Churches Helping Churches or Church Fight Club?

”The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.”
That was a famous line from the 1999 movie Fight Club starring Brad Pitt. Fight Club was an underground club of where, you guessed it, men fought against one another and no one talked about the fights or the club outside of Fight Club.
I may be breaking a rule, but there is a similar Fight Club for churches!

The men in Fight Club fought to prove who was the strongest and toughest. They fought to be the best. The same is true of Church Fight Club, churches fight with one another to prove that they are the better church - they have the better facilities or pastor. They are more doctrinally sound, they use the right version of the bible or play this music rather than that music, and on and on and on.
While Church Fight Club isn’t bare knuckled fighting, it is fighting and it is incredibly hurtful. It hurts families who are in church and families who aren’t. It hurts the churches who seem to be winning and it hurts the churches who appear to be losing. It hurts believers in Christ and it hurts those who do not believe in Christ. Even worse, it hurts the name of Jesus.

Church Fight Club hurts believers because it tends to turn churches inward. We compete with other churches by having better music, better classes, a better preacher, better women’s ministry and a better loooong list of programs. This is great for consumers, but Jesus’ church isn’t a church for consumers, at least not in the sense of our Western culture. Jesus calls us to serve, not be served. Jesus calls us to give up the constant gratification that Church Fight Club strives for and Jesus calls us to suffer. Jesus says it is better to give than receive and that we should consider others more highly than ourselves, while Church Fight Club tends to make church all about the attendee. This is not Christianity. It is consumerism, and in the end it leaves attendees unsatisfied, unprepared for life in a broken world and wanting.

If that isn’t bad enough, this inward focus leads churches to fight for believers and ignore the world of unbelievers outside their doors. Churches fighting for churchgoers lose sight of up to 70% of their neighbors who don’t attend church. Worse, as they lose sight, they also lose their love and passion for those far from Christ. This means that Church Fight Club ruins the gospel mission of the church in the communities and cities where God has planted the church.

This does not reflect the Savior, Jesus who came to seek and save the lost! This does not give us a picture of the King who left his Kingdom to find the 1 lost sheep. It certainly isn’t a picture of the Father who ran to meet his prodigal son. Therefore, Church Fight Club not only hurts believers and unbelievers, it also hurts the name of Jesus.

It doesn’t have to be that way.
We don’t have to fight one another. We don’t have to compete, especially for the 30% of churchgoers in Middle Georgia when there are tens of thousands around us who don’t know Jesus and have no church home.
What if we stopped competing? Stopped fighting? Humbled ourselves a bit?
What if instead we began to work together, to share ideas, to help one another?
What if we cooperated, collaborated and worked together to see the gospel advance in Middle Georgia, supporting other evangelical churches rather than pridefully trying to do it all on our own?
What if we recognized that there are far too many people who do not know Jesus for our church to reach?
What if we saw our differences in style and programming as a possible strength for reaching a diversity of people rather than seeing them as deficiencies?

I’m breaking the first rule of Church Fight Club. I’m talking about it.
I don’t know fully what it looks like to work together like this - I’ve never really seen it. But I really do desire it. And I know that we could see much more by working together than in competing and fighting with one another. And I know that churches helping churches is far better than churches struggling or even closing their doors.
If you want to work together, let’s figure it out! Send me a message, we can at least begin to pray together and dream.