The Church House

Ask a pastor how the church is doing and you will usually get a worship report: attendance is up a little and Easter was full. It is an honest answer to a different question, the way "how is your family?" is not answered by describing the kitchen. A congregation is a dozen ministries breathing at once, and most of us carry no picture of the whole, so we report on the room we can see from the pulpit. Part I of this book gave you a map of yourself. Part II gives you a map of the church, and it starts with a house.

Wesley's doorway, extended

John Wesley described salvation with the image of a house: repentance as the porch, faith as the door, and holiness as the life lived inside, religion itself. The image is worth extending one step further, because the experience of belonging to a congregation is like moving through a whole house and discovering the purpose of each room. Some rooms are public and some are intimate, some get all the traffic and some hold the tools, and a family lives well when the whole house works, not when one showpiece room stays lit while the rest go dark.

One distinctive feature of this house is that although there is a front door designed for entrance, there are many ways a person can actually find their way inside. Some people first meet a church at worship, and just as many first meet it at a pumpkin patch, a preschool pickup line, a thrift store counter, or a funeral lunch. A pastor who knows the whole floor plan stops treating those as side doors and starts treating them as doors.

A walk through the rooms

The front porch: evangelism

The porch is where the church meets people who have not come inside yet: first-time guests, the welcome desk, the sign on the highway, the advertising and the social media presence, the way members invite their neighbors or do not. It is usually the first thing people see when they encounter the church, and porches speak whether or not anyone is standing on them. An unkempt porch tells the neighborhood the house is not really expecting company, and so does an outdated website or a greeting team that only greets each other.

The sitting room: fellowship

Unlike your grandmother's sitting room, this one wants you to put your feet up. Fellowship gives people a place to build friendships without programmatic expectations or discipleship pre-work: supper clubs, affinity groups, potlucks, the coffee hour that runs long. It is easy for serious church leaders to treat fellowship as calorie-laden filler, and it is not. For many people the sitting room is where a church becomes their church, because nobody stays long anywhere they have no friends.

The living room: worship

Almost every other room in the house has a doorway into and out of this one. Worship is the center of the house the way the living room is the center of a home, the place the whole family gathers, and everything else the church does flows out of it and back into it. The children's ministry feeds it, the care ministry follows up on what surfaces in it, and the offering collected in it funds the kitchen. Part III of this book lives in this room, and the point here is simply its placement: central and connected, and never the whole house.

The bedroom: prayer

Jesus said that when you pray you should go into your room and shut the door, and the bedroom is the most personal and intimate space in the house, just as prayer is the most intimate place we meet with God. In congregational terms this room holds the prayer chain, the intercessors, the quiet discipline of members who pray for the church by name. It is the room guests never see and the room the whole house secretly depends on, and it is the easiest room in the house to assume is fine.

The kitchen: service and outreach

The kitchen is where food gets made for other people, and service and outreach are the mission and calling of the church, which does not exist for itself. Food pantries, community dinners, mission trips, the thrift store, disaster response: this is the room where the church prepares what feeds the world. As the old line has it, the church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners, and hospitals have kitchens.

The garage: operations

There is a lot of unglamorous work behind a functioning church, and the garage holds it: the sound board and the folding tables, the van keys, the setup crew, the volunteers who arrive early and leave late. Like the garage at home, it stores the tools and rarely gets shown to guests, and the people who work in it can serve for a decade without public thanks. Naming the garage as a room, out loud, is a small act of justice, because the house does not run without it.

The library and study: discipleship

To know is to grow. The library holds Bible studies, Sunday school, youth group, small groups, confirmation, the short-term class that gets someone reading Scripture for the first time at fifty-four. We grow closer to Christ when we know more of Christ, and a church with a bustling living room and an empty library is producing attenders rather than disciples. Part V of this book lives here.

The back yard: high energy events

The church should have fun, and the back yard is where it happens: Vacation Bible School, the fall festival, dinner on the grounds, the pumpkin patch, the retreat. Back yard events engage people who might never walk up the front porch steps, which makes the back yard one of the busiest entrances to the whole house, and they give the congregation itself a place to gather across the lines of age and committee that sort people everywhere else.

The home office: administration

Somebody pays the bills, keeps the rosters, files the insurance, and schedules the rooms, and the ministries of the house survive because that somebody does it well. The home office is where stewardship of everything else is exercised, and Part VII of this book lives in it. Pastors who despise administration should reread the description of the Executive corner in chapter 2 and then thank whoever runs this room.

Reading your own house

The floor plan becomes a diagnostic the moment you lay your actual congregation over it, and the exercise below takes an evening with your leaders. Churches that do it are usually surprised twice: once by a room more crowded than anyone realized, and once by a room that has been dark so long nobody remembers it is there.

1. List every ministry, then give each one a room. Everything the church does goes on the list, from worship to the men's breakfast to the crew that mows the cemetery, and each item gets assigned to exactly one room. Arguments about placement are useful; have them.
2. Look for the crowded rooms. Most churches discover one room holding a third of the list. That is not automatically wrong, a mission-heavy church may be exactly what God called that congregation to be, but it should be a choice rather than an accident.
3. Name the dark rooms. A room with nothing in it, or one entry limping along on two tired volunteers, is a dark room. Say it plainly and without blame; rooms go dark in every house.
4. Check the doors into the living room. For each room, ask how a person who entered the house there would ever find worship. If the preschool families and thrift store customers have no doorway to Sunday, the house has rooms with no hallways, and growth that has nowhere to land does not last.
5. Honor the garage and the home office out loud. Whatever else the audit finds, publicly thank the rooms that never get applause. It costs a paragraph in the newsletter and pays for years.
6. Choose one dark room and discern. Is this a season to light it, or does another church nearby carry this ministry better, so that yours can bless it and focus elsewhere? Either answer can be faithful. Ignoring the question is the only unfaithful move.