traviswright

I don’t read church planter type blogs very often, but somehow this morning I stumbled onto this article from Ed Stetzer who works with Lifeway.

I love things that are simple. This doesn’t mean I’m lazy, because I’m not. But too many times, people make things more complicated than they need to be. In the music world I’m familiar with, musicians often play more than they need to. I love simple music. All too often, people tend to make things too complicated.

This article summed up how I feel church should be. It should be simple. Stetzer explains Dell’s simple, but uncommon mindset. In a culture where companies pile up inventory on their shelves and in warehouses, Dell doesn’t keep inventory. They put your computer together only when it’s ordered. To quote from the article:

Dell wants their resources out there, on the street. Not in the warehouse, where the resources merely gather dust and produce no impact. So Dell has designed a very strategic process to move their resources to the street.

Then check out what Stetzer has to say next:

Most churches build big warehouses and shelve a bunch of Christians (those rows look suspiciously like shelves). They design attractive programs to “retain” people in the sacred warehouse, keep precise records of how much inventory (people) is on the shelves, and brag about their warehouses being constantly open. And warehouse managers love to show other warehouse managers their newest warehouses while dreaming together of bigger and better warehouses.

God is calling churches to shatter the warehouse myth, to change their warehouses into strategic distribution centers, where people are distributed as salt and light to the world–sending them out on mission. Some churches are strategically challenging their people to be out there, and these churches have a strategic and simple process that moves people from the warehouse to the street. These churches are simple and missional.

I’ve never liked blogs from the church planter culture very much, but this really connected with me. I don’t think that programs are bad (I am a product of RA’s, children’s choirs, youth group, etc), but I think that many churches just focus on how many programs they can have. It’s the more programs = more people approach that bothers me. Here is another quote from the article that sums up the whole approach:

These churches do not rejoice in their complex systems or impressive buildings, but in the micro stories of their members’ transformed lives.

Enough said!