Report Cards, Twitter, and Easter

Since graduating from school a few years back, I have learned that report cards do not stop when you get out of school. Regardless of your domain, people still keep track of how things are going. 

 

Within the church, this is no different. We measure things all the time. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Measures give us some sense of what God is up to in our context and allows us to target areas of intentionality in moving forward.

 

Where measurements can become a problem is when we begin to measure the wrong things.

 

I was reminded of this today during a discussion I had with various pastors in Greenville as we talked about what God was doing in the upstate of South Carolina. During this discussion the comment was made that the problem with the movement of God in the upstate was not relevancy but accessibility.

 

Now, I must admit that at first I disagreed. I mean isn’t the problem that churches are just stale and boring? What we need are more churches doing cooler, hipper things that better reach the next generation. Right?

 

Or is the issue that we need to make the gospel more accessible to people in the natural course of their lives - at the baseball field, the office complex, or the playground. It seems that in order to provide the 1.3 million people that call the upstate home with the repeated opportunity to see and hear the gospel, we should be focusing on releasing the Christians we do have to put the gospel on display in their context without simply trying to invite people to our “relevant” church building.   In an age when Easter messages are being Twittered to congregations, I must admit that I am not convinced that the church that Jesus established should primarily be known as cool and relevant.

 

And if accessibility is the issue then the report card of success changes. Rather than measuring success in terms of gathering, we should start to measure it in terms of releasing. How many people were sent on mission with God today? How much money did we give away? How did we serve our city? How did we put the gospel on display in all the places that the people in our city call home?

 

And this is the brilliance of God in the Gospels. He puts his Spirit in each of His followers and sent them out on mission in the world. The beauty of the church is not in its exceptionality, but rather in its ordinariness. Nothing magical, nothing hip, just ordinary people living sent lives every day.