Word, Work, Worship ---
Moving Beyond Sunday-Centric Communities
by Mike Bishop and T Freeman
http://www.next-wave.org/feb03/sundaycentric.htm
Recently I (Mike) heard
Todd Hunter reference a statistic that 80% of the time, energy, and money spent
by many churches goes towards making weekend services happen. Now I’m an
industrial engineer by training and the idea of spending 80% of my resources on
one thing offends my cost-conscious sensibilities. This focused
expenditure has had many consequences. In my experience “Sunday-Centric”
churches are always fighting to keep up with the Joneses. In the name of
relevancy, enormous sums of money are spent aimed at keeping the attention of a
congregation immersed in a market-driven world. Americans (Christians
included) are, what Gordon Cosby suggests, “Addicted to culture.” It is
naïve to suppose that presenting the Gospel, the way of Jesus, in a
mass-marketing style will do anything else than feed into consumer
tendencies. In this article, T and I want to suggest a polemic for
combating a consumer-driven orientation and hopefully become the kind of
communities who consistently demonstrate the reality of the kingdom to a
desperate culture.
Last Sunday, our faith
community in
But what is
worship? After wrestling (with no lack of conflict) with this question
for a few months, we decided to perform a few experiments in collaborative
worship. On a Sunday morning in early February, we converged on a small
three-bedroom house in an old
To help set the context,
after breakfast I read the introduction to Genesis in Peterson’s “The
Message.” Then I passed the book around the porch and we read the first
chapter. Everyone, even Caleb with his 7-year-old reading skills shining
for all to see (and they were quite excellent), read a small part of the
Story. As we began swapping ideas for the yard, it was undeniable what we
were there to do – worship the Creator with shovels, rakes, and clippers.
Later that afternoon I
had a few images stuck in my mind: Caleb eating oranges on top of Lori's
shed with sunlight streaming through the leaves.
N.T. Wright mentions in
his book "The Challenge of Jesus" that people will put up with all
kinds of theological weirdness but watch out if you ever mess with their
symbols. The Jewish people in first century
I think there is a huge
misunderstanding occurring between those who are still heavily invested in a
meeting-centric way of being church and those of us experimenting with new
ways. We are not simply asking that preaching be more narrative-oriented
or churches be more aware of the increasingly foreign emerging culture in which
they are trying to evangelize. We are not suggesting a new ‘model’ for
church to be reproduced indiscriminately. And we are certainly not saying
that corporate church gatherings are wrong and should be abandoned. We
are attempting, by word and deed, to break once and for all the
separation between sacred and secular, between faith and life.
As I (T) began
reflecting on our yard work-worship time together, I was surprised to see that
a particular belief in me (that I've struggled hard to hang on to at times) had
been strengthened—the conviction that my whole life is an offering to God; that
there is no sacred/secular divide. I couldn't help but think as I looked
back, "If yanking weeds and pulling fruit really was worship—and it
was—then my whole life really can be worship."
Interestingly, I didn't
go out in the yard that day in order to strengthen my belief that there is no
secular/sacred division. I thought I already knew and believed
that. Nevertheless, by my participation in actions that crossed
sacred/secular lines, a lie that had hindered my life, that had deeper roots
than I realized, had been dug-up and thrown away. The Sunday morning
worship service, which is the most sacred of times to American Evangelicals
(and sometimes the time most detached from daily life), got very ordinary and
involved and . . . secular. By worshipping God, even on Sunday morning,
with every-day-life kind of work, we, as a church, lived out a rarely
lived truth and thereby quietly helped to destroy one of the biggest lies that
Satan has used to dominate our lives and the lives of many others, namely the
secular/sacred division.
The thought that I would
like all Christians to consider, particularly those who lead others, is that
acting out a truth in a daily life setting is a darn good way to make that
truth seem workable or applicable to daily life—for participants and observers
alike. Are we, as the
The secular/sacred
divide is (only) one particularly widespread lie within ourselves and American Christians
as a whole. As a result of this lie, we routinely adopt a “secular”
identity 6 ½ days of the week or more, or we struggle not to, unless, of
course, we're in "full-time ministry." But how can we attack
this and other lies that people are basing their lives on? Should we have
an accepted "sacred" man teach against it within a "sacred"
place at a "sacred" time? Or should we cross a line and then
defend it with the teaching? Jesus acted in a way that challenged false
ideas, and then he gave his teachings in that context. His listeners had
to deal with them both linked together. We, too, need to link some
teaching with practice, some sacred and secular, some deeds with words.
We need to incarnate the truth we proclaim. We must act in a way
that confronts the lies we're swimming in. One thing Dallas
Willard is fond of saying (I think it bothers him deeply) is that "our
systems are perfectly designed to get the results we are now
getting." No one apparently disputes that the lives of people within
American churches are strikingly similar to the lives of Americans outside of
church communities except for their Sunday and possible Wednesday
calendar. Is this so? (I'm really asking—I don't know.) To
whatever extent it is, we as Christians in this culture have to consider
whether we should restructure our practices, our services, our worship, our
lives, our systems, our actions to confront the specific lies that are
dominating us and our neighbors. Otherwise, according to the book of
James, we're only fooling ourselves.
Mike Bishop and T Freeman live in