Letters to the Church

I like Francis Chan. I am currently using his Multiply material with a year 12 kid and even on the fourth time through this I am personally challenged by Chan's straightforwardness approach to the Bible. This book is about Chan's reflections on the Church. He wants people to take seriously what the Bible explicitly calls the Church to. The challenging question is: if you had never been to a church and all you had studied previously was the Bible, would you be able to understand or connect your church experience with what the Bible says?

Chan was once lead pastor at a very large church in America and then left because he thought it was unhelpful and was creating consumers and not disciples. After some time outside America and now after a few years back in San Francisco Chan has restarted a church from the ground up. This book lays out his principles for Church. He doesn't think large churches are inherently bad or intentionally making people lazy in their faith, he has been there, with his own good intentions, but he does want people to stop and ponder as to why they do what they do and where it leads.

Chan points out that the Bible doesn't say there must be a 40-minute talk or three announcements at church, but it does have lots to say about holiness, fellowship, love, unity, humble servant leadership, suffering and training (from children upwards). Chan doesn't want church to be something that is reduced to a two-hour timeslot on a Sunday. He sees the thinking behind"what works" in service, ie what gets people in the door is not the goal of Church. Instead of having attractive services the church should be made up of servants. Chan points out that churches correctly confront people in sexual sin, but do churches confront people when they do no serve? We should all be using our gifts for the building up of the Church. The Bible says so.

I appreciated the last chapter, where Chan puts flesh on the principals he lays out. He explains what his church does, with the caveat that what he does in practice is not the only way or the best way to do things. Essentially Chan is now a small church guy. They meet in living rooms, and when they get to be around 20 people they split. Someone from the group takes over half and then they grow again. That leader isn't on a wage from the church, they have their own full-time job. This means their church actually doesn't have any overheads (staff or building), they can give away 100% of what people. Everyone uses the Read Scripture app (I'm using it this year) to help them in their daily Bible readings and they try to share their lives with each other as much as they can. This does sound good.

My only pushback would be, I'd like to know the training process involved in selecting and building up the next person who is going to be overseeing 20 or so people. Maybe because I am part of the system now, but I wonder how much time, training and support these pastors get, when they are working full time (maybe they are retired). Cell division is tricky and hard to control. I am now more curious about their governance structure and oversite. How do they keep all the pastors on the same page? I'm sure there are processes, but the book didn't go into that at all. This is a Western issue to have. I know missionaries overseas are trying to train people up with what they have. I remember a missionary from Mexico saying that their pastors do a PTC, which is something I got before I did my theological studies.

I like Chan's frankness and honestly in the book. This is a good book for people to think through Church, the basics and the ideal of what it should be. Some of it was pushing back against the American megachurch model, but I still found it helpful.