Social media is full of clips of extravagant stunts in various megachurches. Pastors riding custom-made rollercoasters, preachers entering auditoriums like prizefighters before a boxing match, vast productions with lights, lasers, and pyrotechnics – all promising, as one of these churches boasted, ‘church like never before.’
We may shake our heads in dismay, convinced our own fellowships would never turn to those things. However, if we are honest, we can feel a similar pressure in subtler ways – the urge to keep things fresh, to entertain, to offer something extraordinary. But the Lord has not called his people to invent dazzling novelties. He has given his church the ordinary means of grace, through which the extraordinary God meets with his people.
Those means are identified in Acts 2:42 – such as the preaching of the Word, the ordinances, and prayer.
The issue is not just embracing the ordinary means as sufficient as a theological position, but a heart issue. As Sam Emadi asks, ‘Do we really trust God to work through the simple means he has ordained, or do we believe our ingenuity supplies something the ordinary means lack?’
