“The celebrity church must die. And doing anything—like video venues—that prolongs its life, even in the name of the lost, runs counter to the best interests of the Church in all its expressions, big and small, and its mandate to see more people not only reached, but gifted, trained, and sent.”
Have a read of the whole post – it’s a great explanation of why it’s not such a great thing to have churches going the “multi-site, teaching via satellite link” type of direction. But I especially love the start of this quote: “The celebrity church must die”. Because I think that the “celebrity church” is such a dangerous mindset – this concept that the work of the kingdom gets performed by paid staff that we support financially.
And at the moment, that’s the challenge (it seems to me) for YVV. My church has grown to the point where we can’t all fit into one service, and while that’s fundamentally a practical issue, the move to two (theoretically identical) services has the potential to change how the church community sees itself, as well as how the church sees it’s leadership. The size of the church necessitates that the leadership doesn’t know everyone in the church. So how we deal with that necessary aloofness without having that communcate value and status, is a very difficult thing.
Of course, we might just plant a bunch of churches, give away all our best people and the problem goes away