Upgrade Church or Downgrade Church?

Posted by Alan Knox on Feb 24, 2011 in blog links, definition | 1 comment

Jeremy at “Till He Comes” has written a great post called “Upgrade Your Church.”

He recently “upgraded” some of his websites, but the upgrade caused his sites to be slower. So, Jeremy ended up reverting back to the original version of his sites.

Next, Jeremy uses this experience as a metaphor for the church. Do we need an upgrade? Do we need to revert to an older version? You can read his comments on each part of this metaphor.

But, I really like the way that Jeremy ended his post:

Transitioning to a house church model is not a “revert” back to the way it was in the book of Acts. It is actually an upgrade from the institutional model to a more streamlined, service-oriented, all-inclusive, everybody-has-a-say operating system with fewer scripts, plugins, coding errors, and restrictions. And definitely no “Are you human?” codes to decipher.

So, have you upgraded your church recently? If so, how is it functioning?

Now, as most of my readers know, I’m not a house church proponent. However, I definitely agree that changing from a more traditional and institutional way of understanding the church toward a more organic and simple way of understanding the church is a great upgrade!

No, I’m not interested in reverting back to Church 50AD. However, I think we can learn alot from Church 50AD in order to understand and live as Church 2100AD.

(By the way, while you’re reading Jeremy’s post about upgrading the church, you may also want to read an article that he wrote for The Ooze called “The Humanizing Church.” Great stuff!)