Seeing "Churchianity" in the Church

Today I attended a workshop led by Reggie McNeal, based on his book The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church.

Our presbytery sponsored this seminar as part of our emphasis on helping our churches become more missional and transformational. (By the way, I really don't like turning nouns into adjectives like this, but those two terms have become standard ChurchSpeak, so I'm going along with it this time.) This summer the staff at my church did an overview of the book while the session and diaconate were asked to read it in preparation for their annual retreat. McNeal is a very entertaining speaker, which I never would have guessed from reading this book because I was put off by what I perceived as its angry tone. I can't remember laughing so much at a workshop.

As a Presbyterian, I had a few quarrels with the Baptist McNeal's analysis from a theological viewpoint. McNeal states in the book that he does not intend to give the reader a "blueprint" for addressing those issues, and he certainly didn't. I found that frustrating, and thought that if he had included some anecdotes that illustrated how these "tough questions" might be addressed it would have been helpful.

In the seminar, however, McNeal filled in that gap with a number of stories that made the ideas in his book much more understandable and palatable to me. The one that made the deepest impression on me relates to his point in the book that the church needs to move from being program driven to a focus on people development. We discussed this at length in one of our staff meetings because we shared a concern that the church had so many programs and committee meetings of various kinds scheduled that members had little time for mission and evangelism. We are not alone in struggling with finding a balance between doing "church work" and being missional.

McNeal told the story of a woman who wanted to help high school students in her neighborhood. She went to the principal of the high school and said that she wanted to volunteer to listen to any student who needed someone to talk to. The principal was thrilled and invited her to the next assembly. She rounded up four or five other women from her church to go with her. At the assembly she told the students that it was much harder to be a teenager today than when she was growing up. "Some of you don't know one of your parents, you don't have relatives close by, you may be having problems at home or school or with a girl friend or boyfriend." She then gave them the phone number of her church and said to call that number if they just wanted someone to talk to. The next day the church had over 300 phone calls from those kids.

McNeal then asked us to consider whether our church could answer all those phone calls if that woman had been one of our members. I don't like my answer, and neither did anyone else. Those calls would not fit neatly into any of our organizational and programmatic models for ministry, so we would not be prepared to respond as we should. McNeal is good at prodding those of us who are long-time members of churches to view "Churchianity" in a new way so that we can begin that shift from being internally to externally focused. Before we can make that shift, we need to learn how the unchurched see the church.

As Robert Burns wrote: " O wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as ithers see us!"