with a question. What kind of church service should we aim for? What will work with this culture and what will most effectively connect with a generation who are growing up in a world that is as far from the one I grew up in as the one that Wesley was living in was from mine?

My goal in writing all of this is just to raise these questions both for myself and for anyone else who is up for a genuine dialogue about the shape of the church into the future. I will be raising these kinds of questions with our church family over the months ahead and prayerfully seeking what it all means for where God is calling us to go.

I have been encouraged and challenged by Hebrews 10:22-24 in this wrestle:

Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

What I have taken from this passage is three things:

• A reminder that church is never the main game, Jesus is. Ultimately church is only helpful if it helps me draw near to God.
• Church needs to be about being spurred and encouraged on by one-another which means that meeting together has to be a priority, and somehow in that meeting, we need to foster an honest and authentic community.
• The measure of the church’s effectiveness is seen in the “love and good deeds” of its people. Our behaviour Monday-Saturday should be noticeably different to the rest of the world because we love God and are shaped by our involvement in the church.

If these three things are true and reasonable outcomes to be reaching for on a Sunday morning, my sense is that most people would agree that our current models just don’t do what they need to do.

Not only are our Churches playing a very limited range of music that probably doesn’t appeal to this moment, but we have a way to go before anyone would call us honest and authentic communities and we are producing the kind of maturity and behavioural change that the writer of Hebrews seems to be reaching for.

In saying all this I am not wanting to attack the past, it was right for its moment, but this time demands something new just as it did for the Wesleys and Hybels.

I am hoping that as we engage with these kinds of questions at Citywide over the months to come we might find our way to a shape and form that would more effectively prepare us to be the church of Jesus Christ in the places where we live, learn work and play.