We had a new church member “meet and greet” at our house last week and one guy asked, “How do we know how we are doing as a church? What’s a healthy, mature church look like?” This guy is smart, and I like him a lot and I loved those questions. How does a church know how they are doing?
I like to measure things, maybe I should have been a carpenter or an accountant? So how do we measure our faith? What’s our metric? How do we know how we’re doing as Christians? We used to celebrate people’s attendance, bring them in front of the church and give them a pin. That’s not bad, especially in today’s culture where regular church attendance has become 1.25 Sundays per month. That does not sound like a measurable commitment, does it?
Remember when you got a star for bringing your Bible, another star for bringing a friend or memorizing a Bible verse? That seems dated but probably needs to make a comeback. The trouble is we thought we were becoming legalistic so we stopped - that and it was probably someone only attending 50% of the time that wanted it stopped if you know what I mean.
Those metrics aren’t bad, but they don’t measure the heart. I read somewhere that “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) Let’s chase that down with, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.” (Proverbs 21:2) As a pastor I often hear people defend their lack of stars by saying, “God knows my heart.” When I hear that I always think, that’s the problem, God does know our hearts and our hearts are not all that great.
I love my denomination and I was recently reading through our annual prayer guide. It’s good and those people work hard putting it together, but I was reading about how they were offering conferences for those who want to go deeper in their faith. Whoa! What authentic Christ-follower doesn’t want to go deeper in their faith? Who doesn’t want to know how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is? (Ephesians 3:18) I wonder if for some it might help to sing “Deep and Wide” complete with hand gestures in Big Church on Sunday morning again?
My point is in some ways we have created a caste system within the church. Those who are “shallow” and those who like to go “deeper.” God tells us ALL to be “all in.” ALL of us are to love Him with everything that we have got, not some of us, all of us (Luke 10:27). Anything less is, well, less. Now go and get some stars next to your name and that pin!
He told me to tell you that.
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