Philosophy of Ministry

(This is Michelle typing Max's thoughts about the week, so I'm sorry if it isn't well organized)

One of the pastors spoke to us the other day about CHBC's philosophy of ministry.

It may look to some people like CHBC is very inward focused because everything they do is geared towards building up the members of their church through teaching, training and shepherding.

They believe many churches spread themselves too thin, or hire pastors to fulfill one main duty within that church - for instance hire a pastor of outreach.  Then the members think the pastor is the one who will do outreach or that he will train a specific group of people who then will do all the outreach.

At CHBC however, they want to train all of their people to reach out to their neighbors and coworkers.  This is precisely why the pastors spend all of their time training up the members to do outreach and feel competent to defend their faith and speak openly about it to others.  Are the pastors of CHBC responsible for every person in DC or even every Christian in DC?  No.  They are responsible for the sheep whom God has given them.  They are responsible to train, pray for and teach their members to go into their jobs and be outposts of the gospel. 

CHBC has a Wednesday night Bible study which is very simple, but extremely well done.  They open their Bibles and look at a portion of scripture together.  The teaching is deep and thorough.  There are many non-Christians who are eager to come to this via word of mouth.  One Muslim who has been attending this Bible study spoke up quite a bit saying how much he loves the church and how much he is learning about the Bible and now he is inviting friends to come.

Most churches doing a church plant today plan to reach a certain target audience, as though they were selling a product to a bunch of consumers, but CHBC doesn't do that.  As far as they are concerned, their target audience is everyone who walks through the door of the church.  They aren't after the "young urban professionals" or whatever some marketing guru might tell them to target.  They employ no special gimmicks or fancy frills to attract people, but they just make sure to be faithful in teaching and preaching the word of God the same exact way to everyone.  Mark says he preaches as though everyone listening to his sermon is, at the same time, highly intelligent and very uneducated.  In treating people this way, he digs deep into the text, uses words like "justification" and "atonement," and preaches on average about an hour.  He assumes that they don't know very much about the Bible, but that they are very capable of learning about it.  Mark admits that, due to his own personality, he's naturally going to attract some people and not others, but he's not aiming to appeal to a narrow audience.

Most churches believe that they must get people immediately "plugged in" to a homogeneous group.  So, the twenty-something single without kids gets assigned to a group of his peers, the motorcyclist gets assigned to the cycle club, and the seniors get lumped together. This type of segregation, however, fractures the church.  It takes a diverse body of people, whom God has brought together through the power of the Holy Spirit, and who otherwise would have nothing in common with one another, and it splits them up exactly the way the world does...by common interests and demographics.  The world understands gathering together around common interests.  What makes no sense to the world is when a completely diverse group of people know, pray for, care about, challenge, and love one another.  Of course there's nothing wrong with hanging out with your peers, but the love of Christ is displayed when you love your brother with whom you have next to nothing in common.  The modern American church has become another institution clamoring for customers, and it knows that you get the most, not by challenging them to grow in their sanctification, but by giving them whatever makes them happy and comfortable.  

That being said, whenever a new member joins CHBC and asks how they can get plugged in, they don't respond by putting them in a group of their peers, thus separating them from the rest of the church body.  Instead, their response is simply "start attending the morning and evening service every week and talk to people afterwards."  In this way they are encouraging new members to begin conversing with whomever they happen to be sitting with, whether that be a seventy year old black woman or a twenty year old asian man.  And I've personally witnessed the fruit of this approach, as CHBC has an incredibly diverse group of people, all of whom come together as one body.  The last thing the pastors want to do is disrupt that unity by pigeon-holing the members into homogeneous groups.  This is so counter-cultural, but it's how the Bible describes the church.