As you read Church Scattered one thing becomes very clear. This divine disruption is not some minor change in the Christian landscape but a radical transformation of Christianity for the 21st century.
If church leaders are still primarily focused on how to get more people back into the buildings, they simply don’t see the bigger issues. On the other hand if Christians are waiting for the church gathered to be the primary source of their spiritual growth again, then they don’t get it either.
This dramatic disruption is intended to get church leaders to primarily focus on the ministry that should be happening daily in their community not weekly on the campus. It should also challenge the validity of the entire discipleship process that has been in place for decades.
Christians are no more equipped to assume personal responsibility for their own spiritual growth than church leaders are to empower and release their people to merge work and faith every day for the gospel. There should be no competition between coming to church and being the church but there is and that is what must change.
If the church staff and all of the members of any large church were to all move to the 10/40 window, all of this would become immediately clear and extremely necessary. All of the lessons learned over the years about contextualization would determine all the priorities moving forward.
America is more Athens now than Berea and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we will make the dramatic changes necessary to make the gospel contextually relevant again. The reality is that every church member must become a Christian missionary that has fully merged their faith with every other area of their life.
Christianity must become in the culture, the story of a people who are followers of Jesus Christ again instead of a place where people meet on Sundays. We become the fragrance of His grace to all who are lost because He indwells us not the building.