Over at The Gospel Coalition, Jared C. Wilson posted a blog article giving 10 reasons to underprogram your church. I thoroughly enjoyed the article. After reading Iain Murray’s biography of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I became more convinced than I previously was that a church can be spiritually vibrant without needing to be program-driven.
Here are Jared’s 10 reasons:
- You can do a lot of things in a mediocre (or poor) way, or you can do a few things extremely well.
- Over-programming creates an illusion of fruitfulness that may just be busy-ness.
- Over-programming is a detriment to single-mindedness in a community.
- Over-programming runs the risk of turning a church into a host of extracurricular activities, mirroring the “Type-A family” mode of suburban achievers.
- Over-programming dilutes actual ministry effectiveness.
- Over-programming leads to segmentation among ages, life stages, and affinities, which can create divisions in a church body.
- Over-programming creates satisfaction in an illusion of success; meanwhile mission suffers.
- Over-programming reduces margin in the lives of church members.
- Over-programming gets a church further away from the New Testament vision of the local church.
- Over-programming is usually the result of un-self-reflective reflex reactions to perceived needs and and an inability to kill sacred cows that are actually already dead.
I encourage you to read the posts to see his explanation of each point.
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