Vertical & Horizontal Morality and the mission of the church, Part 3
My church expresses vertical and horizontal faith in a public statement we post on every email we send to our church family: “We are a congregation developing a deeper relationship with God and extending his love to our community.”
Notice the two emphases in that statement: loving God and loving people. That’s vertical and horizontal. We need both a vertical and horizontal faith.
Yet, do we actually live that out in practice, in the real world?
Christians for centuries have emphasized holding worship services in buildings led by professional staff. To put it another way, local Christian churches have essentially created two kinds of companies: a worship production company and a property management company.
The worship production company plans and performs a live musical and spoken word event every week. Our worship production company includes audio/visual equipment, technology, live-streaming, volunteers and professional staff who have gone through years of training, and who practice and perform weekly. Our worship production company puts on a religious experience for an audience.
The property management company maintains the venue that the worship production company uses for its worship productions. Our venue includes property ownership, maintenance, a building, utilities, custodian, rentals, and the like.
Each of these two companies involve numerous meetings, planning, IT, HR, payroll, benefits, revenue, expense, website, social media, and many of the other facets that any business has.
If you look at Faith Church’s budget, what you will find is that the money we spend for those two companies, worship production and property management, makes up most of our expense each year. My guess is that the vast majority of American churches are similar.
And here’s where it gets tricky.
Jesus never asked us to do any of that.
Worship services, buildings, and professional staff are not wrong. But they are not required. We can drift from the mission of Jesus, if we overemphasize the church property, church building, and worship services.
Again, those things are not wrong, as long as we don’t drift from the mission of Jesus and miss out on inner heart transformation. In other words, we could put a lot of time, money, and effort into maintaining a property, building, and paying for staff while at the same time miss out on inner heart transformation that leads to living out the mission of the kingdom in our communities.
Jesus referred to this in Matthew 15, and he has a solution. More on that in the next post.
Photo by NATHAN MULLET on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 