Ways We're Not Like Saddleback!
While having great admiration for the Saddleback Community Church of Orange County, California, we must acknowledge ways that we don’t aspire to resemble it!
We’re not called to become a mega church, in that much of our parish area is a one-mile wide strip of island, surrounded by water! Our immediate neighborhoods are more or less “built-out”, and many of our neighbors are highly mobile Air Force personnel, so we are planning for steady, rather than dramatic, growth.
We’re not Baptists, and so we’ve incorporated Presbyterian Church (USA) perspectives on baptism, the Lord’s Supper, God’s concern for justice, and the legitimacy of women serving as leaders, etc., in our Newcomers Seminar (C.L.A.S.S. 101) material.
We’re not led to purge liturgical traditions from our Sunday services when it’s clear that they accomplish the purpose of leading the worshipping crowd into the authentic adoration of God.
Though we’re seeking to “target” certain types of people with need-based fellowship groups, we’re not comfortable with the practice of “targeting” a specific type of person via our design of the worship service. In Galatians 3:28 and elsewhere we read of how the New Testament church was remarkable in its diversity. While we welcome everyone, we recognize that it’s not possible to craft a service meaningful for everyone, and notice that the folks we most often attract currently are baby-boomer professionals who are “returning” to church, military and high tech retirees with highly active lifestyles, and already-maturing Christians looking for a church with a clear and functional mission.
Finally, while we are much impressed with the number of unchurched who have become mature Christians through Saddleback—a “lean and mean, disciple-making machine” (Rick Warren’s words)—we believe that Trinity is called to be a covenant family, albeit a large and extended family. This means that we will continue to maintain some traditions and programs that strengthen the individual’s relationship with the whole church, beyond his or her involvement in a small group or ministry team. (An example is our Wednesday Night Live meal, which required the construction of a large fellowship hall, and consumes many volunteer hours, but produces a tangible sense of church family.)
A family implies less efficiency than an organization. We’re not called to be as efficient as Saddleback in making large numbers of individual disciples, for we believe that God has given us a special purpose in having us relate as church family, which speaks to the isolation and individualism of our age. But how grateful we are to learn how we can be a family that expects to accomplish God’s purposes!
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