ded – thanks for your thoughts. You asked (and answered), “If the Spirit of Christ is evident and growing, is the format a problem? Probably not.” I don’t disagree with your conclusion… and my purpose (as stated) was not to be critical of how someone “does church.” Just wondering out loud… and maybe trying to figure out how to “do church” myself.

Why would that be? If it is efficient as you suggest, that would explain it. What if it were something else? Perhaps in desiring to be what others expect (bouncy dancing while singing repetitious choruses to the few young folks with microphones leading the singing in a line on the stage…),do we limit what we may become? If so, does this weaken the experience of the Spirit? If the Spirit of Christ is evident and growing, is the format a problem? Probably not.

I appreciated this post, Jim. I’ve always admired your purposeful thinking!

The Chinese Christian church is relatively new. Whenever people do something new, the first thing that they do (wisely) is look around at how someone else is doing it, and imitate. Over time, however, they find things that they don’t like and change them. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what you don’t like. And even more time to figure out what change you want to put in place.

The key, however to this dynamism, is freedom. If the Chinese Christians have constraints on their ability to try something new, something that might even fail, then change will become difficult. That’s why I suspect that the official Chinese Christian church will be less dynamic than the grass root house churches.

But even the house churches are under constraints that we are not accustomed to. Any house church that does something that’s really successful is likely to draw more attention from the government, limiting how much growth a good idea can create. Since the churches with good ideas get stamped out of existence, there’s no effective way for those good ideas to get communicated to other churches. One can say, “Hey this is a good idea” but it’s a much more powerful message when it’s backed with “and look at how great it’s working over here”.

Until the Chinese government gets out of the job of regulating religion, creativity will be slow. Much slower than would happen in the US. Here, freedom of religion is the first right expressed in our constitution. So we’ve come to expect a highly dynamic environment. In China, the government is under a different mandate. We should expect change to be slow. I have thoughts on our government on my blog. The Chinese government, is much much worse than ours.

There is another possible answer to the question of why churches in China organize and behave similarly to churches in the West. Maybe it’s what I said above, but maybe it’s that doing church that way is the most effective for the most people. I don’t know the answer. I suspect that there are better ways, but maybe that’s just me.