The holidays are a time of flavor. We walk into Grandma’s house on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and all the spices combine for amazing smells and delicious food — cinnamon, nutmeg, cranberry, butter, garlic, and much more. These are the flavors of the holidays, and they create delicious, memorable holiday experiences.
Similarly, we can ask: What elements should “flavor” a church?
We might think there are some obvious answers: preaching the gospel, evangelism and discipleship, and submitting to the authority of the Scriptures.
But that’s not exactly what we have in mind when we ask our question about flavors of the church. Those things might be the foundation of our delicious meal but what are the various flavors? What are the notes and surprising spices you have to dig a tad deeper to find?
What are the deeper values, the deeper qualities that we want to “flavor” the culture of our church? As we’ve wrestled with our church’s culture, we’ve tried to think about how we “taste” to newcomers and members alike. Three cultural values help shape our ministry philosophy:
1. We want to be simple.
Simplicity can mean a few different things. The “simple” man in the Proverbs is the fool (Prov. 14:15). That’s not the kind of simplicity we have in mind. Rather, we think of simplicity in two ways:
We’re simple as opposed to complicated.
In the early 2000s, Colin Marshall and Tony Payne wrote The Trellis & Vine, using the image of a trellis and a vine to helpfully distinguish between the nature of activities that make up a church’s life. Often, you’ll go to a garden and see a trellis, ornate and beautifully constructed, but a structure built ultimately for one reason: to support the growth of a vine. The authors argue that every local church is a mixture of trellis and vine.
Every church has trellises (structures) in place that support the vine (the people). A local church’s “trellis” would be those things that give shape and support to the vine work: infrastructure, organization, finances, governance, weekly programs, events, meetings, people management, Vacation Bible School, student Bible study, and the like. The trellis is anything that gives framework and structure to help the vine grow.
The vine is the people, specifically their growth in maturity in the Lord Jesus (Col. 1:28). Vine work is seeing people converted, changed, and matured through the preaching of the gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit.
In Matthew 28:18–20, Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
The agenda, priority, and focus of our church and our people is to grow as disciples and make disciples. In other words: vine work, not trellis work.
The tendency in the 21st-century Western church is to focus on trellis work. The air we breathe in the modern world is technique. We’re convinced there’s always some technique, some trick or program just around the corner that can provide the solution to whatever ails us. We’re convinced that growth means constantly reinventing ourselves, optimizing our work, and expanding our reach. Frankly, trellis work is measurable, exciting, and more rewarding in the short-term.
It’s easy to overemphasize the trellis at the expense of the vine. We can lose our vision for the simple work of ministry. Like in the Parable of the Sower, it sometimes feels like the trellis work of the church can be a thorn that chokes out fruit-bearing seed (Mk. 4:7).
We try to be simple. There’s nothing overly complicated or all that program driven; instead, it’s plodding year after year after year. All of the trellis work is vital and absolutely helpful, but it’s not the end in itself. We want to prioritize people over structures and events.
We’re simple as opposed to flashy.
God ordinarily works through (what are to our eyes) pretty mundane things: the Bible, prayer, worship, the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and fellowship. These things are often called the ordinary means of grace. We’re not called to anything flashy or creative, just faithful vine work year after year after year. Watering the vine. Trimming the vine. Watching the vine grow slowly but surely.
One important thing to consider: Does our gathering reflect simplicity by prioritizing those ordinary means of grace?
One absolutely instrumental (pun a little bit intended) practice that we’ve found is singing — specifically, congregational singing.
One current trend that arises from a desire to create a worship experience is: lights off; focus on the stage and an emphasis on the experience. That’s training — week after week — to think of what’s happening on Sunday individualistically. The shape of the service is creating a relational deficit.
Instead, consider turning up the lights, singing songs your people know, and encouraging them to look at one another and sing to one another. Paul sees singing as a community-serving event in the church’s life: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). When asked if we ever have a choir, we joke that we have a choir each and every week: 300 voices singing out together, praising the most holy God. One way we measure church health is by hearing and seeing men and women, boys and girls singing together.
2. We want to be rooted.
We are rooted in three things: Scripture, history, and our community.
Scripture
We submit to the authority of God’s Word. Scripture is what teaches, reproves, corrects, and trains us for righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16). The intake of and submission to Scripture is the way we mature and grow. We increase in our knowledge of God and know everything that pertains to life and godliness as we root ourselves in Scripture (2 Pet. 1:3–4).
History
Church history encompasses 2,000 years — with many ups and downs. We are not the first Christians. We are not reinventing the wheel. There’s great value in learning from Christians who’ve gone before us and have focused on doing God’s work in God’s way. This understanding of historical rootedness helps us determine how we shape our Sunday liturgy every week. We have a call to worship, confession of sin, assurance of pardon, the passing of the peace (we call it “welcome your neighbor”), public reading of Scripture, an extended pastoral prayer, and a benediction so that we always conclude by having God’s Word read over us.
Our Community
We want to invest where God has placed us. We want our people to love and get to know their neighbors. We want to frequent the same restaurants and get to know employees and other customers. We want to serve on community boards and invest in the neighborhood where our building is located. We want to know people to help them know and love Jesus.
We love using Rosaria Butterfield’s idea in The Gospel Comes with a House Key: We want to see strangers become neighbors, and neighbors become part of the family of God. All of these ideas connect closely with our final cultural value.
3. We want to be personal.
We desire to live life together. We desire to experience discipleship in the context of relationship. We want our people to attend the Sunday service consistently and be a regular part of a community group. We want to play, eat, and share time together. We want to study the Bible and read other books together. We want to ask each other the hard questions and pray for one another. We want to make meals for one another. We want to call and text one another to let each other know we’re praying for them.
We prioritize hospitality. We want to put people on our calendar, not events.
Conclusion
We want to have a deep, undivided commitment to Jesus in everything we do. We want our church to be about knowing Jesus and making Jesus known, starting in Greer and going to the ends of the earth. Our encouragement to you is this: Taste and see that the Lord (and His church) is good!
— Aaron Markham and Trevor Hoffman are pastors at Ridgewood Church, Greer, S.C.