Ok we’ve all dealt with this at one time or another.
You get to church, most likely sit in your regular seat, drink your regular coffee and pray to God that no one bothers you while you wait for church to start.
What a good attitude we have, (talking to myself here too), it’s no wonder we have a bunch of consumer-ish church goers that cannot see beyond last week’s power point snafu.
What can we do to change this default living in the church today? Absolutely nothing. That’s right, nothing at all. I say this because I find that consistent pessimism leads to effective optimism. You can’t do anything about it if you yourselves (church leaders/worship leaders) don’t change how you go about doing “it”.
You may wish it was different, often pray to god <-notice small "g"-> but it still isn’t doing anything. Is God not showing up? Does he not care about your services and the abundance of ushers you have. Or maybe He is displeased with the layout of your bulletin, or that fact that no matter how hard someone tries to push papyrus on the church goers, they still don’t feel that the church is being authentic.
It would be amase-zazing if churches would look beyond the boarders of right and wrong ways to do church, and stretch out in to the unknown-ness and outright un-tameness of God. To actually subvert the “usual/that’s how we’ve always done it” mentality and strike gold as a unfiltered expression of faith.
Couple things to think about as you squeeze your stress ball:
- 1. Unify: The stage was invented to keep people away from the speaker or entertainer. Lose it, if only in your mind. Become one with the people you are talking/singing/praying with. *Nut Shell: show them that you, as a church body, are gonna get into the chunky grandma gravy that can be “your” souls, because that is where healing happens.
- 2. De-Stagnatify: Singing songs only gets you so far. Kind of like turning on your car, pressing the gas but not avoiding a potential killing apparatus’s, (namely stagnation). Try and make sure that the pulse of where the church wants to get to is the pulse you are leading with.
- 3. De-Crappify: Sermons with points are just that, often boring drawn out word slobber that lulls people to day dream more than action. Lose them.
- 4. Conjugate your Virbs: Love Wins to put it bluntly. After everything you said or do, if I find you at Chipolte, Applebees, Chick-fil-A, In-IN-Out (you go there because it is a christian company). In the course of this you are being rude, loud, obnoxious, trying to convert your waiter or waitress by drinking as much soda as you can to take advantage of the free refills while you try and skip out on a tip. We as a church are about as flimsy as a reed blown in the wind when it comes to actually loving people without an agenda. Oh God will have His way, with or without you but you know it would be a lot more satisfying to actually put into movement what he started on the mount.
- 5. Un-Fluffify: Start talking about things that really matter. If you have a spiritually immature church, is that their fault or yours? You will only help your church and yourself by going deep and wide. Stop being a pyramid scheme, ask questions. You don’t have to know everything. If you don’t ask deep involving questions you show your church that it is ok to act like that too, which only breads contempt from the mature Christian’s and laziness from the immature ones.
As you can tell I broke my own rule by giving you 5 points. That Just Happened!
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