(Editors’ note: this article was originally published by Paul Tripp)
Maybe you noticed this on Easter. Perhaps your sanctuary or worship center was far fuller than a typical Sunday. Maybe you saw the “Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday” population make their way to church for their semi-annual visit.
Praise God that they are hearing the gospel, but this article is not a cultural critique about that passive demographic. No, it’s a critique and exhortation for me and for you, who might be passive in ways we don’t even realize.
Would you be humble enough to receive it with me? There’s nothing that I write that I don’t first need to hear myself!
Consumerism Christianity
Many believers think of their church as merely a place to attend rather than as an organic body with which they are intimately involved. They think of church as simply a worship gathering, a weekly religious duty. It is sad, but most pastors seem satisfied with ever-increasing attendance, enough financial giving to fuel church programs, and a small percentage of people who volunteer for episodic ministry. In most churches, the paid staff carries the burden of the church’s spiritual health, while the members happily play their role as recipients.
People move from church to church as though the churches in their community are nothing more than ecclesiastical department stores. They are shopping for just the right preacher, women’s ministry, youth ministry, or worship style. Hordes of Christians have this kind of church lifestyle, and they will, like shoppers, chase the deal of the moment. Maybe that means running after the celebrity preacher, the cool Saturday-night worship band, or the best youth program ever. They are high-expectation, low-commitment attenders, and there is a good chance they will soon be worshiping somewhere other than where they are now.
Pub-Culture Christianity
Many Christians also live inside the church virtually unknown. They slip in and out of the weekly service almost unnoticed. Sure, they will exchange niceties with the people near them, and, if they do so, they will learn a few cursory details about one another’s lives, but they do not really have a relationship with the people with whom they worship. Most of what they call fellowship simply is not. It seldom reaches deeper than the kind of conversation you would have at the local pub.
I think we should just be honest and call it “pubship.” Many Christians live in a Christian community where no one knows the condition of their marriage, their struggles as parents, or the areas in their lives where they feel overburdened and overwhelmed. No one knows what goes on in the private moments of their lives, where they are defeated by temptation again and again, or where they are tempted to doubt the goodness of God. Their life in the church is not the life of an essential member of an organic body of faith, in which each member feels the pain when another member hurts.
Ministry-Free Christianity
Even more believers have no personal commitment to ministry. Sure, they put a little money in the plate to pay for professional staff to shoulder the ministry burden, but they do not live with a ministry mentality. To them, ministry is a formal religious thing conceived, programmed, and scheduled by their church. In this view, if you get involved in ministry, you step out of your life for a moment of ministry and then back into your life. Here ministry interrupts the regular routine, representing an exceptional activity for the spiritually zealous.
How many believers really live a lifestyle that results from believing that God has graced them to be not just recipients of the work of his kingdom but instruments of the work of the kingdom as well? This latter understanding results in a constant-ministry mentality that results in an everyday-ministry lifestyle. Here, ministry is no interruption but an essential part of the normal routine.
American-Dream Christianity
Many more Christians than we would imagine have attached their Christianity to their pursuit of the American dream. Whether they know it or not, they have bought into the cultural definition of success, and they are pursuing the culture’s portrait of the good life: career success, financial ease, a big house, a trendy wardrobe, fancy food, and extravagant vacations. And, because they do, they spend most of their physical, emotional, and spiritual energy gaining, maintaining, keeping, and enjoying these things rather than investing in the eternal treasures of the kingdom of God through the vehicle of their local church. Sadly, the cultural dream is their vocation, while their Christianity is relegated to a religious pastime.
Radical Christianity
We have to ask ourselves why this is the case. Why has this become the regular state of things? Why do so many Christians have such a passive relationship to the church?
Colossians 3:12–17 presents an entirely different analysis of what God has designed the church to be and to do. It is a stinging critique of the passive relationship that most believers have with the church to which they have for the moment committed themselves:
“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 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. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
Colossians 3 might seem very radical to us today, but it was not radical in the context in which it was given. Paul does not introduce this chapter by announcing that radical material is coming. Rather, it’s merely an explanation of God’s normal plan for his people and his church.
Total-Involvement Christianity
I like to call God’s normal plan a “total involvement paradigm.” God has designed that all his people should be involved in his redemptive work all the time. This means that no one is given grace simply to be a recipient; every believer is to be an instrument of that very same grace in the lives of others.
This “total involvement paradigm”—all God’s people should be involved in his redemptive work all the time—sounds radical to us because we have drifted so far from God’s norm for his church. Many Christians’ church attendance is the spiritual equivalent of going to a concert. They regularly go to experience the religious performance of ministry professionals, but they have little commitment to the health of the church or to its work in the world. Their relationship to the church is self-focused (“Here is the kind of church I want to attend”) and passive (“I am so thankful for the good work our church staff does”).
Earth-Bound Christianity
Why are so many Christians self-focused and passive in their relationship to the local church? The answer is found in the words earlier in Colossians 3:2: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
This verse simplifies this profound struggle down to two possible options. Either one’s heart and mind in shaped by a fundamental awe of the horizontal, physical, created world (“things that are on earth”) or one’s heart and mind lives in a foundational vertical awe of God, his work, his grace, and his kingdom.
If our hearts and minds have been captured by the glories of the physical world’s people, places, experiences, and things, that is where we will invest the majority of our physical, emotional, and spiritual energies. And because we are seeking true happiness and fulfillment here, our relationship to the church and its work, and to our community with other believers, will exist as an adjunct, or add-on, to what our lives are really about.
I think hundreds of thousands of believers live this way. Yes, they are God’s children. Yes, they have been redeemed by his blood and accepted by his grace. But to them, the church is a place that they attend thankfully, but that constitutes no essential aspect of their lives.
If the church is populated with people who have set their minds on the things that are on earth, then the bulk of people in the church will have a passive relationship to the church, and the burden of ministry will fall on the shoulders of a few paid staffers.
Mind-Above Christianity
On the contrary, when our hearts and minds are being progressively captured by the awe of God, his work, his grace, and his kingdom (“things that are above”), we will see the church not just as a place to attend but as a major commitment of our lives, and we will live with a ministry lifestyle in the place where God has put us.
If the church is populated with people who have set their minds on things above, then widespread daily ministry will take place in the hallways, bedrooms, boardrooms, family rooms, and vans of everyday life. There is a direct connection between what kind of awe has captured our hearts and the amount of ministry that occupies our lives.
When awe of God has captured our hearts, ministry will fill our schedules. We will not need the church to schedule ministry for us; we will approach work, marriage, parenting, extended family, friendships, and community with a ministry mentality. Awe of God will free us from thinking of our lives as belonging to us and of ministry as temporarily offering pieces of our lives to God that we will quickly take back when an episode of ministry concludes.
The Future of the Church and You
Here is what we all need to understand: The Church (by which I mean the people, not the institution) does not first have a horizontal strategic problem, such as a people-mobilization or a volunteer-training problem. The church of Jesus Christ has a vertical worship problem. It is not that the church is losing the ministry-equipping war; it is losing the worship war. And, because it is losing the vertical war, very few people participate in very much ministry.
If you have read this article and thought, “Paul, I am one of those passive people,” do not be paralyzed by guilt or regret. No, run to your Redeemer. Confess that which has ruled your heart and cry out for his delivering and enabling grace. And, as you do, remember once again that your Lord will never turn a deaf ear to the cries of one of his children.
You can experience a rejuvenated awe of God that issues forth in a ministry mindset that will transform your church relationships!
— Paul Tripp leads Paul Tripp Ministries. He is a biblical counselor and longtime pastor and has authored dozens of books on theology, Bible, counseling, ministry, and Christian living.
