Throwing out the church with the "churchy"

It recently came to our attention that the church that we are attending (a different place than one I blogged about earlier--we are still searching for a church to call home) only offers communion two times per year--at Christmas and Easter. This was a very surprising discovery for us, because in many respects, there is a lot to like about the church--it's a place with great worship and solid Biblical teaching. So, hearing that communion was only offered twice per year was very odd.

This has had my mind thinking this week about "seeker-friendly" approaches to church, because my wife and I think that this drive to be seeker-sensitive may be partly the issue here--that communion perhaps is too "traditional" or "churchy" for this church. "Seeker-friendly" and "not the church your parents went to" are clear drivers of this church (not unlike what has guided many other churches in recent years).

Sometimes it feels as if we (the church) are chasing our tails in an effort to woo those "seekers" (arguably, a label that is not very helpful to anyone--aren't we all "seekers" in a certain sense?). Are we out-thinking ourselves? Are the changes we make to the look and feel of church truly based on what we know non-believers are attracted to? Or, are we reacting more to what we think they think about church? On the other hand, isn't there something a little odd to us basing our model of church on what non-church-goers think?? If that non-church-goer never goes to our church, should we be using their opinion to drive what we look like? And, if that non-church-goer does decide one day to attend our church, won't they want to see the church as it really should be??

I'm wondering this week if perhaps we sometimes throw out the church with the churchy. The Reformation of the 1500s, at least according to my reading, in many places and among many church leaders was about getting back to what they thought of as the Biblical church. Yet, in the end, it was more of a reaction against the Catholic church than a realignment with the Bible. Similarly, the Catholic counter-Reformation was a reaction to the changes made during the Protestant Reformation, rather than a realignment with the Bible. In both cases, the church was chasing its tail in that it was measuring itself against itself, rather than the Bible.

Perhaps churches that are driven primarily to be "seeker sensitive" are, similar to what happened during the Reformation, reacting to what they see in the church culture at large rather than carefully measuring themselves against the Bible. And it seems that the more we spend time reacting to ourselves (the way others do church), the less time we'll spend truly creating church the way it was meant to be. Besides, based on what we read throughout the Bible, it's hard to expect that "church the way it was meant to be" would always be easy or comfortable.

Back to what spawned all of this....if doing communion twice a year is a reaction against what other churches do in an effort to simply be less "traditional," that seems to be a mis-placed priority. Our priority, it seems, should be more about what will make the church more Biblical and less about what will distinguish one group (church) over another.