“Come and See” instead of “Go and Tell”?

I’m beginning to see a dangerous idolatry in the water at First Hattiesburg, and it’s a very, very common one among churches in the South, and started hundreds of years ago with the Holy Roman Catholic Church. It’s something that doesn’t really become clear until you’ve been there a month or two and listened to the people a little bit, but it is there nonetheless. The idol I speak of is the Church itself.

No, I haven’t heard people refer to the Church as the mediator of Grace. It’s not that wacky yet, so things aren’t dire, to be sure. But I keep hearing an overwhelming emphasis on mission in the community by inviting people to “come and see,” and virtually none on the preparation of disciples and raising of leadership to go out into the community and preach the gospel. It’s as though there’s an assumption that the Holy Spirit will only move people to repentance within the church community, or that the goal of the church is to expand itself, not to live for Christ and reflect God’s glory so that others may believe.

Jeff was talking about a book that I want to pick up last night, called the Principle of the Path, by Andy Stanley. Well, this attitude marks a path that leads to the prideful declaration that the visible church is the same as the invisible, and that somehow our way of doing things as a church is the anointed Way that Jesus had in mind when he talked about His Church, to the exclusion of all others. I don’t feel I need to explain the grave error of this sort of thing. As Dad said last night on the phone, “denominations are God’s way of compensating for our sinful inability to grasp the real Truth,” and provide us sinners the ability to have fellowship with people of like mind and experiences in our faith. No one church (or denomination), I don’t care how pious they are, has a monopoly on the true objective Truth. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13, now we see through a mirror dimly. The full extent of the Truth that is God will be revealed only when we stand in His presence in the hereafter. If this is the path of the church as a whole, I hope we can swing things back to a focus on the Gospel humbly but fiercely and fearlessly preached, taught and lived. That is, I am convinced, the only Biblically correct definition of the mission of the global Church.

That said, I don’t think this is a systemic problem in First Hattiesburg, at least not yet. I don’t have a feel for the pulse of the place (there’s a LOT of people!), and I’d be very out of place bringing something like this up publicly I think. I might mention it in passing to Jeff, but other than that, I hope this is just me misreading something in the comments I’ve heard.