Baby Factory Churches
I was wondering today if we are creating baby factory churches. Let me explain.
When my wife and I first got married we felt called to provide a home for a girl lost in the foster system. It was a deeply rewarding but very challenging look into the life of a seventeen year old girl who had been abused in more ways than one. My wife met her through Young Life and we chose to take the risk and invest in her in a significant way. The risk we took gave me a first hand look into how our foster system abandons kids at eighteen when they are least prepared for life. It’s really sad.
To be honest it was hard watching her destroy herself. The drama was huge. She had little capacity to make a mature decision outside of what was her immediate need. Most of her relationships were abusive in some respect. Inside our home we got to see first hand the traditional ways people search for love in all the wrong places. Her defense mechanisms were extremely high, as you would assume. At eighteen she chose to leave our home and venture out into the world. Within one year she was pregnant with her boyfriend. Her venture into motherhood was daunting to say the least. It was easy to see how the same brokenness would perpetuate itself in the awesome task of being a parent.
It was also easy to see how being a mother really gave her a sense of validation, even though she had little skill, compassion or maturity. The allure of mothering eventually led her to have a second child almost immediately. The last time we saw her she was struggling to put her kids in the car, screaming at them.
But in reality, she was doing exactly what she had learned all of her life. She was perpetuating the very same life her mother had given her. The cycle would continue for another generation.
And her story got me thinking about the way we do churches. There’s a tremendous allure in numerical growth. Numbers look cool. We look cool when the roster says, “600″ or “6,000″. We must be doing something right, right? But I would ask the question, “Are we creating baby factories?” Does our numerical growth come at the expense of the real responsibility of parenting that leads to maturity? Getting people in the door is the easy part. Leading them through the spiritual formation to maturity is the hard part. Are we parenting them in a way that leads to perpetual immaturity?
And I get the allure of new converts. Having a baby is a really cool experience. The day my daughter was born radically changed my life. It’s new and wonderful and awe inspiring to see new person just arrive. But that moment in the hospital is the beginning, not the end. Birth is the beginning of a long journey that ends when my children can reproduce maturity, not a baby. Making babies can take six minutes. Making healthy adults takes a lifetime.
My wife and I have three children of our own and parenting is hard but it’s worth it. It reminds us constantly of our need for our own Heavenly Father. And my wonder over the last ten years is have we abandoned the parenting process in our practice of spiritual formation. Have we forgotten the need to create elders and instead chosen to have lots of babies, only to create a world that is deeply immature and incapable of mature reproduction.
Jesus spent three years with twelve people, an astounding thought in today’s church models. He was not interested in the crowds who were interesting in cheap thrills. He refused to play their games and was deeply interested in spiritual maturity, not numerical growth. He got parenting because he himself was deeply connected to His Father and had reached spiritual maturity.
What I would also offer is that by abandoning the spiritual formation process, we abandon our own growth. Much of my own maturity comes from living in and through the parenting process, choosing to love when we really don’t want to. It would always be easier to just say to my kids, do what you want. But I would miss the journey of parenting and discovering what I the fullness of what I am created to be. I don’t always like parenting, but it’s has shaped me and been central to my spiritual journey.
Parenting validates the notion that we learn by what we practice and teach better than what we hear or read. Parenting requires me to put my thoughts and beliefs to practice and discover how wrong or right I was. It requires sleepless nights, lots of patience, and a willingness to get up every day and love.
My hope is that those who are in leadership in churches will engage what it means to create mature elders who can lead people not just to the feet of Jesus, but to practice following His footsteps.
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PS: A friend of mine sent this after I posted this. It from Arcade Fire’s Wake Up.
“If the children don’t grow up, our bodies get bigger, but our hearts get torn up
We’re just a million little gods causing rain storms turning every good thing to rust.
I guess we’ll just have to adjust.”
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Jim
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Tyler Braun
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Bill Kinnon
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Jonathan Brink
