Yesterday at the blog Church Marketing Sucks Brad Abare said he sees “a growing trend in the number of church leaders who work and serve in their primary church, and then attend a different church for their personal spiritual journey.” Why do church leaders look outside their own church? Abare suggests at least three reasons:
- Place of service is too small. Maybe it’s a church plant or just really small, but for these leaders their primary church just can’t meet all their spiritual and relational needs.
- Place of service is too big. These leaders feel bound by their particular role to the point where they can’t step outside it and freely participate in the church community.
- Place of service is primarily a job. These leaders can’t help but see the church as an employer rather than his or her family.
At first blush, this phenomenon bothers me. To these reasons above, I would ask questions like:
- If the church can’t meet all of your spiritual and relational needs, are you expecting it to meet the needs of the others who are coming?
- Does your role impede your ability to relate to the community because you are placing too much weight on your responsibilities?
- Can you really fulfill your role well without being fully involved in that community?
- Is your perception of the church as employer something that needs to be fixed or fled from?
For someone who is in any kind of a shepherding role, I’m not sure this is even a debate. You are called to watch over and be examples to that flock (Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2-3). Don’t leave it for another, right?
But I wonder if splitting time between multiple churches is something that any Christian should do. Yes, we are a brother or sister in Christ to all believers, not just the ones in our particular congregation. But when we dance between two local bodies, we dilute our relationships in both and, depending on our form of church governance, we complicate the practice of elder oversight (are we accountable to the leaders in both churches? who gets priority?).
More so, we feed our consumeristic tendencies by treating the church as something we pick and choose from, like a buffet dinner. I even wonder if at the buffet we can trust ourselves to get the portions that are best for us–learning to praise God in spite of a slightly hokey worship leader, sharing a pew every week with the only person in the world who rubs us the wrong way–or if like a five-year-old we will head straight for the desserts.
What do you think? Are my objections to attending a second church fair? Are there good reasons I’m overlooking?
