By Darrel Rowland
Few congregations face one obstacle Grandview Christian Church encounters in making disciples:
Too many PhDs. Located on the south side of Johnson City, Tennessee, the church is home to several professors from nearby Milligan College and Emmanuel School of Religion.
That”s an obvious advantage when it comes to filling teaching and leadership positions.
What”s not so obvious is that this blessing has a flip side.
“The effect of having that many PhDs is that I need to be more intentional about developing teachers in the congregation that don”t have PhDs,” said senior minister Aaron Wymer. “Their presence can be a factor in making others a little afraid to use the gifts they might have.”
At the same time, many of those professors are just as glad to assume other roles in the local church, he noted.
Wymer acknowledged that churches large and small struggle with whether entertainment is a legitimate component of a 21st-century worship service.
“It”s going to be there at some level even if you think you”ve gotten it all out.”
He said the debate goes back at least as far as St. Augustine, when questions were raised about whether he should use his training in rhetoric from the pulpit. And Billy Sunday “used his celebrity as a baseball player and his ability to run races against horses to entertain people into coming to hear him preach.”
Even Jesus used stories, some with humorous elements, that could be considered entertainment, Wymer said.
But Grandview Christian, whose growth in weekly attendance to more than 400 has resulted in the addition of a third service, is still fairly “old school,” employing periods of silence and two Bible readings in each service alongside more contemporary expressions of worship.
Wymer notes that making disciples “is a bigger issue than how we worship on Sunday morning.”
He is challenging his members to establish a close relationship with someone else in the church to serve the community together. For example, some are involved with the local public school system, tutoring adults trying to get their GED.
“We think discipleship is about learning more Bible verses, but I want it to be bigger than that,” he said. “I think it would be a mistake to assume that Bible knowledge equals discipleship. That”s where our movement can get tripped up a little bit, because we are a people of the book.
“The Bible exists to move people into the kingdom of God. The Bible isn”t the focus: it”s the springboard. And if it doesn”t call us to service, to a deepening of joy and faith and those kinds of things, then no matter how much Bible knowledge we have it”s not doing the thing God designed it to do.”
Darrel Rowland is public affairs editor of The Columbus Dispatch and an adult Bible fellowship teacher at Worthington (Ohio) Christian Church.
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