Nowadays, the only thing growing faster than megachurches is the number of bloggers who hate them. (There are 1,650 churches in America that average 2,000 people a week or more. I’m not sure what the stats are on bloggers in the basement.) My goal isn’t to knock on large churches, so if that’s what you were hoping for, you may be disappointed (but thanks for the visit!). Hopefully, you’ll stick around long enough to hear me out. If you do, you’ll find out that the one thing you won’t find in a megachurch is something that I also think you won’t find in a small church or even in the church of one that you attend in your boxers in front of a television while your favorite preacher preaches.
What is it?
Contentment.
Let’s face it. We live in an externally driven world. How our day goes at the office has everything to do with how many red or green lights we caught along the way. The mood at Sunday dinner can have a lot to do with whether or not the receiver on your favorite team caught – or dropped – the game-winning pass. Found a good deal that you weren’t expecting or got a raise that was more than you had hoped for? Chances are pretty good that you’re eating out tonight! Opened the power bill to find that a few too many lights were left on last month? PB & J for the family, and no, we won’t be cutting off the crust and making any kind of cute Pinterest sandwich shapes.
In fact, make your own sandwich!
I’m not telling you anything new. All of us understand how external things affect us. This post isn’t even going to attempt to argue against that fact. But very few of us have learned how to stop letting external things drive us, and until we learn that, nothing external will ever help us find contentment.
It is this external motivation that drives so much of the inability of so many of us to truly settle down. We change wardrobes, jobs, hobbies and furniture because of it. Tragically, we often end relationships because of it. A good bit of church hopping is driven by it, even though we do our best to make that sound more spiritual. But when we strip away most of the excuses and piety, a lot of what we do in churches has less to do with contentment and more to do with our need to be motivated by something on the outside of us in order to make up for what may be missing on the inside of us.
Our typical response to that? More volume, more smoke, more motivational preaching.
The Biblical response to that? Less of all the above.
Not because all of the above is bad, but because all of the above isn’t meant to fill that hole. Only Jesus can do that. Honestly, the hardest verse in the Bible for our culture is Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.” (emphasis added)
Does this make the leaders of megachurches bad for being such good motivational speakers? Does it mean everyone who attends a large church isn’t content? No. Any good leader of a big church will constantly point people back to the simple truth that JESUS IS ENOUGH. In fact, any good preacher of ANY SIZE CHURCH will be doing the same, because if we’re not, none of our churches have a shot at surviving once our time on the platform is done.
While under house arrest, Paul wrote something that can help us here:
I have learned the secret of being content whatever the circumstances. (Philippians 4:11)
Paul was affected by the things that were going on around him, but he wasn’t driven or defined by them. In fact, if you read Acts you’ll find that he was a man who often did the very opposite of what you would expect if he was being driven by external circumstances. This man once got run out of town by an angry mob only to get back up and return to the same mob in the same town!
What? Who does that?
A man who is content in any circumstance. A man who knows that his strength doesn’t come from the best worship money can buy, but from a relationship with the one who deserves the worship because He paid the highest price. Philippians 4:13 (yes, the one that is on posters in Christian schools the world over) doesn’t say, “I can do everything because I go to a megachurch and we just got a new fog machine.” It also doesn’t say, “I can do all things because I go to a tiny church and we all know each other.”
It says that our ability to do ANYTHING comes from our relationship with the One who did EVERYTHING!
Contentment allows us to be settled even though we won’t settle.
Contentment allows us to enjoy the show that many churches can offer without feeling like something’s wrong when they can’t.
Contentment means that churches and pastors – no matter the size or ability – will be able to spend more time releasing their people into ministry instead of convincing them to stay for “the next big thing.”
When we really get contentment, what goes on around us will never be able to change what has happened – and is happening – in us. When we really learn the secret that Paul wrote about, we’ll find that the American church will begin to rise up stronger than ever before, and that nothing that happens to us will be able to hinder God’s move through us.
The one thing I have in common with Steven Furtick, Perry Noble, Matt Chandler, Jeff Kapusta, David Docusen and a host of other faithful preachers leading fruitful churches of different sizes is that none of us have the ability to be in every circumstance at every time with every member of our churches. Only Jesus can do that, and when we point people to Him, we’re pointing them away from dependence on worship in A PLACE and toward contentment to worship in ANY PLACE.
A church filled with people like that – no matter its size – is a church that will change the world.
