Story #17 in the Covenant series
I’d like to leave the narrative of Covenant Baptist Church for a moment and talk about something rather odd that I’ve noticed about our church. At Covenant, everything seems to be upside down and backwards. We’re not trying to be different. We’ve never called ourselves an “alternative church.” We do things that seem right to us, but they seem to be the opposite of what most churches do.
Now before I write this, I want to state very clearly and carefully that I am NOT suggesting that any other church ought to do things the way we do them. There is certainly no shortage of “how to do church” books out there, with Dr. This or Reverend That revealing the deep, spiritual truths he has discovered that will increase your fold, or foster real intimacy, or kick-start your small group ministry, or blah blah blah in a postmodern blah.
If I wrote a book it would be called, “How to take a church from 14 families to 40 families in only 10 years of bivocational ministry.” Just kidding, though that title would be accurate. My “how to” church book would be a single index card. Written on it in pencil would be this:
Read the Bible. Pray. Talk to your church friends in long conversations over meals and coffee for years and years. Learn to love each other so that whatever you do in church gets filtered through your concern for how it will affect others in the community. Then do church in the ways that seem right to you. Let no other concern EVER surpass your desire to be right about church.
Postscript to pastors – Be prepared to find a second job.
That would be my book. It’s free. And I think I’ll put a backwards copyright on it. If you like this short book, feel free to distribute it. If by some miracle someone pays you for it, keep the money. If you want to say that you wrote it and put it in a book of your own, go ahead. Copywrong Gordon Atkinson 2009
Well, I’m glad we got that out of the way. So, back to what I was saying. It seems that everything we do at our church is the opposite of what so many others are doing.
We do not know how many members we have. You’d think we would, given that there are only around 100 people who attend regularly. We have all the names written down, so we could count the members. And we would if the need ever arose. But the only reason I can think of to count members would be to have an answer when other ministers ask me how many members we have.
When we built our church, we put it back away from the road, hidden by the trees, because the highway is loud and ugly. And we thought quiet and pretty was better for worship. Everyone, including the City Building Inspector, said we were making a huge mistake. “You want to be on the road where people can see your church.” We thought about that, but we all agreed that we’d prefer quiet and beauty for worship. If there is a right and wrong to this, and we’re wrong, then I pray the Lord will forgive his silly servants.
Many churches are concerned about locking their doors and keeping their possessions safe. And many have valuable possessions, so I think they are right to do so. We, on the other hand, having nothing much of value inside the building, hand out keys to just about everyone. If someone wants to do a wedding at our church, I give them a key, tell them to come and go as they like, and ask them to clean up when they’re done. I usually get the keys back from them eventually. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never counted the keys. It does seem that we keep having to make new ones, now that I think about it. There might be 50 or 60 people out there with keys to our church.
We do not pay for marketing. We don’t have a yellow pages ad. We don’t have a sign down the road. We don’t hand out leaflets. I want to be honest about this: We tried those things early on. It felt bad doing them. And not much happened. So we put our energy elsewhere and trust people will find us naturally, and they do. They hear about us somehow, or they find us on our website, which was designed for free by a member. Sometimes people see our sign as they drive by. Ironically, we get some people who pull into the parking lot to see if there really IS a church back there somewhere.
This next one is a little embarrassing to me because other ministers sometimes ask if we have a ministry plan. Then I feel like a slacker when I tell them we don’t. I think we wrote a mission statement (or was it a vision statement?) back in the 90s. We found it to be a pretty useless document, and now it is long forgotten. I could probably dig up a copy in the archive box if anyone wants to see it.
We have a fireplace in our worship room. There is no stage or pulpit or fancy stuff up front. After 10 years of preaching on the floor, in front of the fireplace, not more than a yard or two from one of my friends, pulpits and stages scare me. I got asked to preach in big church recently. A REALLY big church. I had a hard time because the people were so far away from me. My way of preaching really only works if you are within arms length of someone you love.
And finally this. We have no long-range planning committee. We used to do that, but when everything started turning out the opposite of what we thought, that kind of faded away. We have no idea what the future holds. We don’t know what would happen if half the church left. We don’t know how we would handle a sudden influx of 50 people. We don’t know if we will exist in 20 years. We don’t know what God wants to do with us. We do have a calendar so we can see when the next youth campout is. Sometimes the calendar is up to date. Mostly it is. We really live week to week.
Everything is backwards and upside down. Everything seems to be the opposite at our church.
After reading this, I’m pretty sure some people are going to say, “Yes, and that’s exactly why you only have about 100 people at your church.”
And they’re right, you know. There’s no doubt about it. They are absolutely right.
Gordon Atkinson
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When a friend of mine came with me one time, she said, “Huh, ADD church.” And I said, “By God, you’re right! No wonder I love it.” Except I mean the good parts of ADD, of which there are, surprisingly to most people, many. Yes, the service is broken up into short bits, which works well for me. But there’s also being in the moment; focusing on a very few, very important things; and the process being more important than the results. I like that Covenant can embrace the old things that are good and see how they work with the new things that work for it too in a way that churches so wedded to the old or the new can’t.
The seats saved for late people are good, too.
A church that is relational, built on love, only 100 members??? aghast… My heart, My heart… it resonates so well with this!.
Last I read in the bible, and I am a fairly regular reader of the word, Jesus said “go and do likewise” as in love on another.. share with one another… get neck deep with one another… not buld a mega church, grow by 10 percent a year to keep paying the morgage and steal church goers from other churches at all cost.
Keep at it… should I ever be in San Antonio you can count use as your 103rd members…if you actually counted.
Having been a “church” member almost-minister-I discovered that it takes an enormous amount of energy just to maintain the machinery of “church”. The spirit is somehow caught in the gears and is rarely seen again. I asked why my church needed to grow and the answer I got was to meet the budget, keep the lights on and to get more volunteers. I don’t go very often.
I will continue to seek a community such as yours. You spoke of vision statements being discarded. You don’t need them if you are living it.
Dana Point, Ca
We were members of a suburban church for a few years; I sang in the choir but didn’t get too involved in much else. This congregation went through one identity crisis after another. During one of these, a consultant associated with our denomination led a workshop to help us figure out who we were and where we wanted to go next.
As part of the workshop, we broke into groups of 3 or 4 and discussed the topics that he gave us. I was shocked to hear the institutional enervation that the active congregation members felt. Just keeping the institutionalized programs running was draining them. There was no joy any longer in their service, just obligation. No wonder the church had identity crises.
A couple years later, I offered to form a youth choir. I learned, the hard way, that it was really about 20% music and 80% people skills that I don’t possess. I sucked at leading it, the kids didn’t enjoy it, so we stopped after a our few-month try at it. Live and learn.
A few months later, as the church were filling leadership slots for the coming fall’s youth programs, I heard people saying that we needed to find another youth choir director–because now we have a youth choir. I told them that if nobody felt called to lead it or the youths weren’t asking for it, then we should not have another youth choir. Institutional inertia reared its head again. Cajoling an already harried member to lead it just because we’d tried it for a few months recently was a poor idea.
We finally left that church due to these issues. Our neighbors are still active in the congregation. Every summer the last few years, the wife/mother in the family has led Vacation Bible School. Each time, she has declared for months afterward that was her last time to lead it, and then each time, she’s volunteered again when nobody else would do it. Sad.
I love this.
ahhh…. to this i’d add: [no secretaries, no janitors, no paid cooks, no committees, no parking lot attendants, no sound engineers, no greeters].
This was truly beautiful to read. I’ve been subscribed to the HCB feed for a few days, but of the few posts I’ve read, none of them really inspired me to comment (even though I enjoyed them).
This time, it’s different. You know, our church has far fewer regular attendants than yours (there used to be more, but there are very few members from those days that are still alive, and few have joined to replace them). It isn’t totally institutionalized, in the sense that there is no notable, active community outreach (we handed over the sponsorship of the nursing home next door to another denomination almost two weeks ago–a nursing home my church built). But although there seems to be no unified effort to reach those outside the church (there is a mission statement, which is very generic and to which no one pays any mind), within the church, there is hardly any life left. The strange thing is, it seems as if we are trying to behave in that “churchy” way, but at the same time, can’t seem to agree on how to do it. It doesn’t seem to occur to most to do it the way they did it in the apostolic church. ~_~
What I wouldn’t give to have a real family like you have.
Don’t mistake, now, I do have friends in the church. I am close enough to a few of them that I we have been mistaken for an actual blood-related family. Didn’t upset me at all.
But the vast majority of the church is distant and lifeless. It is a distressing condition. I can’t help but think about it every now and then, and think that it is like a dictionary example of the Laodicean church. The worst part of it is the fact that most will acknowledge this, and yet still do nothing about it.
I am going to copy that little Q-card of yours and make copies, and distribute them at my church. Oh, I’m sure plenty read their Bibles (more than me, I’d wager), but the part about long conversations may just strike a chord. Some attempt to do this, but most? Sadly, not. I admit I am one of them (though I am not without reasons, being that I have no car, but I really am not an especially outgoing person). I won’t be putting your name on it (though I won’t claim it as my own words, either), because it is my opinion that those words come from God.
The Lord continue to bless you and your congregation.
long conversations over meals …..yum
Read the Bible. Pray. Talk … love.
Sounds like a good mission statement to me.
I love this post because it resonates in me–loving, sharing all things in common, going from house to house–these are my verbs. But I also work at my church doing the very things your church has chosen not: marketing, or as we call it here: communications.
It’s something I wrestle with on a regular basis, how can I communicate to the world that we’re here and they’re welcome, and yet retain the quiet, communal feel of our church. One of the ways I’ve worked to do this is to only use in-house material. We use photos of people here, relevant, real people. I use the local print shop, building relationship with the printers there, instead of going to Kinkos or Office Max, or something larger. I contract work out to the artists, web coders, and copy-editors within our congregation, giving them a sense of ownership and togetherness with what people see when they see our church.
I think it’s possible to do these things and yet still retain the real community feel–it’s possible to grow (we do multi-site churches, so that no one campus is more than a few hundred people) and still feel connected. At least that’s what I hear from the people passing through these doors: “we’ve never met people who love one another so much”, “we’ve never felt the spirit of God more”, “we’ve never had so many questions about church and God and salvation and community answered.”
It takes a bold measure of intentionality though, and a large amount of single-mindedness. As soon as I make community or love or marketing or salvation or cool designs the goal, I’ve lost sight of Christ. He, and His Kingdom, are the single goal.
About the key thing–wow, yes! We know all about that! Someone was just mentioning to me the other day that there are probably 100+ keys floating around to our church building!
lore,
i really liked reading what you had to say here.
the part that struck me the most …
“It takes a bold measure of intentionality though, and a large amount of single-mindedness. As soon as I make community or love or marketing or salvation or cool designs the goal, I’ve lost sight of Christ. He, and His Kingdom, are the single goal.
thanks
Sounds like an amazing place to me. I only wish more churches were like this. Unfortunately, they seem to all be headed the way of big budgets, marketing plans, and building plans. That to me sounds more like a multi-national conglomerate, not church.
Keep up the great work Gordon!
M
Sounds wonderful. Organic, relationship driven and focused on god’s word and prayer.