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The Connecting Church: Beyond Small Groups to
Authentic Community Coming
out of a movement that used small groups in both good and bad
ways, I was excited to read The
Connecting Church as it was being
discussed in my new church. I saw endorsements from the likes of the
Willow Creek Association, Larry Crabb and George Barna and I thought,
this should be
really interesting and good. The Connecting Church is not really
about small groups or "authentic" community. The
book is more about how small groups fit into the author's church's
overall structure. (Note: Since the book was published, Randy Frazee
has relocated to the Chicago area and now serves as a teaching pastor
on the staff of the Willow
Creek
Community Church.)
There are some good and useful parts of the book that
can help Christians build community within their churches. Here are
some of the good ideas he discusses:
Unfortunately, there are some serious drawbacks to the
book. To start with, he seems to be at war with the culture
of suburban America. The culture may present barriers to community, but
it also provides opportunities for building community. Frazee seems to
exaggerate and focus too much on the
barriers. He seems to want to overthrow the culture (as if it was
possible) instead of taking advantage of the culture and using it to
build
community. Frequently, he uses a "straw man" argumentation technique to
make his points. Several examples will illustrate this point. He
was a leader in a church (Pantego Bible Church)
with
a large, sprawling suburban
campus (having moved from a 7 acre site to a 76 acre site), yet he
criticizes suburbanites for wanting to have space for their
families. This struck me as hypocritical and biased; it doesn't seem to
occur to him
that the reasons some churches have large campuses are the same reasons
some people live in suburbs. Is space inherently bad? He
romantically idealizes
both city and country living from a hundred
years ago, where (to his way of thinking) there was more “community.”
He speaks of how "connected" people were, and how they laughed and
joked
their way through life in these wonderful little communities that seem
to be taken from The Music Man or It's a Wonderful Life. He
disregards the obstacles to community in those circumstances, like
hardships and difficulties associated with transportation, 12
hour workdays, the
filth and crowdedness,
the exploitation of the lower and middle classes and diminished
individual boundaries. One
of the staples of American suburban family life he attacks is
children's extracurricular activities. He laments how much time and
energy they take up and advocates children playing in the front yard
instead. But some
of the most bonding times I have with my children are when I'm driving
them to their sport or extracurricular activities. And the groups of
parents in these activities often form a community as well. We car-pool
and sit together during games and practices and the like. We take each
other's kids to practice, to the pool, to dance lessons. How else are
Christians going to meet and get to know non-Christians if they don't
interact in these sort of ways? It's bewildering to me how Frazee comes
down against
children's activities and all of their benefits that you can't get in
any other ways. Can children's activities get out of balance with
other
areas of life? Sure. But I think Frazee should talk about balancing
these things and how to use these opportunities to build community
instead of criticizing them because they don't fit his
model of what community should be. Another
thing in Frazee's crosshairs is dual-income families. He comes down
against both parents working in the interest of simplifying the
family's life.
He laments the complications of a mother working in a family,
suggesting that people do this only so they can have a bigger
house or more toys. He
doesn't realize that sometimes this is a necessity. Both parents
working is not
inherently evil-- remember that woman in Proverbs 31 worked, had a
family and
seemed to be doing OK. Don't both parents have God-given gifts to use
for the good of society? Like
the other things Frazee discusses, moving to a single-income model
could be a good or right choice for some people but necessarily for all.
And to the point of his book-- both parents working need not be the
terrible obstacle to
community that he would have the reader believe. I
got tired just reading his
list of the seven things he thinks a small
group "must" do. And being a sinner who's had his fill of
performance-based Christianity, I’d say just mark me down right now
down
for a “0” on all 30 traits, sight unseen. There is a place for
individual growth and taking
inventory
of one's life spiritually, but for a church system to try to manage
this
artificially could be very unhealthy. God works on His schedule, not
ours. If God wanted us to define our
faith and lives this way, he would have given us a bunch of lists and
had them pre-punched to fit right into our Daytimers. This
sort of list-based approach can have some benefits-- it may get
young or directionless Christians doing "something." But what happens a
few
years down the road when they realize that performance-based
Christianity is an oxymoron? Or can a
small group exist and be valid without Frazee's list of "seven things a
small group must do" hanging over its head? Are
there any controls in place to prevent
the list-based system from running amok? Is there room for people and
groups to
not conform to the lists without being condemned?
How
long before somebody gets the toxic, dangerous idea that keeping some
statistics
on these lists would be a good idea? How long before the ones with
better statistics are considered better Christians? How long before
somebody comes up with a list "better" than Frazee's? Christianity
is not all about conforming to lists. Frazee
compared suburban living to a prison (he actually uses that word). But
managing the church and individual Christian lives with a set of lists
looks a lot like a
prison to me. Leadership
is important, but
I wonder if the concept of peer groups ever dawned upon him? It should
go
without saying that not all groups need the same sort of leadership,
but his model does not seem to allow for that. Everybody needs somebody
"over them?" Can a group of home group leaders help each other out, or
do they need somebody over them? Why? I’m
a firm believer that no reasonable structure or plan is itself wrong or
terrible, that it is what you do with a structure or plan that makes it
good or bad.
This pyramid structure, a hybrid between Constantinian Catholicism and
Multi-Level Marketing, looks nice on
paper and is "natural" in one sense. But there are bad effects that lie
underneath such a structure. These include a natural tendency to move
from servant-based leadership to authority-based leadership, which
leads to competitiveness for places in the hierarchy and turns the
structure into a conscienceless command and control tool. There no
easier way to ruin a church and a lot of lives than
with a MLM type of structure that is out of control. With
my twenty-plus years experience in a church that did very similar
things towards its own
demise, I found this a cause for great concern. Copyright © 2006 John Engler. All rights reserved. |
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