Is Your Church a Company or a Family?

Begin with the answer: “There is no substantive difference between a church and a retail store.” A church is a business entity designed to sell a product (Christianity). It does so by advertising its product to non-customers to convince them to come into the store (the sanctuary) a first time in order to sample the wares. This outside advertising needs to emphasis the positives of the church, promising to meet some need of the prospective customer. Once the prospective customer is inside, the church needs to encourage return visits by making sure the product is appealing and enjoyable. The CEO (pastor or priest) of the church needs to be charismatic, making sure that people are eager to come back and hear more next week. Once a customer enters the building, the experience needs to be catered to ensure that this is indeed a great shopping experience, that the product is of uniformly entertaining quality. It is also helpful if the structure of the church is a pyramid sales model; the customers can move up in the organization and become part of the sales team, and those who are most successful at sales can ultimately be promoted to the senior management team and have regular meetings with that charismatic CEO, hearing the CEO’s latest vision for advancing the organization.

If that vision of church sounds enticing, then congratulations, there are many many opportunities out there for your entertainment pleasure.

Skye Jethani hopes you reacted to that description with disgust. What if Jesus Was Serious About the Church? is an exploration of a better model for the church. The church is a family.

Jethani has been around the church in a wide array of capacities for some time. Currently, he is the straight man on The Holy Post podcast with his funny man sidekick cohost Phil Vischer (of Veggie Tales fame). You don’t have to listen to that podcast for very long to realize that Jethani is clever and highly (very highly) opinionated. (The Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator loves said podcast, by the way, so many of my car journeys have been filled with Jethani’s thoughts.)

One of Jethani’s recent projects has been the What If Jesus Was Serious? books. This is the third installment in that series. Organized as short, pointed reflections on an array of topics, the series reaps the benefits and pays the costs of a long set of short three page long reflections. On the plus side, this allows Jethani to make his arguments with very little build up and no need to force a connection from one part to the next. “If Jesus was Serious…Then We Gather to See Through One Another’s Eyes” is followed by “If Jesus was Serious…Then the Church Gathers for Community, not a Concert” and preceded by “If Jesus was Serious…Then We Must Not Give Up on Meeting Together.” Chapter by chapter, Jethani zeroes in, makes his point, and ends the chapter. Since author has strong opinions, most of the individual chapters are thought-provoking. But that leads to the weakness of the form. There is simply no time to build some arguments in three pages. When you agree with Jethani, you think it is a powerful short statement of Truth. When you disagree…well, you wish The Holy Post podcast had a call-in portion so you could at a minimum ask him to explain or sometimes explain to him why he is a bit off.

So, what is the overall argument of this book? As I noted above, Jethani argues that the church is better thought of as a family than as a corporation. The reflections are loosely grouped into five larger sections. He begins noting that the church is like a family reunion. When you are crafting a business, you can imagine your ideal customers and seek them out. When you have a social club, you can offer membership to the people with whom you want to socialize. When you go to a family reunion, however, you have that Uncle whose opinions you can’t stand, and that Cousin with zero social skills, and that Great Aunt who is infirm and might die any day, and that Niece who is flirting with alcoholism. Of no small importance in the modern age, the family is where you have people with radically different political opinions, and because this family is the church, you have to find a way to remember that what unites Christians is of far more importance than what divides us.

Jethani goes on to note that when the family gathers, it is the meal which brings us all together. That meal at the church family is Communion. We remember Christ’s death by jointly partaking of his body and blood. “If Jesus was Serious…Then His Table Should be More Revered than the Pastor.” Who would argue with that? Yet, in the life of many churches, the table is relegated to something of second or third or fourth level importance. But, the Eucharist should remind us that we are part of something much larger than ourselves, the church is the body of Christ, united with all the other churches in the world both now and in the past.

All of which leads to the question of what we are doing at the family gathering on Sunday mornings. If you are showing up for a floor show, then you have missed the point of a church service. If entertainment is the goal of the service, then once again, something is strongly amiss. Churches spend far too much time dreaming up ways to ape the modern forms of entertainment, forgetting that if this is a family gathering, if this is the body of Christ, then the point of the gathering is not to separately entertain everyone who is there. You go to church to meet others and worship God together, sharing in one another’s sorrows and joys. You go to church not just to have people minister to you, but also and of equal importance to minister to others.

This, Jethani notes, is the family business. This is the role of the family servants. The family does not need a new vision statement. It does not need a celebrity CEO delivering charismatic messages to reach a preselected group of people. If Jesus was serious about the church, then “worship is about seeing God’s intrinsic value, not his usefulness,” “true worship is about relationships, not rituals,” “the church’s mission requires the church’s unity,” and “the church shouldn’t just be strong, it should be anti-fragile.”

Why read this book? This is not a book to read because Jethani has the definitive answers to all the questions. (I am pretty certain he would completely agree.) The reason to read the book is that Jethani does a fantastic job asking the questions. This is a book designed to make you think about your congregation and your relationship to your congregation, and ultimately your relationship to the holy, catholic and apostolic church.

If you read this book because it raises the questions in thought-provoking ways and then read Jethani’s ruminations in a generous and thoughtfully critical way, you will learn much. If Jesus was serious about the church, then he really wants you to be thoughtful in thinking about his body, the Church.

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