You’ve all seen them – beautiful, intricate, painstakingly hand-crafted ships in bottles. They reflect the skill and talent of their craftsman, and not just anybody can build them. But as anybody who has seen one being built, or has tried to build one on their own knows, you don’t build the ship inside the bottle, you design it, fabricate it, and perform much of the detailed finish work outside the bottle. You then fold it up, squeeze it through the opening, pull the magic string, and “poof!” your ship snaps into place. Once this is done, the only way to get the ship out of the bottle is to break the bottle.

Is this a fitting analogy for how churches are built in America these days?

When choosing a “ship in a bottle” project, the craftsman usually picks the bottle first, which determines the size and configuration of the ship to be displayed inside it. This is a critical choice. If the craftsman has his heart set on a particular bottle, it will affect every design detail of the ship.

Churches in America are designed in much the same way. A building is built that fits within a certain (often restrictive) set of requirements – from budgets, to available land, to zoning laws, etc. Once the building is built, the church has to fit inside it. How can a church grow inside a fixed space? You add more services, but with every service you add, one or more elements of the church will need to be compromised to allow for the increased usage of resources. For example, a parking lot can only hold so many cars. if you add a worship service to your church, you might have a parking crunch at one or more times during your schedule. The people who show up for the first service have it made (assuming your first-service crowd doesn’t grow bigger than your lot in the first place). However, those who come for the second service show up to an already full parking lot. Where do they park? Likewise for the third service – and so on.

Not just parking, but Sunday School classes, worship teams, preacher’s voices – all will eventually take the toll of too much demand on their resources in too short a time. That is, if they decide they want to grow. It’s such a pretty ship, and the bottle took a long time to find. Why change it?

I believe churches have three choices in this matter: (1) Stay on the shelf, gather dust, look pretty for those who truly appreciate you; (2) Trust the craftsman to make more ships in bottles so that even more can enjoy you; or (3) break out of your bottle – get rid of it altogether. After all, isn’t the bottle just a novelty?

We marvel at the beauty of a ship in a bottle, but what we’re mostly impressed with is the perceived impossibility of how something that intricate got in there in the first place. Our focus isn’t on the beauty of the ship, it is on where the ship happens to be when we look at it. I propose that this is exactly how the world looks at the institutional church.

Intimate gatherings of close friends are not uncommon in the world (barbeques, school, family, or military reunions). Crowds gathering to give mutual praise and adoration to a common object are not uncommon in the world (sporting events, concerts, variety shows, secular motivational speakers). What is uncommon in the world is the packaging – the thought that you can only do those things “at church” within the stained-glass and stone walls of an established house of worship. I believe that we as believers have a harder time with this than the world does. Why would an outsider want to come inside your bottle, when the same thing is offered outside, and with more room to stretch, too? Churches commonly ask the question, “what can we do to make our bottle more attractive to the outside world?” I’m afraid the answer more and more is – nothing. The world is becoming increasingly distanced from the institutional “church in a bottle” model.

But, you say, “My church is growing! In fact, we’re planting a new church right now – with a new building, a new pastor and staff, and a brand new multi-purpose Family Life Center to attract all the heathen to the things our beautiful facility can provide.” To that I say congratulations. I do pray that many would be saved through your work. However, I know from our own experience that the vast majority of people who will start attending this new church will come from other established churches. Those other churches will decline to support your growth, and the net effect on The Church will be negligible, if not overall negative.

I’m sorry to sound so cynical on this topic. I truly believe that the only recourse The Church has to reach the new generations in America is to break our bottles and just be ships. Let them see the ship, not the bottle. Maybe we’re not as novel, beautiful, or awe-inspiring in the form of “just ships.” But we’re free. We can be any size, shape, color – I can have four sails, you can have a 10,000-horsepower in-board engine. The point is, we will be seen clearer for what we are, not for where we live.

In the meantime, if all we can do is add new services within the existing confines of our “bottles,” then we should (we must!) if it helps answer the need for growth within our churches. But, the long-term solution is. . .

I hope to write more articles on church growth outside of the traditional, institutional church in the coming days. I hope you enjoy them and write comments reflecting your own experience and thoughts. I also hope that some don’t like my views, and express them as well by submitting comments. That is really why I created thechurchblog.org. All the other random rambling from my vacations, and news stories around the country are all just filler.

Help us help the world through the love and calling of our Holy Trinity – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.