Theology in the Raw - #624 - What is Church? - Part 4 - Participatory vs. Performance

Episode Date: December 8, 2017

Preston is working to start a new church in Boise. This has him studying what church should be about.  What is church? What should church be? What should church look like? What should church pursue?  In this series, Preston is looking at 8 different values that the church should work to keep forefront as they continue and grow.  Value 5 - Participatory vs. Performance Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Follow him on Twitter @PrestonSprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Greetings and welcome back to episode number four in the series, What is Church? This is episode number four, and we are working our way through eight different values that I've written for a recent church that I've been involved with, helping plant a, for lack of better terms, a house church-like church. And I hesitate saying house church. I think I've talked about this before. I don't want to, And I hesitate saying house church. I think I've talked about this before. I don't want to, sometimes house churches can get off the rails a little bit, or they can become hypercritical of the so-called institutional church, or they can become very

anti-building. And that's not what we want to do at all. We want to come alongside and join arms with what God is doing in this wonderful city of Boise with the other churches and ministries in the Valley. This is not a reactionary church plant. It is another way of doing church. It is quite different, and that's what we're talking about in this series. We're talking about things that are some values that are driving this church, and many of these values may end up producing a different kind of church. So last week we talked about reproducing versus church growth, reproducing versus church growth.

And we also talked about another value that we want to be relationally driven, relationally driven. Those two go hand in hand. That's why I talked about them together. driven, relationally driven. Those two go hand in hand. That's why I talked about them together. We want to reproduce small gatherings so that the primary rhythm of church, of gathering, is small and intimate and relationally driven. We will also have large gatherings as we, or if we end up becoming too big for our one setting. We will not just buy a building or become a big church with a big service and start hiring tons of people. Rather than that, we will not just buy a building or, you know, become a big church with a big service and start hiring tons of people. Rather than that, we will simply reproduce into another small group and keep doing that indefinitely so that the primary rhythm is a bunch of, you know, small gatherings that don't cost anything to run. They're very simple. I hope

that they're meaningful. We want the gathering to be incredibly meaningful, not just in the quote unquote service of teaching and worship and announcements or whatever, but in the relational time together. I mean, when we meet, we just met last Sunday and, you know, half of, I would say half of our time is just simply hanging out. I would say half of our time is just simply hanging out. People show up around 10. They leave around maybe like 12.30-ish. That's usually when we kind of end up leaving.

Some people stay to like 6, 7, 8 at night. We have amazing hosts that say, hey, look, you can stay as long as you want. You never have to leave our house. In fact, sometimes they leave the house and there's still people hanging out at their house. It's really funny, actually. A couple of weeks ago, we got together with the host for lunch afterward and they said, oh yeah, there's still tons of people at our house.

And we were out having lunch, hanging out just us as couples. And I think that's so cool. So yeah, that's what we're doing. We're doing this church plant thing. So value number five, the value I want to talk about today is participatory versus performance. Now this is going to bleed over into, well, several of the other values, really, especially the last two that we want to be relationally driven. But participatory versus performance, what I want is a church gathering where everybody feels the freedom and even is encouraged to participate in some way.

Whether it's through praying or giving a word over the Eucharist or praying for somebody else or sharing a prayer request or, you know, our teaching is very dialogical. So I'm trying to incorporate, you know, a lot of different voices in the dialogue. Now there is still a leader. I'm one of the two leaders in the church and there are still teachers who are guiding, who are doing the teaching, but we want the teaching to be very interactive and responsive. As you know, I spent 10 years as a professor, and one of the worst ways to be a professor is simply to sit there and lecture, especially if there's like 30 people in your classroom. Like one of the best ways for people to learn to engage the material is to take ownership of it and to engage it and process it and talk through it

and push back and ask hard questions and be okay if the teacher says, you know what, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. Let's together try to figure this out. Now, when I say participation, I'm talking about participation in the gathering and also in the church. And I just, some of you are saying, well, isn't that redundant? You just said the same thing twice. No, I didn't. Because church cannot be reduced to the gathering. Church is the corporate people of God. We are the church. We are the church. We embody the church. We gather as a church, but we don't go to church to gather. We are the church who gathers. You see the difference? So the gathering, the time when the church, this local church, we don't have a name yet. I don't know if we ever will. We should probably get a name at some point, but right now it's just,

we're going to gather together. It's more of a verb than a noun. So when we gather together, that is part of what the church does, but that can't be reduced to church as a whole. Church transcends the few hours we are together on Sunday. So what I want in this church is everybody to be participating, yes, in the gathering, in the few hours that we are together, but also in the church as a whole, the movement, the mission, the needs, the ministries, the relationships, and so on and so forth. I want people to be, you know, even if they're quiet on Sunday morning, that they are very loud in their actions throughout the week, even if not with their voices. So again, going back to our gathering, we

really want to value the, I mean, so, sorry, sorry. When I talk about participation at the gathering, part of our gathering too is simply hanging out. So when we, when people show up at 10, we typically hang out for, I don't know, what, 15 minutes to a half hour. Then we actually gather together. We sing a few songs of worship.

I've been doing these things where I kind of interview people where I just, you know, call out somebody randomly without any preparation in the audience and say, hey, come up here and let's just get to know you a little bit and ask them a ton of questions, have other people ask them questions. I've been trying to do that every week. Last week, we had a couple people who are being sent out to Jordan. They're moving to Jordan in a couple of weeks and they're doing some amazing ministries out there. So I, you know, talked with them and what their needs were and how we can maybe be praying for them. Then we laid hands and prayed over them. And they're not

even part of our church. They're actually part of another church, but we invited them to be part of us for that Sunday. So that the gathering is really, oh, so after we get to know people, then we do, we've been teaching through the values. And a lot of what you're hearing here is what we've been talking through. And, you know, then we pray some more. Then we do some announcements. We ask what people are doing. And we just want the whole thing to be like a big family gathering where there is leadership.

And we're going to talk about that in a second. Where there is leadership, and we're going to talk about that in a second, but everybody who is a believer has the spirit of the creator of the universe in them. They have power that needs to be harnessed and valued and released. And a lot of people just don't have, I think that they assume that the leaders have kind of a bigger spirit, more of the Holy Spirit than they do, and they have less or their gifts aren't as valuable. And it seems like just the way at least some people have gone about church, that that's been kind of implicitly pounded into them. We don't want to do that. We want to release people in the gifts that God has given them. Let's go back to why we are doing this, making it about participation. Let's go back to the first century and let's just talk about the first century church. And we always have to distinguish between the sort of is and the ought or the description of the church and the prescription

of the church, meaning there are some things that the church did in the first century, some ways it existed that were just the cultural norm of that day and aren't necessarily prescriptive or commanded for all churches of all time. But then I do think there are also rhythms and principles and values that the early church had that should carry over to today. So I very much appreciate that tension. I don't want to say, oh, first century church, let's just do it just like that, just without thinking through the distinction between description, describing what the church did, and prescription, where the church is actually, or the New Testament is actually

projecting a vision of what all churches should do. But in the first century, when people were getting saved, I mean, the very first believers gathered at the synagogue, right? Because first converts were Jews and they weren't like, you know, Jesus wasn't trying to start a new religion, but to proclaim, you know, the messianic fulfillment or next step, if you will, of the religion that's been going on from the Garden of Eden. So when the early converts, most of whom were Jews or Gentile proselytes, converts to Judaism, when they got saved or whatever, I mean, they were in the synagogue. But pretty early on, you know, Judaism and what was becoming the way or Christianity started to go its own ways, if you will. I mean, in some cases,

they were kicked out of the synagogue, right? Remember, throughout the book of Acts, Paul keeps going into synagogues and he's getting kicked out. And Jesus, I mean, had a tough time at a few synagogues that he preached at too. So when Christianity could no longer meet at synagogues and he's getting kicked out. And Jesus, I mean, had a tough time at a few synagogues that he preached at too. So when Christianity could no longer meet at synagogues, the question is, where could they meet? Well, first century Rome, the empire, Roman empire was, it was actually more tolerant of religions than some people think. They were, you know, you can practice different religions as long as it didn't kind of upset the fabric of the empire, as long as it didn't upset the social hierarchy and challenge the elites and do whatever.

If you just want to practice your religion over here, then that's fine. We're not going to... Yeah, we're going to be okay with it. We're going to allow that. So when Christianity existed, it was still under the umbrella of Judaism. It was recognized as a sect of Judaism by the Roman Empire. When it started to go its own way, it was kind of out in no man's land a little bit. It didn't have the sort of covering of Judaism. And so they couldn't actually have like public spaces to meet in.

And plus, a lot of the believers were poor. A lot of people were poor. So, I mean, getting a public space to meet in would have been expensive, but it also was not really legal. They weren't recognized as a distinct religion that could have public meeting space. So they ended up meeting in the homes of wealthy Christians. Most Christians had tiny, tiny homes that can hold just barely like a family. So they couldn't hold the whole church. They couldn't hold 20, 30 people.

But there were a few wealthy Christians in every city that had homes big enough to hold the entire church. Now, when I say church, I mean, think like 20 to 50 people, like 50 people would have been on a large size of a first century church, and most of them would have been 20, 30 people. And some cities had several of these communities in it. So like, if you read Romans 16, we can identify, I think, about five different home churches that constituted the church at Rome, the Roman church. So it was a network of small gatherings. Now, we don't know a lot about what these gatherings looked like. They probably structured their quote-unquote order of service. Again, I don't think it was that formal. But the

practices that they did in early church gatherings probably reflected a lot of the same practices in the synagogue. In the synagogue, people would get together for worship, for prayer, for reading, for a meal. And so the early church most probably adopted those practices as well. And the few passages where we get a glimpse into early church gatherings, it does seem that they more or less reflected the general sort of themes of synagogue gatherings. Now, one of the most interesting pictures of the church we get is in 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians, especially chapters 12 and 14. And I say interesting because, as you probably know,

the Corinthian church was an absolute mess. It was a morally, it was a mess, okay? But they still gathered as a church like any other church would have. And so we do have, even though morally it was kind of messed up and need a lot of correction, Paul had a lot of pretty hard things to tell them in, especially 1 Corinthians. But what we see is that in the gatherings, they were participatory. They don't look, they didn't look like the type of churches that we have today. Now, again, I'm not saying one is necessarily right and one is necessarily wrong, just because, well, I mean, fast forward to today, most church gatherings are much larger than the small house churches

of the first century. And so, you know, you can't, it makes it very difficult to be participatory. And it makes it easier to have kind of one teacher teaching people. And it makes, you know, dialogue during the teaching time to be a bit more difficult. And when things are bigger, they do require more organization, which requires, you know, And when things are bigger, they do require more organization, which requires us to think through structure and offices and different people, staff members, and so on and so forth, and buildings and whatever. So I'm not saying those are all good or bad. I'm just saying it's a departure from the way they did church in the first century,

primarily because of the size. Because of the size, we now have buildings. Because we can have buildings, we have buildings. And it's hard to cram hundreds of people into one house church. And so our structure looks quite different. But in the first century, the gatherings were very small. They did gather in homes. And they were, according to the little window we have in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, they were participatory. We see people using their gifts and, you know, Paul has to kind of correct them and how they're using their gifts. You know, they're speaking in tongues or languages without an interpretation and they're not waiting for each other. And they're, you know, the way they do the

Eucharist, the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11 is, you know, wealthy believers were taking it, eating before the poor believers and weren't waiting for the poor believers to show up because wealthy believers would get off work a lot earlier or didn't work at all. And so they can kind of start to meal around two and poorer believers would, you know, work until the sun goes down and they would show up and all the good food was eaten. And anyway, it was a big mess. I mean, there's several messes in the Corinthian church. But again, what we see is we do see people using their gifts. So 1 Corinthians 12, Paul compares the church to,

he calls it the body of Christ. And he is really trying to correct this sort of hierarchy of gifts. I mean, his big point in 1 Corinthians 12, and really spelling out the whole metaphor of the church being the body of Christ, the whole driving point is that diversity of gifts should foster unity, not cause disunity. And one way to do that is to make sure you don't have a hierarchy of, well, a hierarchy of gifts in the sense that you look down upon people who have seemingly weaker gifts than those who have seemingly stronger gifts. In 1 Corinthians 12, 22, Paul says, seemingly stronger gifts. In 1 Corinthians 12, 22, Paul says, but even more, or sorry, let me go back to 21. So the eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you. Or again, the head can't say to the feet, I don't need you. But even more, watch this, even more, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are necessary. And those parts of the body that we think are less honorable,

we clothe these with greater honor and our unpresentable parts have a better presentation, but our presentable parts have no need of clothing. Instead, God has put the body together, giving, watch this, greater honor to the less honorable. When he says less honorable, I think he's, you know's going back to verse 23 when he says that those gifts that we think are less honorable. He's not actually calling them less honorable. He's just playing into the mindset that we think some gifts are less honorable. So we should give greater honor to less honorable gifts so that there would be no division in the body, but that the members would have the same concern for each other.

So one of my growing passions in trying to create a faithful church is that we would do that. I want to do that. When I read about how the church gathered, I want to do that. I want to somehow honor gifts that people consider less honorable. It's easy to honor the one with the good teaching skills or the amazing musician on stage and say, man, that person is really being used by God. And they are being used by God. The goal is not to diminish those gifts, but to elevate the gifts that we think are less honorable. Like,

I want to do that. What would it look like to do that? What would it look like to create a type of church gathering where gifts that seem to be less honorable are actually given more honor? How can we create a gathering where people who think that they have nothing to contribute are actually empowered and released because they have the Spirit of God in them? How can we make this gathering to where it can't function right if the people with the so-called less honorable gifts don't show up? Because I haven't really experienced that too much. I haven't been in a church environment where if people with less honorable gifts don't show up to the church service, then the church service just, it ain't going to go right. It's just going

to be not as powerful. It's not going to be as organic, not going to be as effective because it's missing parts of the body. And if we take Paul's metaphor seriously, if you're a little toe or a big toe or an ear or an eye, like no matter what part of the body you are, you play a vital role for the health of the body, which is precisely his point. So even if you are a, I don't know, let's just say a big toe and you're not seen by everybody and you don't talk and you don't contribute to hearing. But my goodness, if you don't have a big toe, that's going to affect the posture and the health of the body as a whole. Like, what if we did that? What if we did that as a church? What if we created a church to where if the big toe doesn't show up, it ain't going to go right. Where everybody

is valued equally, equally valued and their gifts are cherished. So we're not talent driven or performance driven. This is the whole value of participatory versus performance. I don't want to depend on really good performers to make the gathering effective and a good experience for people. I want it to be a place where a diversity of gifts can be used. Now, when we read the Corinthian letters, it does feel very democratic. A lot of people jumping in and participating. Now, when we get to the end of Paul's letters in 1st, 2nd Timothy and Titus, we do see more of an emphasis on leadership. The Corinthian church, I mean, I assume there was leadership, but it seems very, very kind of

congregational, if you will, very, very democratic, very much kind of like, I don't want to say free for all, but you don't get the sense that you have a couple of leaders at the top kind of doing everything. And maybe part of the top kind of doing everything. And maybe part of the problem was lack of leadership. So, you know, again, the Corinthian church, we should not glorify the churches as a whole. I think there's a lot of problems in the church, but it does give us a window into how early church is gathered. Now, when we get to, again, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, we see more of a concern of Paul in establishing leadership. He tells Titus in Titus 1, you know, I left you on the island of Crete to appoint elders in every city on the island. And 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 also gives criteria for leadership. And there

is this huge emphasis on, you know, making sure, you know sure you rebuke bad leadership and people spreading false doctrine. And you raise up solid leadership, people who fit qualifications for leadership. So here's the tension I'm wrestling with is how do you cultivate group or church participation to where it's not this top down couple gifted people doing everything? How do you cultivate that sense of participation and yet still respect and promote solid leadership? And I think there's a way to do that. I just think that we have to keep that in intention. So, and let me say, by no means am I saying that we are just nailing this. I mean, goodness, we're like two months old and we're gonna run in all kinds of bumps

and hiccups and problems. And, you know, times are like, oh my gosh, we're not gonna do that again. Or man, you know, this person needs to be talked to or whatever, like it going to be absolutely messy. So in no way am I envisioning some perfect, you know, fluffy idealistic, you know, gathering where everybody's happy and hunky dory and getting along perfectly and all that. That's not the point. Families are messy. The point is it needs to be a family. It needs to be people who are committed to each other and where relationships, authentic relationships are valued highly.

In a sense that if we gather together and you're not engaging in people on a relational level, you're not gathering well. Remember we talked about this last week where people, I think at church, we should be living out the one another's. Like we should be forgiving each other and loving each other and bearing each other's burdens. So anyway, that's our fifth value, participatory versus performance. We're going to do probably two more of these. Next week, we're going to talk about diversity and integration. diversity and integration. And then the last value we're going to talk about is theological,

being theologically orthodox and also theologically generous. I can't wait for that one. That's going to be real raw. So we'll see you next time. Thank you.