The Impotent Church

There is no shortage of books about the church. A quick search through Amazon yields more than enough reading material to carry you along for quite awhile: The Purpose-Driven Church, Simple Church, Organic Church, Liquid Church, The Electric Church, The Deliberate Church, and on and on and on.

After spending six months in a new place, and still not being much closer to finding a church to plant ourselves in, I’ve gathered that maybe there is room on the market for one more book: The Impotent Church

According to Dictionary.com:
im•po•tent [im-puh-tuhnt]
1. not potent; lacking power or ability.
2. utterly unable (to do something).
3. without force or effectiveness.

I believe we are finding ourselves in a place where more and more the Church is lacking potency and effectiveness. That’s a problem when the one thing Jesus left us with was to reproduce (Matthew 28:19).

While I certainly don’t have all the answers, there are some reasons I think we find ourselves in this place…

1. We focus our attention on things that are largely unimportant in Kingdom-perspective

How else can we reconcile that most of the church’s voice is simply rhetoric about issues that the Bible is either silent or barely vocal about, while we fail to hear most of the church speak about those things that weigh heavily throughout Scripture. (Read the end of Matthew 25 and wrestle with the spiritual implications for the church).

2. We spend time ‘building our box’ and systematically kicking people out - instead of breaking down barriers and inviting people in.

We treat the Church and God’s Kingdom like it was a country club or home owners society - with rules and regulations whose intent is to exclude and restrict. Jesus described the Kingdom as a party where the outcast and ‘unmentionables’ were not only welcomed but sought out (Luke 14:15-24)

3. We overburden the lives of God’s people with twaddle (trivial)

We overload people’s lives with never-ending programs and ‘ministries’ (which often times do little actual ministering). These can easily be unimportant tasks that steal our time and sap our energy - leaving us largely unable (or perhaps unavailable) to live the life of impact that God has created the Church for. We need a priority-shift and need to move away from the religious in favor of the relational (Luke 11:46).

I say ‘we’ because I’m part of the problem - I’m part of the Church. I don’t speak out of anger as much as out of frustration. I love the Church and I have a vision for what the Church can be that I’m not willing to let go of yet.

Am I off-base or are we simply not giving attention to the insufficiencies in the Church that we are a part of?

Posted 08.01.2008

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