When the Church Becomes a Machine

By Mike Glenn

Since Jesus gave His church the command to make disciples of the whole world, we’ve struggled to define how to best carry out what Jesus requires of us. The first problem is to understand what Jesus meant by “disciple.” In the time of Jesus, His disciples were easy to find. They were usually standing around Him. Now it’s a little more difficult to recognize a disciple of Christ. We don’t have any distinctive attire. We don’t have a secret handshake. So, how do you know?

Defining a disciple of Christ is notoriously difficult because of the terms we use to describe a follower of Christ. To begin with, terms like “love,” “grace,” and “obedience” are fuzzy terms. It’s almost impossible to nail them down with any clarity. Take for instance the command to “love your neighbor.” What does that mean? Does it mean feeling positive toward the family that lives next door to you? Or do we expand “neighbor” to mean anyone we meet? For that matter, does our love require anything more than a good feeling? Does it require action? If so, how much action? If my neighbor is ill and I take them a casserole (it’s what Baptists do), is that enough? How many casseroles do I have to take before I can say I really love my neighbor?

This fuzziness has frustrated the American church for years. Being typical Americans, we set out to remedy this. We looked at all of our corporate friends being efficient and goal-oriented so we wanted to be efficient and goal-oriented too. To accomplish this, we brought corporate strategies into the church. Now, I get it, good practices are good practices wherever they’re practiced. After all, accounting is accounting. The problem came when we tried to mechanize discipleship. We wanted to start with a sinner on one end and spit out a fully mature disciple on the other end.

We created classes to attend, selected Bible verses to memorize and prayers to quote and, if we did all of these things, we’d get a gold star and be called a disciple. The programs were usually successful as far as we could determine. Sure, we passed out lots of certificates and pins, but we rarely made a disciple. Most of the time we just ended up painting a Jesus veneer on a well-mannered church member. Read More