3. Don’t spend time with your church outside of the church building.
Most of our churches’ corporate gatherings serve a great purpose. We worship together and we learn together.
But most aren’t very conducive to getting to know each other on a deeper level. This isn’t a failure on the part of our leadership, it’s just the nature of a larger gathering.
We need these small group gatherings (not just official ‘small groups,’ but parties, coffee dates, men’s/women’s nights, etc.). I’ve found that I learn more about a person over 30 minutes of sharing coffee or a beer, than I did attending liturgy with them for several months.
4. Believe that everything should be about you and for you, all the time.
Not long after Kate and I started attending our current church, they undertook a ‘season of kids.’
There was additional time in liturgy given to teaching the children in the church. The kids participated in the service in various ways. Even the sermons were about child-like faith and other themes centered around children.
Kate and I didn’t have children (we now have one on the way if you’re not keeping up), and we were not ourselves children. We had to understand—not everything is about/for us all the time.
That’s not to say that we didn’t get anything from the season of kids, it just wasn’t aimed directly at us, but even that taught us something important, because the church that teaches you that everything is about you, all the time, is preaching a very different message than “lay down your lives for each other.”
We were also appreciative to be a part of a church that found value in children and went to great lengths to show it to them.
