Are We ‘Ingrown’?
So far this summer — “so far” because summer isn’t over yet — I’ve reread a couple of gems by Jack Miller. If the name is new to you, Jack Miller is something of the unsung hero of the New Calvinism movement over the last twenty years. Many people are familiar with the late Tim Keller, but it was Jack Miller who deeply influenced Keller during his days at Westminster Seminary.
It was Miller, first, who experienced what we’d consider a “gospel awakening.” He had a life-changing renewal experience of the grace of God, as both his biography and memoir recount. That renewal could be summed up in his electric line, “Cheer up! You are far worse than you ever imagined and far more loved than you ever dared dream!”
He held nothing back in admitting his own sinfulness, and he was deeply assured by what Jesus alone had done for him. (His best book, in my opinion, that explains this daily practice of repentance and faith is Repentance: A Daring Call to Real Surrender.)
But he has another book that I believe is even more relevant for our church as a whole. First published in 1986, Outgrowing the Ingrown Church is Miller’s attempt to help churches break free from “the things that turn them in on themselves and keep them from being outward-looking and outward-moving communities of Jesus Christ.”
He makes the case that “ingrowness” is a common phenomenon among more established Evangelical churches. The more comfortable churches become, the easier it is to lose touch with the gospel zeal at the heart of their being. In all of Miller’s work, as a church planter, church revitalizer, and seminary professor, he discovered at least seven marks of an ingrown church. As it turns out, before Mark Dever laid out the 9 marks of a healthy church, Miller warned of 7 marks of an ingrown church.
And the question here is not if these things are present in established churches, but how badly, and what must we do to walk in repentance and renewal. They are marks that should lead us to self-examination and humility, and I’m offering them here in that spirit.
From Jack Miller, Outgrowing the Ingrown Church, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986)
Seven marks of an ingrown church …
[The following are selected quotes directly from the book, pp. 29–36]
1. Tunnel Vision
Members of the ingrown church body are characterized by tunnel vision that limits potential ministries of the church to those that can be accomplished by the visible, human resources at hand. …
This unbelief expresses itself in the quiet acceptance of churchly dullness as normal, and numerical stagnation or decline as inevitable. … Today such a foreshortened vision reveals itself most conspicuously in our indifference to the peril of the lost. People are no longer seen as being in danger of perishing forever under the condemnation of a holy God.
2. Shared Sense of Group Superiority
… [these churches] are likely to exaggerate points of superiority they actually possess as means of compensation for their limitations." What they do is build an attitude of superiority over others by elevating a positive feature in the church life or tradition and then comparing this feature with groups which lack this quality. …
3. Extreme Sensitivity to Negative Human Opinion
… members of the ingrown church are also likely to feel inferior and shrivel up and die at the first sign of opposition. A word of disapproval from a "pillar" of the church is enough to rattle the ecclesiastical squirrel cage and send everyone running for cover. …
4. Niceness in Tone
…what is often wanted in the local church is unrelieved blandness: a "nice pastor" preaching "nice sermons" about a "nice Jesus" delivered in a "nice tone" of voice. What is twisted about all this is that "niceness" is being substituted for Christ's holy love, a heroic quality that might not in some circumstances prove to be nice at all. What we really want is to be comfortable and undisturbed.
5. Christian Soap Opera in Style
The niceness of the inward-looking church does not go deep enough to hinder the soap-opera style in which many a congregational life is lived. Soap operas are basically a series of endlessly repeated conversations, and gossip …
6. Confused Leadership Roles
In many churches the members of the congregation do not want officers who are trying to be pacesetters for God's kingdom. This is especially true of the small church, where fear of change often runs high. The reason for this should be clear. In the typical self-centered church there is a hidden determination to eradicate enthusiasm that disturbs the comfortable routine dictated by self-trust, self-exaltation, niceness as a defense mechanism, and the rights of gossip. … What the church actually wants is a pastor and elders who have the majesty and manner of Moses and Aaron but none of the prophetic fire.
7. A Misdirected Purpose
It is clear from the foregoing that the controlling purpose in the ingrown church has to do with survival — not with growth through the conversion of the lost. …
We can recognize this misdirected purpose by noting what goes into the church budget (and what is left out) and how visitors to the church services are welcomed. Visitors to the inward-looking congregation may be given a formal welcome and a smile, but the heart is not in it. … Where this distortion of purpose prevails, the danger is that eventually the church will make its own life, programs, and traditions into its object of worship.
