"c"hurch No More

I think the use of the word "church" should be banned for 5 years in North America. I preached a sermon one time explaining the difference between the big "C" Church made up all followers of Jesus around the world and little "c" churches that we use to describe our individual local congregation that may or may not include followers of Jesus. And I still see a lot of confusion between the two. In fact, I was recently listening to a nationally know author speak and he mixed the two freely and had them mixed up in the same sentence. So, until we get it straight, I propose banning the use of the little "c" church from our vocabulary.

Every church name would have to relate to THE Church. No "Community Church" or "First," "Second," or "Third Church." Every church name would start with "The Church That Meets at ____________," where the blank would be the street address. Our church could no longer be called "ZUB Church" but would be named "The Church That Meets At 3092 W. Broadway."

Sure, it would cause a lot of problems. Just the website confusion alone would be a major headache. But maybe we would finally start thinking straight about the Church.

Where Do You Grow?

I've been processing some thoughts on the environments where we grow in our relationship with God. Here is a diagram of the concept.



















The larger the circle the larger the impact the indicated environment has on your spiritual growth. In this diagram "Personal Bible Study" has the biggest impact and a relationship with a "Mentor" has the smallest impact. This is just an example so in real life there would probably be several more environments and the sizes would be different for each individual person.

The thought is that each person needs a number of environments where we can grow in our relationship with God. Some of the environments may serve other purposes so just because they are small doesn't mean they have less value. The church can help people by making learning environments available for people.

But to do so we also need to understand that everyone is at a different point on a continuum with regard to their desire to grow. Consider the following diagram.








Individuals would fit all along this continuum. A learning environment that included people from a wide range of this continuum would have a smaller impact on an individuals spiritual growth because to include everyone the environment would probably need to target its purpose and activities to meet a broad range of desire. An environment that included individuals that also fit fairly close together on the continuum would be able to focus more and would therefore probably have a greater impact on the individual's growth.

Environments could also have greater impact the farther the members of the environment are toward the "Highly Motivated" end of the continuum because these individuals would be more likely to accept a purpose and activities for the environment that targeted spiritual growth. Individuals toward the "casual" end would tend to favor other purposes and activities for the environment.

Practically, we can set expectations for an environment, and avoid a lot of frustration, if we are aware of these factors. If we create an environment that consists of individuals from a wide range on the continuum we should realize that we are probably not going to get high impact spiritual growth from that environment. Instead we can use that environment to build community, nudge individuals in the direction of growth, etc. On the other hand, if we create an environment that is made up of a group of individuals that all come from a region far to the right on the continuum we can expect that this environment will need to challenge the individuals to grow or they will probably quickly lose interest.

Just thinking out loud.