Summary thought for the day

I thought I'd break out of the monotony of the CPM universal elements to make a short post about CPM as a whole. I read this concept in Alan Hirsch in his book "The Forgotten Ways", and I think it is right on the money.

When you look at broad CPMs like the first century church or the Chinese church of the last several decades, two truths emerge from these movements. First, following Jesus was very hard even to the point of requiring your life. Second, 'doing' church was very simple.

I think the Bible backs this up. Jesus never made following him easy. In fact, he asks very hard things such as requesting that the rich young ruler sell all he owns. The Bible does not make church difficult. In fact, it spends very little time at all describing the organizational specifics of the church. When the church structure is brought up, it is normally reactionary - reacting to something happening within a local church at that time. The Bible spends very little time telling us how to organize a church from scratch.

Here is where things get troubling to me. What do we generally do today? We do the opposite. We make following Jesus very easy, often reducing it to simply praying a prayer. And we make church very complicated. We have denominations, and leadership structures, and positions of authority, and big budgets, and programs, and committees. You almost need an MBA just to start a church these days.

So ... why do you think the number of people actively involved in church has not grown (as a percentage of population) in the US over the last several decades? Maybe this is a part of it.