the running reverend
Josh Rhone is a husband, father, pastor, seminarian, and follower of Jesus who is trying to figure out how to best walk in the way of love.
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At this very moment I am sitting in bed typing away on my iPad while watching reruns of MacGyver on Netflix. As I watch I can’t help buy chuckle. In this particular episode MacGyver has been buried in an avalanche. Someone, using just the handful of items he finds on his person, he manages to survive.
As a kid, I was amazed by MacGyver’s ingenuity and his ability to patch together a solution to whatever problem he might be presented with in a particular episode. Then, it was good TV. Now, however, it is both irritating and laughable.
It hit me as I was watching tonight’s laughable rerun that many a pastor and a church operate from an ecclesiological paradigm that is very MacGyver-like. The shifting tectonic plates of culture collide causing an avalanche that seemingly buries the church alive.
The church and/or its leaders survey their surroundings looking for some “thing” that will keep them alive. Some thing that will allow them to hang on at least a little while longer until help comes.
In more than a few instances that “thing” has been a convenient and easy to digest theology (e.g. the “prosperity gospel”) that fills the pews for a time.
Other handy solutions have presented themselves in the form of material and/or programs that have worked in another church. “If it has worked before,” the argument goes, “Surely it will work again and breathe new life into our situation.”
When times get tough and the pews get barren, the church gets resourceful.
Unfortunately, these changes, born out of necessity, are often reactionary. As such they tend to be based upon “what works.” “What works,” however, has a short lifespan. What works, and draws crowds to fill the pews one week, may not the next week. What works, and results in a need for bigger buildings, may not work a year down the road, resulting in a big but empty building that has mortgage and utility payments that still need to be made.
The MacGyver approach to church ecclcan (and does) work for a time.
There is a time and a place for the MacGyvers. There is a need for them.
But this world, God’s kingdom, and the church also need those who do more than simply improvise and react when a crisis comes.
