The summer before my senior year of high school, I surrendered my life to serving God in full-time ministry. In my youthful naiveté, I assumed this would be the thrill ride of my life, strapping in to see God work miracles that could never be attributed to human hands but only to the power of the Spirit at work among his people. While I have seen my share of God moments over my 20-year career, I have also experienced seasons of ineffectiveness in youth ministry and the church at large.
Hours of planning events, recruiting adults, networking with students, developing leadership and rallying support have, at times, been met with ambivalence and apathy from the students my teams have worked so hard to reach. Constant competition for teens with para-church organizations and other larger churches can leave leadership feeling drained and frustrated. At times, it feels like no matter how many resources we pour into our ministry, students don’t seem as interested or as involved as we would like.
Why?
Adam McLane believes the problem lies with church leadership, stating that there is no way a “staff-led church” can reach our communities. At face value, this statement seems logical. However, it also seems to represent our culture’s rejection of institutional authority. Having served in seven different churches over the past two decades, I have experienced the extremes of both staff-controlled leadership and completely volunteer-driven ministry. For me, the answer lies somewhere in between. But are we really asking the right questions? Does the problem actually run deeper than church leadership?
McLane’s comparison between Jesus’ open-source conflict with the religious establishment of his day and the church of today is similar to comparing car brands to airplanes. The religious subsystems before Christ have little to no similarity to the church of today. The whole argument leaves out one important element—the Holy Spirit. The religious leaders of the Old Testament law were not working together with the power of the Spirit to build the kingdom of God on earth. Rather, they unknowingly worked against God to keep his people separated from him. Unleashing an open-source firestorm was the reason Jesus came to earth.
Yet the history of the early church teaches us that God led the disciples and subsequent leadership to clarify and re-clarify what the structure and teaching of the church would be. Open-source ideas brought confusion and heresy in an age when communication and access to Scripture was limited. The Holy Spirit has repeatedly intervened over the past 2,000 years to lead godly men and women to re-center the church on the true meaning of the gospel.
In the greatest example of open-source control in Scripture, the ancient Israelites during the time of the judges repeatedly fell into a pattern of rebellion and sin when they had no national or spiritual leadership. The final verse states, “At that time there was no king in Israel; people did whatever they felt like doing.” (Judges 21:25) In other words, everyone had control and input into the destiny of the nation, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
McLane’s assertion that the church is a “closed, proprietary system in which few people have access, control or power” sounds like a description that someone might give who is looking in from the outside. I cannot think of one church example in my upscale Bible-belt community of a church that limits the ministry of its people by exercising institutional control.
Furthermore, I find nothing in the Bible that teaches that the church should be an open-source gathering of people. In fact, the New Testament teaches that the church is like a body, made up of many parts, and each part is uniquely gifted to build up the believers. Each person has a role; some are to lead; others are to follow. This may seem open source but would better be described as theocratic.
While I passionately believe in the priesthood of the believer, I don’t believe that the church should be an open-source dialogue for leadership and control. To say that the church’s struggle with attendance and growth is an institutional issue may have some merit, but it sounds a bit like complaining that it is rainy or cold. You can complain, but you can’t change the weather.
Is it possible that the issue is not the institution of the church or our current strategies but rather our idolatry to the riches of the western world instead? The places in the world where the church has seen significant decline are the places where wealth and comfort have become the sole pursuit of the culture. Yet the church grows like wildfire in regions of the world where people often don’t have enough to survive day to day. The bottom line is that we don’t need Jesus in America because we have enough wealth and power to control our own destiny. And when you don’t need Jesus, you usually don’t need the church either.
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