Dysfunctional Ecclesiology

I am sitting at a demographic encounter. The speaker right now is telling us of the demise and prosperity of the churches within  New Orleans because of Katrina. Many churches in N ew Orleans, as well as the MS gulfcoast, were either completely destroyed or seriously incapacitated. A He has  spent some time showing us pictures of the damaged buildings and demolished buildings. One remark that immediately stood out to me was, “the church could not function after Katrina until certain Baptist Conventions and national churches came and helped them to rebuild and function again”.

Major question: can today’s church not function without a building?  Is a church not a church unless it has a building?  Does it not seem strange that we have celebrated rebuilt buildings more than rebuilt lives? Why is our stansdard of measurement how many people we can cram into the building rather than it being how many missionaries (Christ followers) we are sending out?

It could be argued that many of these churches were incapacitated even before Katrina came. When you see the lack of community impact, the growing rate of unchurched along the gulfcoast and in

  New Orleans before Katrina, it argues that Katrina did not incapacitate the church, it did the church a favor by pushing it out of its sanctuary and into the mission field. Like a mother bird does in pushing the young ones out of the nest to get them to fly, Katrina did the church a favor.   

Finally, the speaker is getting to the heart of success as he shows the meeting place of congregations that, because of the mission opportunities provided by Katrina, were able to continue with a strong community presence. Katrina opened ministry opportunities that they used as open doors to make disciples among those in the community. The post-Katrina congregation is stronger because the church functioned. It functioned through the storm, after the storm, and now even without a building. The rebuilt walls only serve to make the gathering of the church more convenient. But, a healthy congregation will function without regard to where. As one pastor very ably replied when asked where his church was, “What time is it now?”

This entry was posted on 29. April 2008 at 11:49 and is filed under Missional Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.