This clutter in the church is a symbol for something much greater:  the clutter of activities that accumulate on the church calendar.  It is a deterrent to effective mission.  Remember when Jesus sent out the disciples, and told them to travel light? (Luke 10:4.)  The church has drifted a great distance from that approach!  How did we get there? 

In the theoretical lifecycle of a church, the pattern is a Bell Curve.  

It can be divided into thirds.  The first third is a strong focus on mission:  to reach out, make disciples, grow the church.  As the church grows, it adds programs and facilities.  The drift comes in the second third.  It is subtle...and devastating.  The shift moves to maintenance.  It can be measured by the way leaders spend their time and energy, by financial support, with an increasing percentage devoted toward maintenance.  The church moves from making disciples to operating the machine.  This top section of the Bell Curve is the "critical third."  A church that persists in a plateaued maintenance mode will begin the downward spiral.  This decline is not just in worship attendance.  It includes finances, spiritual dry rot, and momentum. 

Recently, I consulted a large church in Michigan.  The pastors and staff were frazzled, like gerbils running on a wheel.  One pastor shared, "We feel like all we do is race from one thing to another.  We're spinning our wheels, focused on running the machine." 

"Burnout, without progress," is common.  Church leaders seem to be buried in (1) administrative details, (2) meetings, (3) patching up problems, and (4) serving as caretakers.  There is nothing left for mission, outreach, pioneering, building, growing, expanding - all those activities that represent health, vitality, and the mission to make disciples.  How does this happen? 

Feeding the Monster 

Forgive my analogy - I love and respect the church - but when the Bride of Christ becomes a monster that needs to be fed, the joy of ministry has collapsed under the weight of maintenance.  The mission of Christ is not engineered to be that way! 

As a church grows, more people come.  They come with ideas.  The programs and activities grow exponentially with the size of the church.  Pastors and church leaders - the good ones - tend to love people.  The dark side of loving people is being a people pleaser.  It is hard to say, "No."  It is difficult to process proposals through the grid of purpose.  Difficult, but not impossible.  It takes discipline, but this is the responsibility of leadership:  to keep the team headed in the same direction. 

With almost every new project, every new activity, there is a new committee or board.  In time, this adds layers of bureaucracy that subconsciously operate with high control and low accountability.  Unfortunately, the decision-making mechanism of most churches is influenced more by secular approaches than biblical principles.  The end result is more bureaucracy, using methods contrary to the spiritual identity of a church. 

High control feeds on meetings.  The meetings are the symptom.  High control is the issue behind the issue.  The result is a machine.  Boards and committees talk a lot about ministry.  There is more talk than action.  This changes the definition of ministry.  Ask people, "What is your ministry?" and many will respond they are an elder, deacon, sit on a church board, council, consistory, session, or (in the super-corporate model), the board of directors.  This represents little of the mission side of Christianity.  It births a worldview that the church is an institution, bureaucracy, and political system focused on control of a myriad of activities. 

The hyper-extension of this model is represented by several prominent denominations.  The corporate model at this level is the epitome of drift.  What happened to the Body of Christ?  Just this last month, another major denomination met for a general conference.  The total cost of these extravaganzas is in millions of dollars.  Any wonder secular people are increasingly turned off by what they perceive to be "the church." 

It may sound like an incredibly naïve and radically simplistic concept to de-organize the organized church.  Yet, there many churches that have incorporated the elements that are clearly taught in Scripture.  They have reduced the bureaucracy and returned the machine to the living organism called the Body of Christ.   

Recapturing the Movement 

At the core, Christianity is a movement.  Consider the concept:  it is moving, alive, and dynamic.  You can have a building and not be an institution.  You can have order and not control.  You can manage God's resources and not become a bureaucracy.  You can be liberated from most meetings and remain legal.  You can function more effectively and rise above the tyranny of the machine.  You can restart a church caught in the "critical third" maintenance mode of the lifecycle.

But don't look to a program:  top-down, quick-fix restructuring of the latest, greatest, best-selling fad.  Think movement - it is the genius of the faith launched by Jesus.  A movement is bottom-up, relational influence that enriches and energizes this organism called church. 

Jesus embedded in His disciples the DNA of the Kingdom.  Go back and look at His teaching about the "Kingdom of God" and the "Kingdom of Heaven" (concepts that are understood as interchangeable).  Focus on the concepts:  "the Kingdom is like...," Jesus said.  What are the concepts and how do they fit with the culture of your church? 

Here are some of the core markers of that DNA:  (1) The high control becomes low control.  (2) The low level of personal, relational accountability becomes the dominant lifestyle of most everyone in the church.  (3) The focus on running the machine is minimized, and the mission to "seek and save the lost" is maximized.  (4) The primary role of leaders and staff is not to "do ministry," but to equip others for ministry (Ephesians 4).  (5) The power and potential of a church is not the political decisions of the few, but the missional lifestyle of the many.  (6) The involvement of the individual is based not an election to a board, but the discovery of spiritual gifts.  (7) The fulfillment of every Christian is not attending a meeting, but being discipled by another and empowered to operate in your calling.  (8) The infrastructure of the local church will reduce meetings to a minimum.  (9) Those who lead will focus on discerning God's will.  (10) Their manual will not be Robert's Rules of Order, but Scripture.  (11) The qualification for leadership will not be majority votes, but recognized biblical wisdom.  (12) The dominant posture of the Body of Christ will be mission, not maintenance.

There are likely two kinds of responses to this concept:  (1) those who consider this simplistically impossible in the real world, and (2) those who have followed their biblical intuition and rejoice in their liberation from the machine.