Goals & Realities (xix)

FPC, Lowville, NY

This is the nineteenth posting in a series working on what it means to be a church, based on eight criteria the Mars Hill Church uses to define its branch congregations as churches. The series began (here).  Before we turn to the seventh criterion in the Mars Hill list, I would like to return one more time to a concern I have with the wording of several of the criteria.  As I've noted already a couple of times in this series, the Mars Hill criteria describe the church in its "pure" state.  In fact, most of the eight criteria describe something that does not exist.  Real churches in the real world are not made up only of regenerated believers.  Their leadership is not uniformly competent and qualified.  Real-life congregations are only partially unified under the Spirit, at best.  Sometimes, they can be terribly disunited.  And so forth through the list.

Thus, the seventh criterion reads, "The church is a loving community that devotes itself to fellowship."  In our dreams.  To be fair, there are some impressively loving people in most every church, and experienced church people can think back to times when their church showed real love for someone in need.  We have seen parishioners do things for other members of their congregation have taken our breath away.  That, sadly, is not all we have seen.  I remember an experienced restaurant server once telling me that she tried to avoid working Sunday noons because of the "church crowd."  They are demanding and give lousy tips.  Again, to be fair not all of us are like that—but some of us are.  It's a trivial illustration of a serious point: churches are not perfect embodiments of the Kingdom and sometimes they are far, far from that dream.

Local churches seek to be even struggle to be unified under the Spirit (Criteria #5), holy (#6), loving (#7), and visibly evangelistic (#8).  These are goals, visions, and measures of every church's limitations.  It is vitally important, in sum, that we acknowledge the fact that the church described in these criteria does not exist, otherwise we will become discouraged by and even bitter at the imperfections we find in actual churches.  It is our goal and dream to become something like these criteria.  We believe that God in Christ through the work of the Spirit is gently, persistently pulling us forward toward our goals and dreams.  But, we're a long way for the goal line when in it comes to actually being the church of our prayers and dreams.