peterskim

In recent years, I’ve tried to make this my guiding philosophy on how I live out my faith, especially with regards to my involvement in church:

“What happens within the context of the local church does not matter. What matters is how Christians impact the world outside the boundaries and walls of the church.”

This is important for me because in the past, I’ve attended a number of churches that have equated serving the church with serving God. Basically, if you played on the Sunday music team, helped set up for Sunday service, cooked food for the after-service meal, you were serving God. I don’t want to say that those acts of service are not “for God” but I think there is a higher calling to serve God that can become lost within the busyness of just keeping the local church functioning on a week to week basis.

So what is this higher calling of service? I believe Christianity will flourish only when God’s love is made obvious to people outside the church. That sorta sounds obvious but why don’t most churches’ ministries reflect that? Most people who live in Western societies have absolutely no interest in walking into a church building, so in order to engage those people, we have to do our ministry outside of the confines of the church. The idea that you can create a church service with hip music and relevant preaching that would actually be attractive to non-believers is ridiculous.

In my opinion, the institution of the church should be extremely lean and agile, with a focus on empowering Christians to be expressions of God’s love in the secular realms of their life (e.g. work, school, friendships, neighbors, etc.). Churches should not burden their congregants with spending hours every week running programs within the church. Remember, non-religious people are not interested in going to church! Also, most church programs only seem to exist to serve other Christians! The local church should not attempt to set up a “parallel” Christian version of the world where Christians can escape to. I believe we Christians need to learn to serve God at our workplaces, with our friends, with our neighbors, etc.

How is this practically reflected in my life? I started attending a new church about ten months ago and I’ve had the urge to make commitments to various areas of service within the church. However, I’ve constantly had to remind myself that I do not want to fall into the trap of spending too much time basically running church programs. Instead, I would much rather meet up for dinner or drinks with co-workers or other friends with the intention of getting to know them better.

I’m very far from being a prime example of how to live this out but in my heart and mind, it feels more in line with what I believe God wants for His Church than what I see in the American church planting movement as not being much different than some major retail chain’s store expansion plan. New churches shouldn’t be planted simply to provide jobs for newly graduating seminarians and to keep lay Christians busy and feeling like they’ve checked off their “I’ve served God this week” box. If you’re currently in seminary, consider dropping out and going back to your old job. I strongly believe that this world needs more Christian engineers, dancers, bankers, marketers, salespeople, janitors, lawyers… and not more pastors. The people of God can change the world but will do so only by being in the places where the people of God currently are not.