Excellence @ Church

Why Excellence?

  • Non Christians (Barriers)
  • Spiritual Motive (Crossroads statement for God’s glory)
  • Encourages others (Distractions)
  • Builds Ownership (When things are grouse people will be enthused)
  • Learn to Trust Systems (They are put in place to make life easy for everyone concerned).
Tim Keller on Excellence
The power of art draws people to behold it. Good art and its message enters the soul through the imagination and begins to appeal to the reason, for art makes ideas plausible. The quality of music and speech in worship will have a major impact on its evangelistic power. In many churches, the quality of the music is mediocre or poor but it does not disturb the faithful. Why? Their faith makes the words of the hymn or the song meaningful despite its artistically poor expression and further, they usually have a personal relationship with the music presenter. But any outsider who comes in who is not convinced of the truth and who does not have any relationship to the presenter, will be bored or irritated by the poor offering. In other words, excellent aesthetics includes outsiders while mediocre or poor aesthetics excludes. The low level of artistic quality in many churches guarantees that only insiders will continue to come.

 

3 comments:

Anonymous said... 4/24/2008 12:18 pm  

Maybe excellence is overstating it a bit? Doing a 'decent job' or even a 'good job' @ church might be a better description?

After all, it's not like we are getting up at 4 each morning to train, or studying for years without reward or something, like others striving for excellence seem to...

mike said... 4/24/2008 12:36 pm  

Fair point... although the post wouldn't be quite as provocative without aiming for excellence would it. ;)

Anonymous said... 4/28/2008 12:53 pm  

No, but it might not make me want to run away and cry at my inability to achieve excellence ;)

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