10 Toxic Traditions That Are Killing the Church

6). Preaching merely to teach the Bible. Yep, let’s go there too. Preach the Bible, preach the Bible, preach the Bible. That’s all well and good. The Bible should be central in our preaching, and I hold to as conservative a stance on biblical inerrancy as the next evangelical, but the Bible is the means, not the end. If you preach only to teach the Bible, you’re selling your congregation short. How many times did Jesus sit his disciples down and walk verse-by-verse through the book of Deuteronomy? His goal was to introduce people to his Heavenly Father. That’s the end: God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. The Bible is great, but it is not a part of the Trinity. The Bible is the word of God, but the Bible did not die on the cross for our sins nor rise from the dead three days later. The goal of preaching is to introduce people to Jesus through the Bible, not just teach the Bible. The Bible is the means, but not the end.

7). Making belief in all the Bible a pre-requisite for salvation. This one is related to the previous point. I’ve written about this before that we can elevate the Bible to a place where it was never meant to be. Churches today are beginning to talk about the Bible as if belief in all the Bible is a pre-requisite for salvation. The Bible doesn’t save us. Jesus saves us. The Bible points us to Jesus, but the Bible is not Jesus. Another slice of this point is that too many churches preach the Bible assuming that everyone knows the stories. All this does is reinforce to visitors and guests that they don’t belong.

8). Viewing missions as a location and not a lifestyle. I love missions. I was a missionary for two-years. I’ve done missions about every bad way you can do it. I did tourist missions, where I went to an exotic place, took some pictures with some malnourished kids to feel better about myself, and then came back home loaded down with souvenirs. That’s not missions. But here’s the specific tradition about missions that we’ve turned into a toxic tradition: we’ve turned missions into a location, not a lifestyle. We feel like we’ve got to go 1000 miles and spend $1000 to go do missions. How is it that we’ll train for months, give up our vacation and spend our hard-earned money to go tell strangers we’ve never met about Jesus, and yet we won’t go across the street to help our neighbor? We’ll go to Africa but we won’t go to the inner city? Come on now. Missions is not a location. It’s a lifestyle. If we started doing missions right where we lived, if we began to see our schools, our workplaces, our ball fields as a mission field, people would be getting saved left and right. Missions is not a location, it’s a lifestyle.

9). Reducing the transcendence of Christianity down to a reliable voting bloc for one political party. I’ve wrote on this one before as well. Why is it that to be a good Christian you have to belong to a certain political party? I’m not trying to argue the merits of the Republicans vs the Democrats, I’m just asking why has American Christianity, which is supposed to transcend politics, been reduced to a reliable voting bloc for one political party? Whenever I ask this I’ll always get someone to come back at me, “What are you saying? How can anyone support this party and what they stand for?” That’s not the conversation I’m trying to have. What I’m trying to ask is why do you have to be a Republican to be a good Christian today? Whether or not the Republican party lines up more with evangelical Christianity is besides the point. What we’ve done is immediately alienate the half of America that doesn’t identify as a Republican. If we identify ourselves so closely with one party that people assume you have to be a Republican to be a Christian, we’ve just lost influence with 150 million Americans.

10). Choosing to reject culture rather than redeem it. Some churches treat anything outside of its four walls as so toxic that it could never be brought into the holy sanctuary. So if one church decides to play a secular song or leverage a popular movie or television show as a bridge to the gospel, it will always take friendly fire from behind because they ‘caved’ to culture. If we continually reject culture rather than try and redeem it, we’ll find ourselves having no bridges left to try and reach a community. Not all culture is bad. Not all culture is evil. When done the right way, leveraging and redeeming contemporary culture is a powerful way to reach a community. You can’t love someone and judge them at the same time. Churches have to choose whether to reject or redeem the culture around them.