There is some correlation between educational development and spiritual development. How people develop in the spiritual arena is still left unexamined to a great extent.
There are systems that lend themselves to consistent growth and those that are less effective. Some are not effective at all.
It is believed by some that a school of 400 people is ideal. They contend that every student added beyond that mark means a drop in the quality of education. What does this say about larger churches? Something. But we don’t have time to list all the benefits of a larger church. There are many depending on the church that cannot be experienced outside a larger church setting.
What this does mean is that churches need to break down into smaller units for life change to be fully seen. I have always favored a church that met in many services. I have led a church where we had ten services a weekend and many small groups we asked people to go to instead of a service once a month. And I think this could be the genius behind churches meeting in many medium size or smaller venues at once.
They have also found that summer breaks actually set students far behind. Yet we continue to avoid having year around school. This one move, to year around school, would allow us to catch up with the more progressive systems around the world.
What about the summer slide in churches? I think the same thing happens. People lose ground spiritually with lax summer attendance and serving. Do we really need all these breaks? And what are the real spirituals trade-offs. And just be the first to try and remedy this. Our penchant for summer breaks come from our northern European roots. They only worked eight months of the year in the ancient cultures. The whole concept sets back development. I am looking for ways now to make summer make ground…maybe in different ways than we think.
We could do so much more if we had more profound ways to fund things than the offering bag. Our form dictates our aims sometimes. And this isn’t always good.
Kids whose parents read to them far excel in school and life. Wouldn’t we be better off teaching parents to train their own kids in Bible knowledge and doing other kinds of development at the church? I think if we want to see real life transformation and strength we train parents in church to train their kids. This is called Orange Thinking by North Point in Atlanta. The whole truth even outstrips their tremendous efforts to take this approach. After all the church at the very most can get 52 hours a year and more likely around 40 in the best of cases. Training parents for the additional hundreds of available hours makes a great deal more sense.
