The Cambridge Diet for Fat Churches
Cal LeMon
July 1, 1984
I live with a church that has a weight problem. The weekly spread of tasty music, erudite education, scrumptious social life, and gourmet preaching seems to produce ever more poundage on our padded pews. In fact, the fare can get so rich that sometimes I think only the dessert of the eschaton would be enough to make the saints salivate. The bulges under the garment of success began to show after only ten years of corporate life. By 1974 we had to admit that our increasing size was bittersweet. The frequent accomplishments—new buildings, staff additions—were often interrupted by a belch of discomfort as we sensed something amiss. I was a member of the church at that time, serving as campus pastor at the denomination's nearby liberal-arts college. The pastoral leadership began to suggest one way to spell relief: m-i-s-s-i-o-n. But what would that solve? The mission budget was as obese as the rest of the church. Articulate guests came to the pulpit of Evangel Temple on a regular basis to remind us of the physically and spiritually starving world on the other side of those glass doors. So the bucks rolled in, but no parishioners moved out. "Mission" meant missionaries, and we had plenty of them. The congregation had yet to risk anything more than its checkbook. Meanwhile, my wife and I were in the throes of making some long-term decisions about our ministry. The campus work was challenging—but a different challenge was growing within us: the idea of planting a new church back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We knew the community well from the three years we had lived in the Boston area while attending Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The clogged streets of this Ivy League city of 120,000 were lined with empty ...
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