Many of you may have already read this excellent post from David Fitch on how to lead a congregation out of ingrained habits of Christendom. Fitch shares nine habits that the church ought to “kindly” reject, along with nine corresponding missional virtues to instill into the life of the congregation. When you visit David’s blog be sure to subscribe to his feed, while his posting is often infrequent, when he writes it is always worth reading.
Speaking of worth reading, if you are not familiar with Fitch’s book The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies, then here is a short review I did on the book a couple of years ago:
Fitch’s overall intention in the book is to show how modernity has transformed clear gospel teaching into modernistic trends, he does this by looking at eight areas including success, evangelism, leadership, the production of experience, preaching, justice, spiritual formation, and moral education. Then the “task” of the book is to (1) examine the ways we have “given away” being the church to modernity by allowing its influence to individualize, universalize, syncretize, and commodify the tasks, truths, and even the very salvation we have been given as a people from god through Jesus Christ, and (2) to offer practices to evangelicals by which we may receive back being the church, the people of God ruled by Jesus as Lord in resistance to such modern influences.
With each of the eight areas of discussion there are clear strengths to be found in the explanation and solutions offered, however the strongest areas of the book include the chapters dealing with success, evangelism and spiritual formation. With the topic of success, Fitch contends that we measure success by size because we have accepted the modern values of individualism and efficiency.
Instead, success should be measured by measuring faithfulness rather than size. With the topic of evangelism he states that we rely on arguments, presentations, and proofs in our Gospel presentations, rather than embodying the reality of Jesus Christ being lived within our churches.
And with spiritual formation we have accepted therapy and psychology, and in many cases have substituted these for the biblical practices of confession, repentance, and speaking the truth in love in the context of community. Additionally, the book includes over thirty pages of excellent notes for further study and reflection.
I have also found Fitch’s book helpful (I read it for a class awhile back). His criticism of the church measuring success as the world does (namely, numbers) continues to resonate with me; I agree that churches should focus more on qualitative evaluation and less on quantitative evaluation. Frustratingly, counting numbers is easier than measuring ministry qualitatively, and I suspect this fact is a large part of why many churches continue (for the most part) to evaluate quantitatively.
Josh, thanks for stopping by. Yes I think you are right that it is probably easier. It is also want we do in corporate/business America and unfortunately that is the “model” we often follow in the church.