QUESTIONING THE OBVIOUS
Shaking up cherished assumptions isn't just for radicals.
Joel C. Hunter
April 1, 1986
Many of us whose intellectually formative years fell during the 1960s will be scarred for life. Remember those days? We accepted very little at face value. We bucked tradition. We questioned authority. We tweaked the Establishment.
Now, closing in on age forty, I find myself a member of the established clergy. I am conservative in many ways. Yet that old habit of questioning the obvious has never left me. If Hegel was right that history is a matter of normalcy (thesis) being met with its opposite (antithesis) and blending into the answer (synthesis), then when we turn the normal upside down, maybe something better will shake out. Even if nothing better comes, the very shaking will have been fun.
Try it with me on a few "obvious truths." Then you can do it on your own with any other issues.
"Growth Requires Specific Goals"
You have heard it said: Churches that aim at nothing usually hit it.
True enough. Yet holding forth an overall direction for your church's progress is not the same as setting "growth goals." A vision for what God could do is one thing. Planning exactly what God will do is quite another.
Many churches take planning as the medicine to cure both the "illnesses" of uncontrolled growth (I've heard such growth compared to cancer) and of no growth (such a lack has been compared to death).
Dear me! Is our planning an aid to healthy growth, or is it an attempt to gain control of growth, which only God gives (1 Cor. 3:6)? Growth spurts are by definition not long lasting, nor are growth pauses necessarily permanent. How many parents plan for their six-foot son's period of uncontrolled growth? How many homeowners tug on their bushes during the winter?
In my last parish, Sunday morning attendance grew from two hundred to nine ...
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