Learning from the Global Church: Part 2
The Church is about People
In my last blog entry, I started a series about what Christians in America can learn from the global church. It starts with rediscovering that we need a bigger God. The next thing we can learn is that the church is about people. In the Kingdom of Jesus, everything is about relationships.
We tend to think in terms of institutions in the U.S. Churches have property and buildings, run events, and build brands. We invite people to place membership in our institutions which is only partially connected to their commitment to follow the ways of Jesus. The end goal for us seems to be bigger institutions with better events and programs in an ever-expanding enterprise with our numbers hopefully going up and to the right.
Actual people, made in the image of God who were designed to share immortality with God, can get lost in our misguided focus on an institutional abstraction that won’t exist in 20-100 years. Instead of using churches to save people, we can get caught up using people to save churches. It’s quite odd when viewed from the Kingdom perspective described in scripture.
This way of thinking is almost entirely missing in the majority-world church. They are better at remembering that the church is about people and relationships. Outside the west, churches don’t typically have the resources to build impressive institutions, so they are more inclined to focus on the relational dimension of our faith. This can be twisted into abusive power relationships in the church built around big men with big personalities (a problem we haven’t manage to avoid well either). But the church in the majority world does typically get the relational side of the church better than we do in the west. Having an impressive facility that houses a wide range of programs run by professional staff is not an option. In many ways, that works to the church’s advantage because it keeps in focus what matters most: people. The church is not an event center to staff and run, but people to love and serve.
Institutional churches are inclined to have an inward focus. It wants to draw people into its events and programs. Ministry happens on church property and is designed to produce an ever-increasing participation in church programs. Often that produces much good. However, the lives of actual people, their needs and struggles, and the transformation of their souls, families, and communities can get lost in the focus on the big events and crowds. The endless events can be more exhausting than life-giving after a while.
In the majority world, the focus is clearly on people and relationships. Where and how people gather is less important than being together. What happens in a service is less scripted. Performance quality is not a premium. Rather, life-on-life care and encountering God in community are. Rather than being obsessed with bringing people in, the focus is more on going out. Yes people “go to church” for gatherings, but churches constantly send their people out to start new churches in new communities where they don’t exist so that everyone can have a church in walking distance.
Nsawam Church of Christ in Accra Ghana
Nsawam Church of Christ in Accra Ghana (whose story you can watch here) is a great example. When I first visited there in 2012, they were a church of well over 1,000 in attendance with new people coming all the time. They had land and a building, but it was unfinished. There were no doors or windows installed yet and people sat in stackable plastic chairs. Yet, they didn’t put a premium on getting their facility completed. They had already planted over 25 other churches around Accra, their home country of Ghana, and neighboring countries. Their focus was on reaching as many people as possible not in getting them all in the same place. Church was about people loving people, people serving people, and people being transformed by people in the name and power of Jesus. We can learn from the wider focus of the global church on kingdom goals which frees them from a narrow goal of building up only one local church.
In the global church, authenticity is more important than image. There is less concern for performance quality. Leadership is less inclined to be tied to looks or image. Gatherings are less scripted and time bound. Gatherings feel less like a performance or entertainment. Fellowship around a relaxed table is more common. Church is a community of people who share identity and mission every day, not just on Sunday. Deep community is the reality all through the week. This can easily be idealized into a distorted picture. The church everywhere has its problems, but keeping the focus on people is something we need to learn in the American church.
Granted, this model of church would struggle in our fast-paced, event-oriented, time-obsessed culture. We can’t just copy what is done in other countries here anymore than they can just copy us. Every church must learn how to be the people of Christ in their culture. But we can learn a lot from the global church about the importance of people, relationships, and expanding the reign of God through families, communities, tribes, and nations. Ultimately, God is less concerned with how big our church is but rather how many lives are transformed because of the influence of our church.