Sign of fallenness

This post is from the defunct blog “Dying Church”

I wonder if the very prominent concern about survival in churches is a sign of their fallenness…Both the concern for "church growth" and the concern for survival (which can sometimes be the same thing) lead to many of the tactics of fallen powers, such as competition, the overwhelming pressure on church leaders to be successful, reduction of the gospel for the sake of marketing, and so forth. (Marva Dawn, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God)

Marva Dawn describes the predominant way that churches operate within our culture, and then correctly identifies the underlying problem. A church can never worry about its own survival if it wants to stay faithful. It's a little like the way most of us live. At one point, I wouldn't have minded losing all my worldly possessions. That would have been fifty books, some clothes, and some battered furniture. Now that I own a house and a car and tons of other stuff, it's harder to think about losing it all. It's easy for a start-up church to lose everything. It's much harder for a church with a big campus and a reputation and history to lose it all. It's harder to follow Jesus, individually or as churches, when we feel we have to carry all the stuff with us. Leaving it all behind scares many of us to death. But we won't be able to follow until we do exactly that – leave it all behind.