No, the title isn’t a new lame “Christian” horror movie.  It’s actually my little twist on an issue that’s been big in many Christian circles for a while now. Actually, this has always been an issue, it’s just that in the last few years it’s gotten a nifty new name and lots of publicity thanks to Willow Creek and other church trying to figure out how to deal with the issue.

The issue is simply this:  Should Christians be dependent upon the church for spiritual food and grow, or should they be able to do that at home, i.e. to be self-feeding?

About two years ago Willow Creek did a huge study on this and concluded they had largely failed to help their people grow spiritually and that they weren’t self-feeding believers.  Here’s Kyle Strobel’s comment on this:

An instance of this phenomena can be seen in this quote from Bill Hybels, founding pastor of Willow Creek, “We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’” The church’s task, in other words, is to make people independent, in a similar way that a parents task is to help children leave home and exist on their own two feet. But is that the church’s task? What this is modeling, in my opinion, is the opposite of what the church needs to be doing – not to make people dependent upon a service for their relationship with God, nor to be turning them into “self-feeders,” an odd term if there ever was one – but for the body of Christ to exist as a people, and individuals to exist within that as individuals within the larger body.

Now obviously Christians need to be able to feed themselves, and they also should expect to find good, deep, Bible teaching at their local church. But many argue that in the past the church has talked about self-feeding but in reality fostered dependence of the believer on the church.

Skye Jethani says this about that!

The problem is that both of these models are right, and both are wrong. Is the church a corporation?-Well, yes…kinda. In our culture of tax laws, legal structures, budgets, staffs, and facilities the church does, in some cases, need to function as a corporation. Is the church a family?-Well, yes…kinda. It is a relational network that is trying to grow immature people into maturity so they can function, in some cases, as autonomous selves.

The problem is when we take either of these models too far. Which seems to be the issue of debate right now.

I agree with Skye. Obviously the end goal of any discipleship program is for believers to be able to turn to God’s Word and both properly interpret and apply it their lives. That’s the only way you’ll ever feed yourself!

There’s no need to go to extremes, as the Bible itself makes it clear that fellowship and worship are to be regular parts of the believers life.

So the challenge for the American church today is how can we both teach people to be self-feeders and build them into committed members of a local body, and do both at the same time??