Functional Church Ideas Pt. 1

As a follow up to my last entry, based on some of the comments I received, here are some ideas bursting forth from my brain as to how we can become a more functional church body. I feel a little bit like Martin Luther, posting my blogs of reformation...okay, not really.

#1 Size-It does matter, there I said it. It seems we have become too big and lost our personal touch. Think about this, if you put two elephants in a room in 22 months you will have one more elephant. If you put 2 rabbits in a room, in that same amount of time you would probably have 1000. Smaller is more effective for reching people and causing authentic, life-changing growth.

I think a home church of 10-25 people would work. Getting together in a home is more like a gathering of friends, than a put-on-a-happy-face get ready for a passive listening Sunday service. In a smaller group mutual edification is the focus, not spectatorship.

Plus, we need to get out of the mentality of "going to church". We ARE the church, it's not something we do or where we go, it's who we are, a living organism. The Greek word for church is ekklesia, which means "an assembly". The church body, His Body is an assembly of parts all working together and functioning in unison. That can't happen if there are a select few doing everything. Everyone has a role to play and something to offer. Which brings me to #2...

#2 Participation- Unlike, today where the teaching for the most part is brought by the same person week after week, when the 1st century believers gathered they all had a right, privilege, and responsibility to minister in the group, to the group (Eph. 4:16, 5:19 1Cor 14:26,31 Col 3:16).We have small groups where this happens more, but they are a ministry of the church instead of being the church. Which again goes back to the mindset of "doing" instead of "being".

We need to be "living life together", which can only happen when you are connected with others in open, authentic relationships. This goes back to point #1, we have gotten too big to be relationally effective for real sustainable spiritual growth.

I have more thoughts to throw out there but I will save them for later posts. Some books I have read along these lines are pagan Christianity by George Barna and Frank Viola, Reimagining Church by Frank Viola, and of course "the B-I-B-L-E, yes that's the book for me". Check them out they are very good.