Is the Church a Gold Mine or a Bottomless Pit?

After a particularly difficult season, a ministry colleague recently told me, “I feel as if my church just sucks the life right out of me.” Apparently, that kind of thinking is quite common among ministers. According to research by the Barna Group in March 2022, two out of every five pastors were seriously considering quitting their profession. Things may be somewhat on the upswing since then, but it’s hard to know.

Many ministers and lay leaders feel as if the work they’re doing isn’t what they signed up for. Instead of life-giving kingdom work, they seem called to deal with problems far greater than what they can manage or what their experience has prepared them for. As a result, many of my colleagues seem to have the same sinking feeling: that serving a church is like being in a bottomless pit that will take as much as you can give without returning the favor.

Does this opinion reflect reality? Or is it a cynical view that misses something significant? I argue that it’s a little of both and always has been, but this is only okay if churches can remember why they even exist.

When Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon published their highly acclaimed book Resident Aliens in 1989, their work met with a constant stream of criticism despite the positive reviews. The book tried to paint a hopeful picture about the importance of the church. They argued that the efforts of modernity to strip the gospel message down to its essence were misguided, reducing the church to just a set of right beliefs and principles—which misses the whole point of the church. 

In their book, they argued for a much more important and demanding role for church than just a gathering of lone rangers each Sunday. The Christian church, they said, is meant to be an alternative community of people who are committed to following Jesus, loving each other, and proclaiming the truth of a greater reality. They asserted that the church needs to take its calling seriously and ask more of its people, not less.

The criticism of their written project boiled down to a single thought: Resident Aliens was asking too much. The church, said their critics, needs to demand less, not more, given the world we live in. Hauerwas and Willimon were being unrealistic, the naysayers said.

In a 1991 article “Why Resident Aliens Struck a Chord” in the journal Missiology, Hauerwas and Willimon rebuffed those claims. “The whole point of the book is that the church we want does exist. … The whole point is that we Christians are sitting on a gold mine called the church, but unfortunately the very categories we have been taught as Western Christians make it difficult for us to notice that it is gold” (p. 424; italics are the authors’).

Hauerwas and Willimon were trying to suggest that the church is and ought to be a tremendous source of blessing. It can function as a north star to guide the lives of those committed to Jesus—not just with boiled-down beliefs and principles, but with the serious task of following Jesus with our entire beings. Too many churches, they bemoaned, have lost sight of their mission and settled for the goal of just helping individuals be happy and successful. 

We see this today in a society where so many churches are driven by ideology rather than theology. Some are arguing the church can only find its way if it stands up for the “orthodox beliefs” of historical Christianity. People are certainly entitled to their opinions, but this is merely more of the same thing that Hauerwas and Willimon condemned almost 40 years ago. It’s a reductionistic approach to the cost of discipleship, telling people that their churches will grow if they just “believe the right things.”

Church is meant to be more than a bearer of ideology. We are to be a pilgrim people, journeying together on the difficult yet rewarding path of becoming more and more godly each day, while inviting others to join us on that journey. It’s not always meant to be neat or pretty. But when we do it together, there is nothing more rewarding.

When we lose sight of the significance of the church—or when the church loses its function of being in the world while not of it, i.e., resident aliens—then the bottomless pit can swallow up even the gold mine of the church.