“Amen! Praise God!” shouted the congregation.
I stood there in disbelief, a stifled laugh welling up inside my chest. “These people aren’t even listening to what is being said,” I thought to myself.
There we were, in one of the villages that is a potential church planting location for our team. But a church building is not among the things they are lacking. In fact, most river communities that we pass by have a church building, often with a denomination’s sign on the front. We may assume that this represents a group of believers that meets there at least once a week to hear the Word of God being taught, and to sing and pray together. However, my coworkers said that often there is no “pastor” and no meetings for months or years at a time in some of these places. It seems as if they built a building, recorded the community name and number of people there, wrote it down in their denominational log book, and left.
But hopefully we all know that a church building really is (or should be) nothing more than a place for “the church” (believers) to meet together and use for ministry. And we also know that Jesus talked more about the heart and washing the inside of the cup than outward signs. Why do you think He needed to say those things? Is it only because of the Pharisees, or does mankind have an innate inclination to DO things, to practice religion in order to gain favor with God? I submit the latter.
Which things are easier to pass on to a group of people: a biblical worldview or behaviors? Let’s consider the case of the village we visited. Earlier in the day, after showing us their gardens, this older gentleman asked my coworker if he knew how to pray. He claimed to be a believer and said several others also were. We figured he probably wanted us to have a showy church service, full of lots of frivolous things, just like the groups that usually show up. But my coworker started asking him questions. “Do you understand Portuguese well?”
“Yeah, I can understand most things.”
“Do you know what sin is?” He didn’t really have a response. “Or heaven? Or hell? Or grace? That’s why we have to learn your language and culture to explain things to you accurately.”
So that night, during the meeting, I saw several things that made me think they didn’t have a clue and were just going through the motions they had learned. They shouted amen according to the tone of voice and everyone started praying together out loud during prayer time. At the end of the meeting, the main guy went around to each bench and shook everyone’s hand, just like some pastors here often do. All of the visible things they learned, but the things that actually matter, the inward things, remain unchanged.
Jesus’ command before leaving earth was about spreading the gospel. But He didn’t want his followers to do a quick trip somewhere, do some face painting, a haphazard sharing of some vague components of the gospel tainted with lots of human performance, ask for a show of hands to receive Jesus, record it in their convert book, leave, and never return. Some people view missions this way, but Jesus said to make disciples, learners. We see the early Christians doing this in the book of Acts. Paul stayed in Ephesus for two years, teaching those who had believed his message (Acts 19:10). They also chose mature men (not just one) to be leaders of the church, and would keep track of the church’s spiritual health through correspondence and visits.
So why would we try to do things differently? The oven is too slow so we now want microwaveable disciples? If you focus only on the outward, you may get some external results, but Jesus focused on the inward being. Forcing people to conform to external standards will only conform the outward. Believers are to be “transformed by the renewing of the mind”. The internal transforms the external. Don’t get the cart before the horse. We can’t make disciples from the outside in.