Reactive Church

This past weekend Katie and I enjoyed a relaxing trip out of the city, unfortunately to get out of the city we had to endure a trip through the suburbs. One observation remains at the forefront of my thoughts, the further we got outside the city limits the larger the church buildings got. Initially the thought of a mighty God movement comes to mind, God is alive in the suburbs, or so we think.

Unfortunately the realization soon sets in that the Mega Church movement, which is thankfully beginning to die out in the emerging world, was never an explosion of God's moving, but rather it began solely out of reaction to a cultural shift that clearly was an abandonment of God's plan and purposes for the cities.

Looking back on the history of Mega Churches we would be hard pressed to find a suburban church that was "mega" before the influx of housing developments and strip malls. The churches that we look at and the leaders we idolize are merely a reflection of the churches historic inability to be on the leading edge of cultural shifts.

Please note that I am well aware of the many things God has done through this movement and the lives that have been changed by it. I am only stating the obvious that the church seemingly failed society by falling into a consumerist mindset that allowed the suburban sprawl without a single thought for the negative spiritual impact upon the cities.

The church of the modern American era has been a people of reactive or even passive action to cultural problems. It failed to condemn the theft of land and massacre of native Americans, it failed to call for an end to slavery, it never called for equal rights, nor did it call for Christians to stand in the gap for the cities. The church always seems to react to cultural movements instead of being on the front lines fighting for the very least of these.

I was saddened by the site of these large churches, not because of what God has done, but because of the lack of understanding of what was left behind. The church today stands on the threshold of a new age, we call it Postmodernism, the corporate world calls it the Communication age. Regardless of what we call it, the church has a chance to be proactive rather than reactive. I don't entirely know what that means, but I desire to seek the answer.