Conversion: How God Creates a People (9marks: Building Healthy Churches) by Michael Lawrence

Author:Michael Lawrence [Lawrence, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL109000/REL030000
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2017-06-30T05:00:00+00:00

5

Distinct, Not Designed

Implications for the Corporate Life of the Church

Remember before there were designer jeans? You went to the store and bought a generic pair of jeans because that’s all there was.

That changed in the mid-1970s. I remember it mattered to the kids at school what the label said on the back of your jeans. Brands became an essential way of saying who you were and which group you belonged to.

Yet the desire to belong to a group wasn’t invented in the 1970s. Branding simply gave us a new tool to do what people have been doing for millennia. People have divided themselves one way or another at least since the Tower of Babel. Being with people “like us” makes us feel safe, understood, and appreciated. There’s less conflict when we’re all the same. So culture divides into class. Class subdivides according to lifestyles. Pretty soon, the concerts and the bowling alley and the shooting range and the churches became filled with “folk like us.”

Building on the church-growth theories of missionaries like Donald McGavran, church leaders in the twentieth century discovered they could grow their churches more quickly by dropping the “one size fits all” approach. So began what we might call the designer church movement. These days there are Boomer churches, Gen-X churches, and millennial churches. We have suburban churches complete with theater seating and cup holders as well as gritty urban hipster churches that look like the club down the street. In most cases the goal is to make the church feel less “churchy” and to reach a particular niche market. So programs mirror the natural interests of the target audience. The staff dress like cultural insiders. And to all appearances, the strategy works. The largest churches in America all follow this principle. After all, like attracts like. And birds of a feather really do flock together.

But is it Christian?

The biblical doctrine of conversion actually teaches something different. It teaches that Christians and churches should be distinct, not designed. We should be set apart from the world, not conformed to it. And it’s a church’s distinctness that gives credence to the truth of our message.

Now as a child of fundamentalism, I want to be quick to acknowledge that this distinctness has often been pursued in wrong-headed ways. We’ve worn different clothes, avoided cards and movies, looked down our noses at non-Christians, and then taken a foolish pride in those things as marks of our holiness. Yet Scripture isn’t interested in our styles and preferences, but in the quality of our lives and our loves. The doctrine of conversion means that a church should be a distinct community.

A Distinct Community

Throughout the Bible God calls his people to be distinct. From the garden, to Noah’s Ark, to God’s people in Egypt and the wilderness, to Israel in the land, to Peter who describes the church as “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet. 2:11), the Scriptures call God’s people to distinct lives, even as they invite the nations to join them. The trouble is, too often we want to be like the world.

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