New Wineskins
Recently Perry Noble (pastor of an exploding church in South Carolina) wrote a semi-controversial blog (in the way that only Perry Noble can). He wrote ten convictions he had about the church. His entire list can be viewed here. Let me comment on five of his more incendiary convictions:
2 – If churches do not learn how to reach people on their mobile devices, we will soon not reach them at all. At first this seems outlandish, but there is truth here. For churches to be successful they’ve had to go where the people were. In the 70s and 80s the (white) church had to move out of downtown out into the suburbs. In the 90s and 2000s they shifted from traditional worship to contemporary worship. Perry is asserting that people are shifting again, this time to mobile devices. How will the church reach them there?
3 – It’s not a lack of prayer that is holding most churches back; it’s a lack of preparation. We need to prepare for messy people to actually show up and not ask them to leave because they do not have the appearance of perfection. I so agree with this. Prayer is vitally important, but I’ve seen ‘prayer for revival’ as a crutch for a lack of preparation. Too often our hearts prayer is that God would send well put together, homogenous disciples to our church. Instead what we usually get is messed up, broken, recovering sinners in need of grace. We can pray for the already discipled, but if we don’t prepare for the messes, we’ll never see our church truly make an impact for the Kingdom.
5 – Seminary will become less and less relevant because most Christian educational institutions are focused on how to reach people in the 1970s. Ouch. I spent years pursuing two seminary degrees. In the beginning I did it because I thought that was the best way to be successful in the church world. I finished my doctorate simply because I was too far along in the process to stop. Seminary has value, but I’ve learned much more outside of seminary and the seminary mindset than I have inside. The seminary as it’s always been is in danger of becoming less and less relevant if it fails to adapt (not compromise, adapt) to a rapidly changing ministry environment.
8 – The world would change in an unbelievable way if the church would attack the issue of obesity as relentlessly as it attacks the issue of homosexuality! (It would also be way more relevant to the church!) The brother is preaching here, and he paints a strikingly poignant note. Homosexuality has been the whipping post for evangelical Christianity for the past few decades. Conveniently enough, it’s something that’s mostly outside the walls of the church. Perry makes a great point that if we attack sin inside the church as ruthlessly as we attack sin outside the church, our world would change dramatically. Completely agree here.
9 – Community is more important than reading the Bible. (The early church didn’t have the Bible for the first 300 years of Christianity…but they did have one another.) This seems like sacrilege, but I get and understand his point. Too many churches have created a culture that exalts Bible knowledge and accumulating Bible information higher than anything else. But if you look at the early church, before they had the Bible they had community. True community (which is not code for traditional Sunday School) is desperately needed in churches today. That’s why Mt Vernon’s driving vision is creating contagious communities of hope.
As for his #10, I won’t even touch that, although I wholeheartedly agree with him.
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