SEEKERS OR SAINTS: THE CHURCH CONFLICT OF INTEREST?
A Leadership Forum
Brian Larson and Marshall Shelley
October 1, 1991
Like the taut string of an archer's bow, a bow with 50-pound pull, pastors repeatedly feel tension from two directions when it comes to outreach. The church tends the world and tends the household of faith. It reaches out to evangelize and reaches in to nurture.
There is the inevitable tension between budgeting for church maintenance and budgeting for outreach, between time spent with churchgoers and time spent with church non-goers, between targeting the uninvolved and targeting the faithful.
LEADERSHIP editors Brian Larson and Marshall Shelley invited four pastors to discuss the pull they've experienced.
-Wayne Gordon pastors Lawndale Community Church, a mostly black congregation in urban Chicago.
-Mike Marcey pastors Naperville Presbyterian Church in the mushrooming white-collar suburb of Naperville, Illinois.
-Doug Murren pastors Eastside Foursquare Church, a seeker-sensitive congregation in Kirkland, Washington.
-Bob Thune pastors Christ Community Church (formerly Omaha Gospel Tabernacle) in Omaha, Nebraska.
As you'll see, these pastors, from widely different denominational and social settings, found that the tensions of outreach, like the archer's bow, need not divide but can be part of what propels the arrow straight and sure.
Leadership: Can a church simultaneously focus on outreach and on meeting the needs of members? Or does one emphasis have to dominate?
Bob Thune: There's a definite tendency to push it one way or the other, often in reaction to the other extreme. As I grew up, I saw this in churches. One evangelized from the pulpit week in and week out. People heard the gospel a lot but never were built up. The other extreme swung the pendulum, spending all their energy teaching and perfecting the saints, but they won ...
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