meditatio at the water's edge

I want to challenge what I have recently been thinking of as 'Hungry Hippo' church. In this pattern of behavior, churches do all they can to 'get more people in the doors'--and keep them in. Like the game where you hit the lever to move the hippo head and grab the marbles, some churches see their purpose as collecting as many people as they can.

To use another analogy, this approach is much like a family where the parents try to keep their children at home all their lives.

Imagine a mother and father whose 40 year old son is still living at home and incapable of living on his own--incapable of starting a family of his own--incapable of life outside the protection of mom and dad. The son is physically healthy, but the parents never raised him to be able to function on his own--never allowed him to even imagine a life where he could be married and reproduce. At best we would call this dysfunctional. At worst, we might say it's criminal.

But this is how some churches (many churches?) operate. We work hard at getting people in, but we do not entertain the thought of growing people to the point where they go out and start 'families' of their own. "What's wrong with living with your mom and dad? Don't we show you all the love you need? Don't we provide you with food and shelter?"

Of course I realize that many churches are quite happy when their members 'go into ministry.' However, these people seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Why do we not set things up so people naturally grow up and start 'families' of their own?

Maybe it has to do with power. We want some significant level of control over people. Do we create structures that make people dependent on the institution? Whether it is intentional or not, I think we do.

Codependency is a recognized dysfunction in relationships between people; why is it excused in churches? Is it because we are really more concerned with our own 'grand' agendas than with helping people develop fully functional, interdependent lives? I think we need to ask ourselves that question.

Perhaps it seems the most expedient way, the most efficient way, to get something accomplished. The bigger the group, the greater the resources, the more we can do. “So grow your group because you will be able to do more good things.” But I'm not so sure the problem is with the size of a group. I think the problem is with what we define as 'good things.'

I think that for too many churches 'good things' means what our culture would identify as success and accomlishment. This is why our churches make a big deal about how much money we have given to missionaries, or how many people have been converted, or how much influence we have in the community. I'm not saying these are bad things, but they are poor indicators of spiritual transformation.

How many churches (local communities of disciples) can say that they have never grown beyond sixty in number because the developed people into fully functional disciples who 'left home' and started families of their own? How many churches have had to ‘close the doors’ because they had ‘given birth’ to so many others that they simply had nothing more to give? Not too many, I think. Most churches celebrate the fact that their family is so big and very few of their children ever leave. Again, I'm not suggesting big is bad. I am suggesting underdevelopment is bad.

Why is our goal not to grow people up and send them out, but to get people in and keep them in? Why do we seem to be more concerned with self-preservation than mission? Maybe too many of us think self-preservation is the mission.

What if our churches were to exchange our 'keep them at home' structures for 'train them to go' structures?