Culture of Church and the Death of Church

Myiesha Cherry's "10 Thoughts on Tyler Perry and Bishop Jakes, Evangelicals, Money." discusses sensational response to the $1 million donation Tyler Perry publicly made to TD Jakes's ministry, his praying in the Spirit, and praying over TD Jakes who becomes slain in the Spirit.  This whole milieu is easily misunderstood and subsequently judged by people like me who are only tangentially familiar with the charismatic, evangelical and black church traditions represented here.   Consequently, I could only listen in on Dr. Cherry's thoughts as one eavesdropping on a conversation.  But her final comment caught my attention. She wrote:

I predict the "culture of church" will be the death of the church. Until the church gets more focused on the teachings of Jesus and less focused on a manipulative concept of success, emotionalism, and dogmatism; it will always look like foolishness to outsiders and feel "only" like church to insiders.

This is a sentiment I've heard repeatedly over the past few weeks.  It was expressed by the presenters at this year's Adult Faith Focus--three of whom were millenials.  It was the sentiment expressed in recent CNN Belief Blog post recent by Rachael Held Evens.  It was the summation of the Reveal at Willow Creek Church which brought to light years of research the church had done on its approach to church.  And, in truth, its the sentiment that gets expressed in nearly every generation of Christianity.

I do not disagree with the sentiment.  As followers of Jesus Christ, we should be more concerned to be faithful to Jesus's teachings.  What has been missing in all the varied calls to eschew gimmicks and pursue more faithful and authentic forms of ministry is evidence that such an approach actually works at attracting anyone.

Two things happen when a church is labeled "unfaithful" because its approaches to ministry are accused of betraying Jesus's core convictions.  First, people line up examples of churches that are more faithful and claim that a church can actually be . . .  thoughtful . . . . liturgical . . . progressive . .  whatever and still grow or be successful.  Second, people defend the practices in the attractional churches arguing that they have reached more people for Jesus than the others.  They are doing a better job of doing the very last thing Jesus said we were to do--go into the world and reach people with the gospel. Their growth is evidence that they are indeed being faithful. 

What few people are willing to say is that Jesus may not actually be all that concerned with the survival at least of the institutional forms of the congregations formed in his name.  Jesus said that those who make their own survival their overriding concern will not survive (Matthew 16:24-28, Mark 8:34-9:1, Luke 9:23-27).