Is Your Church a Thermostat or a Thermometer?
Does your church challenge you to take action commensurate to your capacity to get positive things done?
By Daniel Gauss
To what extent do churches accommodate the values of their worshippers and merely give them a sense of comfort, and to what extent do churches set high standards and encourage Christian growth and social commitment? To examine these questions, I want to draw from a memorable service I attended commemorating the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at one of America’s most affluent churches. The sermon from that service helps to show how a minister can tailor and dilute the Christian message to suit the congregation. It also hints at what, perhaps, could be said to money makers and power brokers who go to church. Through this you might better assess whether your church is a thermostat or a thermometer.
In his letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. talked briefly about the early Christian Church and how transformative it was. He said the early Church was, in fact, a “thermostat”: the early Christians initiated ethical and social change, they turned up the heat through their commitment to higher values and positive personal change. The early Christians lived austere lives of intense self-scrutiny and made good things happen…
