What would it look like if Christianity was shaped more by capitalism than by Christ?
- We would be preoccupied with branding, marketing, and production
- We would use numbers and metrics to measure success
- We would assume bigger is better
1/4
- We would see pastors functioning more like CEO’s or small business owners than shepherds
- We would see hype and self-promotion as normal
- We would see more competition than cooperation
2/4
- We would see some churches and leaders amassing power and wealth while others struggle to survive
- We would see churches with mostly passive consumers rather than active disciples
What else?
3/4
Clearly, this is not just hypothetical but our current reality. Some @newwinecollect1 thoughts on why the business model of church has to change: bit.ly/3ijSvCm
🧵 The Church is facing a discipleship crisis.
Could it be that the current forms and structures we’ve inherited are simply not very good at making people more like Jesus?
We need system change, starting with a paradigm shift in our approach to spirituality. 1/10
Spirituality is a journey, not a destination.
Yet for too long, the Church has treated formation, discipleship, and spiritual growth (or whatever you like to call it) as a linear process with the end goal of conforming to a certain set of beliefs and behaviors. 2/10
We say the goal is to become more like Jesus but what we’re mostly trained to do is make people more like ourselves. Much of religion has become a hierarchical, paternalistic activity, driven by experts and empowered leaders forming people in their own image. 3/10
🧵Is "church" supposed to be like a factory or a workshop?
I believe you cannot do genuine discipleship and spiritual community at scale. People and relationships are not products that can be mass-produced on an assembly line.
Ever since the industrial revolution, it seems the Church has been trying to copy the gains of mass production and distribution. Christian publishing created more and more content to consume, an industry of experts and leaders emerged to share their secrets of success...
...and churches became focused on drawing crowds and measuring success by numbers.
This led to the establishment of a Christian industrial complex and a broad movement of cultural Christianity in the U.S.
However, the question is...
🧵IMO, more pastor sabbaticals, self-care, and emotional health resources are good but just temporary bandaids that do not address the root of the problem.
What if clergy burnout is simply the byproduct of an unhealthy system based on over-functioning and uneven power dynamics?
In other words, maybe we should stop blaming pastors for not being able to sustain themselves in an environment that's unsustainable.
The constant pressure to perform, produce, and maintain appearances makes it difficult to be a human being!
We might get by for a while, maybe for years or even decades! But things have a way of catching up to us. We carry so much trauma in our bodies.
Add the loneliness and isolation pastors regularly endure and it's a recipe for disaster.
🧵 On Thursday, 4/20, we're having an honest talk about the good, the bad, and what might need to change about how we do leadership in the Church! It will be a moderated conversation and an opportunity to connect and learn from one another. 1/4 @newwinecollect1
There's a leadership crisis in the ⛪️. Pastor burnout and walkout are on the rise and we're seeing far too many examples of scandals and abuses of power in churches and Xian orgs. What if these are not just anomalies but symptoms of a dysfunctional and unsustainable system? 2/4
Instead of empowering the priesthood of all believers, we seem to have created power structures that promote the priesthood OVER believers. Instead of making disciples, we seem to be creating dependency and consumerism.
What if we've misunderstood the assignment?
3/4
🧵Most churches and orgs now acknowledge that change is a given. So there are many conversations being had about the “future of the Church” which is valuable and needed.
However, may I suggest that…
1/8
If you’re relying mostly on insiders from within the Christian institutional or industrial complex to tell you what the future might look like, you may not be getting the clearest or most complete perspective. 2/8
In general, it may be less than ideal to ask people who are already deeply invested in the system and even derive their identity and livelihood from it, for their ideas about how to change the system.
3/8
🧵It can be difficult to see the forest for the trees but we are in the midst of a massive disruption in the spiritual landscape and the existing model of church will most likely not be able to see it coming. Here’s why…
The world is changing rapidly. Yet, most existing Sunday, programmatic churches are not able to adapt because they are too preoccupied with meeting the needs of their most demanding consumer: pre-churched, insider Christians.
Meanwhile, outsiders — those for whom the current church model simply does not work — continue to be ignored and excluded. And the more churches cater to pre-trained insiders, the more insular and out of touch they will become with the broader culture.