You’ve been in one before. A place that sells non-prescription reading glasses, Pringles, cases of motor oil, high end sewing machines, children’s dress shoes, 12 gauge shotguns, regulation basketball hoops, portable gazebos, white gold engagement rings, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and frozen fish sticks. It’s a Wal-Mart, a Costco a big box store! A place for one stop shopping, literally. These big box stores make the department stores of a couple decades ago look prehistoric.
To have everything at one’s disposal. That is what society instills in us. It informs our TV viewing (1000s of channels!), our religion (1000s of denominations) and our outlook on life (millions of viewpoints, all of them valid). We want things in abundance, yet easily accessible.
Take this cultural mandate to unlimited stuff, all under one roof, and you end up with big box Christianity. Except instead of an immeasurable amount of stuff we demand an immeasurable amount of excellence. This happens all the time in our churches and ministries. It’s why we end up with churches and non-profits that keep expanding into different areas: We’ve got evangelism down, lets try microfinance! We’re great at discipleship, let’s start a counseling ministry! We’re great at missions trips, let’s start our own missions organization!
This desire for expansion—to fit every thing a Christian can do under one roof—is big box Christianity. It’s also a lie.
There is an assumption, based on our consumerism, that churches and Christian ministries should provide everything—one stop Christianity. Churches and Christian ministries are not big box stores though. Individually, a Christian organization should not be expected to provide the full spectrum of Christianity to its members, partners or constituents. There is cause for concern when a church tries to have scores of specific ministries or a Christian homeless ministry starts thinking that it needs to expand its focus beyond homelessness. Granted, I fully believe that God calls leaders of Christian ministries to new and exciting places of ministry, but there is a pressure to add more and more and more to our Christian organizations that comes from the big box mindset of our society, not from Christian faith and practice.
If our society offers us the big box store as a metaphor for expansion and growth—you grow until you provide everything—then let us look to the Scriptures for a better metaphor: that we are all part of the body of Christ, a community of believers. To put it in more contemporary terms, Christian organizations should not try to expand and grow, they should function as part of an ecosystem, like a town or Main Street. In a community mindset, everything is still provided, but it is provided by those who know how to do it well. In a sense, we should begin to discern the distinct vocation and practice that God calls ministries to and not just assume that expansion and broadening of services across the Christian spectrum is a good thing. We need to begin to chase excellence in faith and practice more than an expansion of faith and practice. If we do that, we will still see the full spectrum of Christian faith and practice covered—from prison ministry to puppet ministry, evangelism to Eucharist, and choir to counseling—but it will be with excellence instead of expansion, focus instead of forecasts, and a holistic understanding of the body of Christ functioning together as a whole instead of every Christian organization trying to be the whole body by itself.