Well Rebecca and I just got home from visiting a church in our new home here in Rome and we are both so excited. The worship wasn’t great, really there wasn’t anything on the surface appealing about the place. No one tried to market the place to us. No one was selling us the church or immediately trying to plug us in. From the view point of many churches I’ve been involved with, this place would sadly be described as a miserable failure.
But they’re not because they seem to get it. It being that the most important thing is the Gospel. Many churches try their best to mold themselves as much as they can to whatever culture they’re attempting to reach. This place, from our first impression seems to get that it’s the other way around . . . that we are to imitate Christ as the body of Christ, we’re not to be showy. The scripture teaches us that there wasn’t any thing visually appealing about Christ, nothing that would attract people to him. The Church as the aroma of Christ is meant to point people to the Gospel, not church culture.
I’m not belittling the necessity of marketing, only the use of marketing as a ploy. If you show up at a church as a lost person and everything you experience there is simply just a show imitating everything the world does and is (even in the purest form you can come up with), then what have you really gained? What is there to experience that is any different from what you experience every day? Sure it may be fun, you might be entertained, and you may enjoy the time spent there, but in the end you haven’t experienced the community of Christ, but the communion of the church imitating culture just to get you to feel comfortable enough to come back again. The use of culture to reach culture should never never never be elevated above the importance of the Word and the Gospel–which have no culture.
This place seems to get the Gospel, they seem to be very missional–planting other churches and partnering to see other nations impacted by the gospel. They taught from the Word, not from opinion or feelings or convenience.
Anyways, I’m very wary of speaking too soon about a place because of past experiences, but so far so good. Looks like we’ll be sticking around. I’ll keep you updated with our experiences there and might even mention the name of the place and give concrete examples of what exactly gives me this “sense” i speak of as time goes by.