Yes… 2 posts in a day… back to back!
My wife found this and it’s so achingly bang-on [shout out to the Canadians] with regards to the state of the church [written over a hundred years ago]. It’s from Soren Kierkegaard’s wiki. This particular quote pretty much sums up how I’ve felt my entire time of church planting. We’re so concerned with building the business of church and not making disciples [just collecting people]. And as pastors/leaders we need to come clean with our hunger for fame/power/notoriety when it comes to forming our churches. It’s in me too – I wish it wasn’t. And I’ve met very few in our ranks who have a pure desire to follow Jesus and make disciples. If you look at the church, we’ve paid a heavy price for this.
My hope is that the church and our generation will make some drastic course corrections. It seems like it’s slowly happening. But we’ve got a ways to go.
In Kierkegaard’s pamphlets and polemical books, including The Moment, he criticized several aspects of church formalities and politics. According to Kierkegaard, the idea of congregations keeps individuals as children since Christians are disinclined from taking the initiative to take responsibility for their own relation to God. He stresses that “Christianity is the individual, here, the single individual.” Furthermore, since the Church was controlled by the State, Kierkegaard believed the State’s bureaucratic mission was to increase membership and oversee the welfare of its members. More members would mean more power for the clergymen: a corrupt ideal. This mission would seem at odds with Christianity’s true doctrine, which, to Kierkegaard, is to stress the importance of the individual, not the whole. Thus, the state-church political structure is offensive and detrimental to individuals, since anyone can become “Christian” without knowing what it means to be Christian. It is also detrimental to the religion itself since it reduces Christianity to a mere fashionable tradition adhered to by unbelieving “believers”, a “herd mentality” of the population, so to speak.
>> Quote found here.
There are no longer “state-churches” – but we function with the same values and system. More members = more power. We’re stunting the growth of people by not leading them to live for Jesus. It’s ironic that we’re “disciplining” people from taking initiative for their own relationship with God. Reading this makes me a little sick as to how true it is.
EL's Dribble 