Writing from the US, Josh Moody aspires to be an evangelical Alistair Cooke as he begins a series ...
Ask an Englishman to imagine an American church and he will no doubt think of a lot of people. Rows upon rows of seats, expensive car parks, exuberance, show, vigour, success, and, of course, a lot of money.
There certainly are churches in America sort of like that. Some churches here have multi-million dollar mission budgets. But there is a lot of smoke and moonshine.
For instance, in England if a church cites its membership at, say, 40, we assume that average attendance on a Sunday is considerably higher than that. Membership is the inner sanctum, well at least the inner core basis of the church. In America it is quite common to talk of churches with 500 members, or something, when in fact the vast majority of those have not attended church there in several months, perhaps years. Membership of churches is collected by some, like people collect membership at clubs.
On the other hand, there certainly is a Bible belt. But it is a belt. There are, I am reliably informed, places in America, like the mid-west or in the south, where on a Sunday morning at 11 am if you have happened to wander the streets you would find them empty. Everyone is in church.
But then, there are also other parts of America where, and this I know from experience, you can wander through the town and see church upon church (building) with very few people, if any, inside at the witching hour on a Sunday morning. A colleague in this region has received death threats for teaching the Bible.
Cutting the shine
The odd thing, though I suppose inevitable, is that most of those American pastors that we hear of in England actually do come from the Bible belt. They have the money to finance lengthy absences of their pastor on preaching tours or writing books etc. This is worth noting because, when someone tells you of their great success story of building a church from nothing, you really need to know where that church is located. One great hero of mine who I heard in England talking about reaching out to this generation etc. I've found has his church where there are several other churches within a mile or two of his which are quite as large, and actually considerably larger.
This cuts some of the shine off that transatlantic advice. It was Bishop Stephen Neil in his history of Christian missions who noted that it is apparent that throughout the history of the church when the church has grown so has everything else. It seems people come to a point, under the sovereign hand of God, where they are brought to desire spiritual truth, and they are ready to hear the gospel, as well as other religious messages.
If you live and work in a place where most people are going to go to some sort of religious service every now and then, you are faced with an interesting choice. What do you do to attract people to your church? You either go mainline and attract as many as possible.
Or you carve a niche and say 'we're different from them (and therefore better) because of so and so emphasis that we have'. Quite a lot of the rather acute, hair-splitting, theological distinctions being painfully worked out in America seem to come from a need to establish a market niche. If everyone buys trucks you need to sell not just trucks, but better trucks, faster trucks, redder trucks, bigger trucks, and so on.
What we have to offer...
Now this is not to say that we English have nothing to learn from our American purpose-driven brethren. We do. We must be humble. But we also have something to offer to the global Christian community. Not the least of which is myth exploding 'don't-take-yourself-too-seriously' biblical teaching.
Which reminds me of one of my newly born child's great grandmother's humorous sayings: 'with friends like these who needs enemas'.
Josh Moody, an English pastor of a Baptist church in New Haven near Yale University, is author of Authentic Spirituality.
