Yesterday morning, my family and I visited the last Sunday morning service of Potter’s Hands Christian Church…a congregation we helped to start from 2003 through 2006. It was a bitter-sweet morning for sure! We reconnected with lots of old friends & kids who had grown; and we saw & heard many memories from our past. It felt like a cross between a reunion and a funeral. It was a chance to honor & celebrate what God had done through the past 11-years of a vision, but it also had the taste of death to many people who still called that congregation ‘home.’ The closure, in short, was the result of struggles in leadership, involvement & finances over the past several years….which had finally came to a head…so they had to ‘close the church.’ My heart went out to those people, many of whom I labored with years ago…but I also found myself hearing a lesson that the Holy Spirit desperately wants us to learn in American churches…that Church is not an institution or occasion…it’s the people, not what we do when we gather on Sundays.
For me, it’s a travesty that 70-80 people who love God and each other, who are bound together as a spiritual family, can’t find a way to continue following Jesus together without having a traditional worship service led by paid staff in a rented facility. This underscores a chronic problem that is closing the doors of American Churches at the highest rate in our nation’s history…when push comes to shove, we instinctively believe that church is a religious organization, rather than a sent people…that worship is singing praise songs once a week in a sequestered environment, rather than following Jesus every day in a messy world…that organization and leadership dictate the existence of a congregation, rather than existing to empower a group of people to impact society in ways that could never be directed or controlled. This is not what Jesus and the Apostles meant when they said the word ‘Church.’
I hope and pray that I’m not coming across as cold & jaded….I sincerely care about those people and the legacy we share together in Christ. But I’m tired of hearing about, and experiencing, congregations closing their doors in disillusionment while the harvest fields are white all around us. We need to reevaluate who we are and what we’re doing if we’re going to be effective in the Mission of Jesus. Founding pastor Sean Thome’ returned to PH to preach yesterday, in what I think was the best sermon he ever preached. He reminded us that it all comes down to 3 things: Remaining in Jesus, loving each other, and producing fruit. I think there’s a multitude of ways that communities of faith (aka ‘churches’) can pursue these simple, foundational aspects of following Jesus together.
Dear Church that was/is Potter’s Hands, I am praying for you that the Living God will indeed encourage you and empower you to be His Church….you are not dead!
