Longing For The Days of Mega-Ministry, Not Mega-Church
This is an excerpt from John Fountain’s new book, No Place For Me: Letters to the Church in America
This is an excerpt from John Fountain’s new book, No Place For Me: Letters to the Church in America
By John W. Fountain
There was a constant push to raise more money and make financial reports on church anniversaries. The idea that we would someday build a bigger church and maybe leave the storefront behind.
The weekend ritual of selling fish and chicken dinners and the church mothers and sisters working in the piping-hot kitchen at church Saturday after Saturday to make enough dinners to keep pace with the orders delivered by the deacons and other brethren to the community.
No matter how much money we raised, it never seemed enough.
The pressure was always on to raise more money, to set larger financial goals with the idea that someday we might have a big beautiful church with maybe stained glass windows and a huge recording-quality choir. And every seat would be filled and God would be glorified and have set his stamp of approval upon us as evidenced by our growth and prosperity.
In my mind, we morphed into churches for the “found” not for the lost.
What seemed to get lost, however, was any idea of reaching out to help or heal the community. We never had a soul-saving goal. Never counted how many homes we visited. How many sick or infirmed we shared a prayer or a hug with.
We did not engage the community that surrounded us beyond the occasional invitation to come to our church, or to buy our Saturday dinners, or to ask them to support some other fundraiser. It was as if the church existed on an island surrounded by the indigenous people.
And we fortified it with wrought iron fences and steel bars.
We came and went — fellowshipping mostly with other churches who had founded their own isolated little islands in their respective communities. We gathered for local church anniversaries, for pastors’ anniversaries and assorted church celebrations…
And often people in surrounding neighborhoods of the churches where we assembled for any of our particular religious shindigs had no idea of why we were meeting, no real interest in the goings-on and often likely would not have known we were there. Except for the sounds of the service spilling into neighboring streets, or the fact that we had consumed most, if not all of the street parking.
In my mind, we morphed into churches for the “found” not for the lost.
The focus was internal, mostly on sustaining and promoting the church as organization rather than as organic and global and reaching beyond itself with mercy and grace.
By the time I was preparing to return to the University of Illinois that spring of 1984, this much was clear. But I had learned not to say everything I thought to the “saints.” That doing so was to risk the wrath of the elders and God’s elect.
They would have thought me to be a near heretic. But it was what it was.
And what I saw was a falling away from biblical principles, from simple storefronts and small ministries that once had sought to fortify families and friends and had stood as the moral cornerstone, and instead a shift toward an intoxicating movement to build bigger churches with large memberships.
I don’t know that the disintegration was more a conscious decision than it was a reflection of a change in the general cultural tide that washed over churches, like a tidal wave. Some more than others.
But it was clear to me, even back then, that we seemed to be veering more and more from the old time way and, more importantly, from the heart of what we were commissioned long ago to do as the church.
Clear to me, even way back then, that there is a difference between a mega-church and a mega-ministry.
Email: Author@johnwfountain.com
Website: http://www.author.johnwfountain.com
