What If We Got It All Wrong?

What if what God wanted of us was not to see how many Christians we could gather under one roof, but how many small high commitment gatherings we could link together in a network of believers?

Humor me a moment . . .

If you are like me, every time you read what the scriptures have to say about church you are applying it to what you already know a church is to be. But what if you had no idea what a church was? What if you had never even seen one . . . and all you had was . . . a Bible. Would you come up with anything like what we have now? We don’t hesitate to assume there was a great deal wrong with indulgences or congregations standing through a long sermon in one of the great cathedrals in Medieval times. Or, how about the Puritan churches who expected you to attend not just one three-hour service on a Sunday, but two, and then a midweek lecture to get you through the week. There is surprisingly little continuity between what we now have and the variety of church forms existing throughout history.

But we’ve finally figured it out, right? I wonder.

When you think about it, the formative structure for the early church was the small group. The church met in homes. Yes, there were large gatherings, but the most common dynamic seemed to be small cells. What is the typical American image for the word "church"? Even as a pastor who knows better, to this day when I hear the word "church," my first mental image is of a building, then of a large congregation as reason takes over.

What do you think the disciples pictured when Jesus gave the Great Commission? Not steeples and pews. Or row after row of congregants dressed in their Sunday best. Perhaps they may have thought about synagogues, but at those they would soon be persona non grata (or however you say that in Aramaic). If there was one image that dominated the apostles’ thinking, it had to be the one Jesus modeled for them - the small group. Those twelve men Jesus dragged around the countryside as they laughed, and fought, and learned, and lived. That is how they had been shaped and fashioned for this moment. How else would they go out and make disciples?

So what are you saying, David?
We should turn our whole idea
of church upside down?
Sell the building
and disperse everyone
to small in-home gatherings?

No. I am a pastor after all. I love what happens in the congregational gathering. I love to preach. I love to sing praise and worship together with Christians of like mind. I’m not certain such a change in form would work in our society. But as a pastor, who cares for His flock, I can’t help but feel we have far too much emphasis on the large group meeting for anyone's good. If high commitment small groups were central to the disciples’ strategy, then can it be healthy that for most of us in American culture, small groups are just one of the many options that revolve around the core of worship services central to our idea of "church."

Someone asked me once, because of their very tight schedule, what should be their top priority? The growth group meeting I had recruited them to join, their Sunday school class, or Sunday worship. Now, frankly, I think most people can and need to make time for all of those. But as much as it pained me to say it . . . I knew that the most important priority for growth for that person would not be my carefully crafted sermon and the worship service, and it would not be the dynamic adult Bible fellowship he attended. If he threw himself into that growth group, he was going to grow so fast that eventually you wouldn’t be able to keep him from attending the other two options. Yet, I was at odds with myself even as I heard the words stumble out of my mouth. Deep down, for a pastor, it feels like a travesty if anyone misses Sunday morning worship!

I really think
a high commitment growth group
should be right at the top
of any church values list.

We need to make it clear that we want everyone to grow and become all they were meant to be in Christ. And that the committed, intentional disciplemaking small group is the best way for that to happen. Now frankly there are many small groups that are not well planned or well led and this level of growth does not happen.  (Since we spend a lot of time in T-Net on creating effective small groups I won't go in to that here).

Why is the small group so central to discipleship? I think the first clue is in how scripture describes the Body of Christ. We are family. God is our father, we are sisters and brothers. The Apostle Paul uses the same terms of endearment a father uses for his children when he writes the churches he has planted. The small group becomes a family to find the support and healing we all need in a chaotic fallen world.

It is there where we find healing
for the wounds each of us suffers
 often from those who love us most,
our family of origin.
The small group, then,
becomes our family of destiny.

John Eldredge in Wild at Heart writes passionately about the wounds men carry. Each of us is wounded in our families he says. Women are wounded, too, but often deal with it better. Men ignore the wound, let it fester and drain us of all vitality, while we deny there ever was any wound at all. A woman is more likely to say at any time, I hurt, please help. (Of course, she learns to say this to another woman because chances are a man won’t have the slightest understanding of what she is talking about). But in a small group, even a man can begin to learn to face the source of his fears - the wounds never before spoken of.

The small group can become a place where enough people can grow in trust and love to the point where someone might even touch a man’s wound . . . and when he cries out in pain, he just might realize there is a reason for that pain and there is also healing grace Christ wants to bring us. That’s family kind of stuff. That only happens when people commit to be brothers and sisters - the family of God. That doesn’t happen when rows of people gather on Sunday morning for worship. It doesn’t happen even in the best of Sunday school classes because there are too many wounds to care for there. We’d have to all take a number and the Sunday school class would go way overtime and we’d all miss church . . . I mean worship. (You knew what I meant, didn’t you? But is that good?)

In fact, what I am about to say is almost heresy for a pastor. But when I read how scripture describes what the church is to be, I realize the essential unit for most of those things to happen is a small group. But that isn’t the way we think . . . is it?

Even though
people don’t get to know each other
in a worship service,
can’t discover each other’s gifts
in a worship service,
have little opportunity to exercise those gifts
in a worship service,
cannot encourage and admonish each other
in a worship service,
for some reason we still see it
as the core of the church
and hope the rest of this somehow happens
on the way in and out
of the narthex.

It’s interesting how churches flourished in China as they were forced to be no larger than a family gathering so as not to stand out and attract suspicion. I wonder how much of that had to do with the fact that they could be truly a family gathering in that setting to support each other against overwhelming obstacles.

All pastors know how easily people hide in the large meeting. Yes, they leave with great instruction and the sense that they have participated in fellowship with people, but they may have hardly spoken to anyone outside of their family. I sometimes wonder about the effectiveness of asking people in their pews to stand and shake hands with those around them. Yet, I once had a woman thank me for instituting that. She said it was the first time after attending there for years that anyone had shaken her hand. I almost cried.

So what is "church?" We come and go under the cloak of semi-anonymity. No one gets to know us too well. They don’t know if we struggle in our marriage, if we give little thought to Christ through the week, if we hardly peek into our Bibles. But we show up, sing out, look good, get some meat to chew on, and leave satisfied that we have done our bit for God. Soon we are a familiar enough face to be recruited as a children's teacher, then serve on the finance committee, and eventually the board. All of this can happen without our really being known by anyone.  Can you see Jesus giving the Great Commission to a group he knew no better than that?

Is that what "church" was intended to be? We know it isn’t. And the only form that can change that is a committed discipleship small group. Our goal must be that when people hear the word "church" they have a mental image of gatherings of people throughout the town all in circles, Bibles open, grappling with life. We need to take the nursery rhyme:

"Here’s the church
here’s the steeple
open the doors
see all the people."

And reverse the hand motions and say:

Here’s the church,
it’s a small group of people
tied to other small groups
who gather (sometimes) under a steeple."

Okay, the rhyme might not catch on. But small groups somehow need to catch on in our churches. They cannot languish in third place priority or the church will never be, in this age, what Jesus intended it to be.

One last thought. As a pastor I often tried to imagine Jesus filling my role. I confess that is not easy. I can’t see Him as anything other than a guest speaker because contemporary people wouldn't tolerate His style of leaving listeners with open-ended controversial questions. I have real difficulties imagining Him working under a church board or sitting through bureaucratic committee meetings. My list goes on and on . . .

The one thing I have absolutely no problem imagining is Jesus leading a small group. That comes through crystal clear. In fact, I have to wonder if Jesus, the pastor, wouldn’t turn our churches upside down (like He did the temple) and reorganize so that a whole lot more church energy went into discipleship groups and a lot less into some of our more cherished creations . . . things He, Himself, never seemed to get around to modeling for His disciples in those 3 years of ministry.