I just read an article this morning that compared and contrasted a couple of churches by the same name and a few things occurred to me. If you want to read the original article by Eric Geiger, the link is http://ericgeiger.com/2014/09/tale-two-mars-hills/#.VAcNF2RdXKU.
The article is about both Mars Hill churches that have basically lost their pastors for different reasons. While I am not writing THIS article to criticize either of these pastors (God forbid I put myself in the place of the Almighty and begin to cast my own judgment on those who are just as flawed as myself), I do have a couple of observations of church in general that might be relevant. I'm probably wrong in just about everything, but here I go anyway.
I have a question. Why are so many "popular" megachurch pastors seeming to have difficulty and failing in today's church? I'm not naming names, but you can do a quick internet search and come up with a number of names and churches that have suffered fallen pastors in the last ten years. I realize that we hear about them because they are "popular" megachurch pastors and that small, unknown pastors fail just as much, but the "big" ones seem to be really dropping like flies or getting caught up on controversy regularly. Are the churches getting too big? Are they getting so big and "popular" that they begin to believe their own hype? I think it's a GREAT thing that large churches plant smaller churches, but is it really church planting? Is the church planting that is happening focused on Kingdom building or empire building? What I mean is that it seems to me that some of the larger churches have begun, over recent years, to open up what seem to be franchises rather than planting independent churches. Maybe I am totally wrong and the churches that, Mars Hill in Seattle for example, has planted are totally independent and have nothing to do with the mother church outside of sharing the name, but I would bet that this is not the case. There are pastors who had to sign a no compete clause to leave Mars Hill just so they would not minister within a ten-mile radius of Mars Hill in Seattle, so I can't imagine that the mother church just supported the daughter churches until they were healthy and then just completely let go.
Why can't a church just plant a church, give it a different name from the mother church, set up and train a completely independent staff, be a resource when times get tough, and just let the church be a church that is ministering in the Kingdom of God on its own? Why does the planted church have to be a part of the conglomerate of churches? Why does the church have to simulcast that one guy to all of its campuses in order to control a message?
Years ago, I sat at a church planting conference in Lynchburg behind these two kids who were probably in school at Liberty University (not knocking Liberty, mind you. I received my M.Div from there. Great school.) I honestly heard one of them say the following: "When I get invited to come back to speak at one of these conferences and they ask me how my church was so successful, I'm gonna be like, 'I don't know. It was just God!" Now, on the surface, that seems fine and innocent and even humble by giving credit to God for church growth. I didn't take it that way, though. The inflection and focus was not even ON God in the conversation. It felt dark and selfish. When did church planters become rock stars and cease to become ministers? Why do we all need to plant a church, write a book, and go multi-site in order to feel worthy of our position in the Kingdom? Now I'm not saying all of that is BAD, but it feels like a slight shift in focus. "When I get invited back..." is about ME and not about God. If my ambition is to be invited to a church conference as a speaker, then am I doing this for the right reason? If I need to have an empire of ten churches, all of which broadcast MY message during the week, am I becoming a narcissistic overlord? More importantly, does the church get so big that I cannot focus on actually ministering and have to become a politician in order to get anything done, thereby losing time to actually do ministry and maintain my relationship with God? Does the church machine become so big and my name becomes so intertwined with it that I just break under the pressure and compromise morals and theology?
I don't know. Maybe I'm just being a jerk, or a hater. Maybe MY focus is wrong. Maybe I really do need to focus on using any avenue that I can to grow the church and make Jesus famous. That's all fine and I agree with that. But do I really NEED to do that by growing a church empire that has ten different churches that have the same name? At some point, won't my personality become a distraction to the Kingdom to a point that I couldn't get out of the way of church growth even if I wanted to? What if I just ministered in my church, planted churches that could stand on their own two feet, empowered the pastors and staff of those churches, and just cheered them on as we all work together to build the Kingdom and move it forward. I don't need to LEAD those planted churches if they have qualified leaders. I need to FIGHT alongside them. Maybe instead of building an empire of church conglomerates, we need to build a Kingdom of armies that will fight and bleed TOGETHER in the name of Christ. Anyway, that's just my two cents.
