Author: Jonathan Dodson

Reasons for a Second Service

Posted on September 11, 2008

Here’s the other side of the coin in considering the addition of a second service:

1. Why turn away people from hearing the gospel of Christ? If more people will come to our gatherings to hear the gospel preached, who am I to turn them away? Jesus went out of his way to keep the unregenerate masses around to hear his sermon on the mount. He went out of his way to feed them and broke them into small groups to share his provision. Peter addressed thousands. Paul packed out houses with people falling out of windows (acts 20:9). As Jacob Vanhorn said, “The first century church didn’t get to put their finger in the dam when God added 1,000’s of new, clumsy believers. I don’t think we can either.” The challenge is to keep preaching the strong gospel of Jesus, and to not accommodate increased consumerism that people bring with them.

2. See the second service as another gathering of the church during which people can be discipled into gospel-centered missional community. Daniel Montgomery once asked me which form of the church was most pure, missional communities or Sunday gatherings? It was a loaded question. He avered that, if done well, both can be “pure” expressions of the church, and I tend to agree. The challenge, however, is to spend as much time recalibrating gatherings as we do recalibrating smaller communities. Austin City Life is in the process of trying to develop a more intentional “liturgy” whereby Sunday gatherings become more of a discipleship experience, not just a service. Missional, steady state, gospel-centered community should happen through public and private gatherings.

3. A second gathering will increase business for the coffeeshop in our building, enabling us to futher support local business. The unoffical slogan of Austin is “Keep Austin Wierd,” which is multivalent. One of the things it means is keep things indy, support local business. We like to do that when possible to be a blessing to our neighbors and city.

4. A second gathering will enable volunteers to serve and to worship every Sunday.

Coldplay or U2?

Posted on September 10, 2008

Yesterday I asked my three year old son what he wanted to listen to while we were driving, Coldplay or U2? He replied, “Wallflowers!”

Obama and the Closing of the American Dream

Posted on September 10, 2008

In this article, n+1 writer Aziz Rana discusses several variations of the American Dream including the promise of professionalism, the strength of the agrarian, and boom of the industrialist small business owner. He notes that all of these have failed. Regarding small business he writes: “The quantity of small businesses begun each year suggests that the aspiration of having one’s own shop persists. Yet for the past half-century bankruptcy has been more likely than success.” As for the promise of professionalism, “we have been left with the professional ideal, which values only certain types of work and thus implicitly disdains the rest. It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution.” What then is the solution to the American Dream? He closes the article by saying: “If Obama hopes to save his party and to address the interests and experiences of working-class citizens, he will have to challenge the hegemony of the professional and with it the closing of the American dream.”

Can our presidential candidates sufficiently address the closing of the American Dream?

To Start or Not to Start a 2nd Service?

Posted on September 9, 2008

We are wrestling through whether or not to start a second service. For most people it’s a no brainer. If you have enough people, start a second service! Or, follow the 80/20 rule–if 80% of the seats filled, then start a second service because the other 20% will be intimidated by the lack of space. I don’t like either line of reasoning. Here’s why…

  1. Just because you max out seating capacity doesn’t mean your church is ready for more people. How many of the people in our services really get church the way we are trying to be the church? How many understand and embrace that we are trying to raise the problem of mission, solve it with the solution of the gospel, in the context of community? If they get it conceptually, how many of them are actually living this way practically? If there is a gap between concept and practice, is this a product of consumerism, poor leadership, or brevity of time? If there is a significant gap between our theoretical and functional ecclesiologies, then why add more people ignorant of your ecclesiology into a service that isn’t church to begin with?
  2. To start a second service is to commit more resources to an event, not a gospel-centered missional community. Will the demands of a second service so tax our spiritual, emotional, and physical resources that we end up reinforcing church-as-service, instead of church-as-gospel, missional community? Will a second service propagate discipleship anonymity, not missional church tenacity?
  3. Who cares about the 80/20 rule; it just reinforces individualistic comforts. I say “squeeze in”; meet your neighbor; love the church, swallow your individualism and take a bite out of community. Sit on the floor, just don’t fall out of a window.