The Church Service

We all know what church is supposed to be. You go in. You get fed. (If you're a Baptist, you might even get literally fed. )You go home. And, of course, you will repeat that sequence if the service was good. Like any good restaurant.

Of course, others of you are more mature. "It's not a restaurant; it's a hospital." So you go in and you can find help there. Good stuff. But if the service isn't helpful, you go somewhere else.

Service -- not just the church service, but the service you receive at church -- appears to be key. So I have to wonder. Did you not read the part in the Bible where Paul talks about your "reasonable service" (Rom 12:1)?

I don't know where it happened. If you read about the early church, it isn't described this way. Those people weren't part of God's gathered people to be served; they were serving. They met daily, shared all things in common, met needs, ministered to each other, all that kind of thing. If you read Paul's explanation about church, it isn't described this way. Church is "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ" (Eph 4:12). We do that. We're to "attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph 4:13), which is not a passive "you've been served" kind of thing. Church is work, serving in the body of Christ for the benefit of those around us. Jesus didn't say, "By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if those in your church love you." No, it is by our love for one another (John 13:35).

We seem to have imported the world's consumer economy concept into Christ's church. We look for what we can get, preferably at the lowest cost to us. And that's not church. Not Christ's church.

Oh, there is supposed to be service in church. Just not the service that comes to us; it's supposed to be the service we give. It is the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit, the giving of gifts, the sharing of talents, the love each of us gives to our fellow believers. We are the Body. We don't expect the church to serve us; we expect to serve the church. If there is feeding to be done in church, we ought to be giving it. If the church is a hospital, we're to be the staff, the workers, the ones doing the service. We don't get to show up like baby birds with empty gullets and evaluate the response. We're supposed to do the work. Yes, we go to worship. Yes, we go to get fed. Yes, we go to be healed. But more important and even valuable than all of that is what we contribute, how much we contribute to the work of God's people. You know, it's more blessed to give than to receive.

It happens to some degree. They say that 20% of those who go to church do 80% of the work. It's happening to a point; just not enough. The question is not "Are they doing it right?" It's not "Are they serving properly, feeding well, helping sufficiently?" The question is "What am I doing?" Are you there to serve or to be served? Or have you given up on going at all because their service wasn't good enough?