Tell Me If You've Heard This One Before...

…Some dear friends of yours are part of a tight knit bible study group in their church, one that has met regularly for years. It's small, just a handful of families, and they've been through everything together: weddings, baby showers, funerals, divorces…everything. And not only do they share years and years of history, they've also been truly vulnerable with one another, telling each other things about themselves and about their stories that few others know.  

It's a group I'm sure many of us would like to have, no?  

But something strange happens. Over time, one of the couples begins to have some second thoughts about the church. It's not that they don’t love the group. On the contrary, the group has probably kept them at the church longer than they otherwise would have stayed. Initially the group is supportive of the couple, and for the first few weeks and months of this the group is there for them, just as always. But then, whether it's the week they finally decide to leave, or whether it's a few months down the line, something happens. The group bond weakens. Maybe it's something black and white, something drastic: the leader tells them that the group is really only for members of the church, and that they’re no longer welcome. Or maybe it's more organic: the group doesn't outright kick them out, but over the next few weeks and months the couple finds themselves left off of invite lists and missing out on the dinners and get-togethers that had been such an important part of their lives.

Whatever the scenario, one thing is true: those deep bonds weren't as deep as your friend thought they were.

As someone with a long history with the church, both as a member and as a pastor, I've treasured the relationships that the church can facilitate. Few other places in our society, it seems, can encourage as effectively as the church the type of deep, vulnerable, and supportive relationships that I've seen grow time and time again in a Christian community. In many ways, the church seems to have the best shot at cultivating the type of village community that many of us seem to hunger for. And yet, even as I've seen that to be true, I've also seen that time and time again, just as often as the church encourages these type of beautiful relationships, it just as often causes them to crumble. Whether it's something like the situation I just described, or whether it's something else, there's something about the way the modern church is structured that sabotages relationships.

This is a terrible, terrible problem.

Unfortunately, as terrible as this problem is, those who try to fix it don't recognize that it's a symptom of the structure of the church itself. As a church leader I've fallen into this line of thinking many times myself. We try to fix our small groups, we try to create community through various events and programming tweaks. We search for new online tools that might facilitate a deeper bond between people.

I'm beginning to think these efforts are doomed from the start. Now don't get me wrong, I think a lot of good can come out of the effort to build community. After all, God doesn't require our perfect plans or blueprints to do amazing things. God's going to do amazing, incredible things no matter what. So I'm not trying to be fatalistic here.

But if the problem is in the very structure of church, we're not going to fix our issues with relationships by adding new things or fixing old programs built on that structure. If the problem is the structure, then we're going to have to look at tearing everything down and starting over.

Drastic? Perhaps. But what do we have to lose? After all, it's not like Jesus said as he ascended to heaven: "Go and make disciples of all nations by making the church look exactly like it will two thousand years from now". There's nothing about the structure of our churches as they stand today that can't be reimagined. By-laws, VBS, buildings, budgets, fog machines, satellite campuses, zoom bible studies, steering committees…tell me if I'm wrong, but can't the church be the church without any of these things? If there's something about how things are currently structured that is poisoning the relationships inside the church, why not tear it all down and see what we can come up with?

I guess it boils down to this: what's more important to us? Is it figuring out what's poisoning our relationships? Or is it preserving what we have? I don't mean to make a straw man argument here. The church in its current form has and is doing some amazing things. But does that mean we have to keep building off of what we have? Or are we willing to tear it all down to see if maybe, just maybe, we've been building off of the wrong blueprint, or at least an obsolete one?