What if???
o The next time the offering plate went by at church, you DIDN’T “sow a seed” but instead helped your neighbor pay their rent that you know is late but your pastor is ignorant of and wouldn’t be allowed by charity discrimination laws to help out anyway.
o The next time the church asks for faithful volunteers to man the coffee bar, instead offer to take out a widow once a week for a grocery/errand run and treat her out to a coffee.
o The next time you feel guilty for having to serve at church yet again because you’re the only one willing to volunteer with your specialized skill set, instead choose to invest that time into mentoring a person or two or three and watch them bloom into their potential.
o The next time the Children’s church put out the plea for more nursery workers instead offer the single mother across the hall free babysitting and be a foster Grandma & Grandpa to make her children feel wanted and cherished.
o The next time a prayer email that is really a gossip line in disguise goes out, instead be willing to go sit at the hospital bed of your brother-in-Christ’s child so they can quickly go home and grab a shower and hug their other children.
o When did we stop being the Church that operated within the context of unconditional loving relationships without performance and acceptance strings attached and start serving a church system that reduces or eliminates the personal responsibility God commands us to have for our fellow brethren and the stranger in our midst? When did we stop being fruitful and multiplying our resources of love, time, finances, emotional support, mentorship, God-given talents and spiritual giftings, etc. in order to try to make a Sunday morning service successful within its 1.5 hr timeslot?
o What if all the church buildings in a city shut down for 1 year? What would happen? Would all the 200 people that used to show up on a Sunday service still faithfully give their 10% and more without the incentive of a charitable tax receipt? Would they still gather together hither and yon to spontaneously worship, chew on the Word of God, and share testimonies? Would the community outside the church’s 4 walls even know the churches were shut down? Would their impact on their community go up or down now that they have all that extra volunteer time each week to sow into their community and make a difference? Would they discover that the church building was truly an asset or actually a deceptive crutch? Would the community be able to identify those 200 church members by their Christ-like actions and words?
o What if a church INTENTIONALLY shut its doors for a 12 month period and instead transitioned to an online hub lead by the 5-fold ministry, encouraging people to gather together in people’s homes/parks/restaurants/etc and go BE the Church, taking responsibility for fostering relationships with other disciples of Jesus Christ within their neighborhood, identifying needs and meeting them person to person, while utilizing the hub system to address the needs that were larger than an individual’s or home group’s abilities to meet, maximizing the power of networking across the home groups to fit the resources to the need, and having the 5-fold ministers do the home group hopping to equip the saints on targeted learning goals and reproductive training techniques (training the trainer to train the 3rd and subsequent generations of trainers) instead of demanding everyone come to them for mass-teaching. After 12 months, would that church have dwindled from the 200 initial membership or exploded in growth and impact? How would each of those members compare their growth over the 12 months without having the external accountability of a pastor to prepare a sermon to feed them weekly? Would all 200 members still consider themselves members or would the turnover make the Leviathan Twister look minor in comparison? I suppose it would depend on how spiritually healthy the church body truly was to begin with regardless what the denominational report of how much giving, Sunday service attendance, and other socially engineered markers of growth deemed to be healthy.
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