Last Sunday I finished a 12 part sermon series on What is a Healthy Church. As usual, I have more information than I can preach. While the sermon was fifty minutes long it did not seem that long and in reality it could have been much longer. Even to the last minute of preparation I was debating on using the article I am about to refer to.

Kevin DeYoung wrote an excellent article called, “The Glory of Plodding” in the May issue of Table Talk magazine. Kevin’s article is short and sweet and identifies the current cultural trend to seek a church that is bigger and better and has a rock start personification when it comes to worship and ministry. Not only this he points out the trend for younger Christians to try to be individualistic, revolutionary Christians as opposed to committing to a church body and plodding along doing life together. Let me give you some excerpts from DeYoung’s article:

It is sexy among young people—my generation—to talk about ditching institutional religion and starting a revolution of real Christ-followers living in real community without the confines of church. Besides being unbiblical, such notions of churchless Christianity are unrealistic. It’s immature actually, like the newly engaged couple who think romance preserves the marriage, when the couple celebrating their golden anniversary know it’s the romance. Without the God-given mandate of corporate accountability, we will not prove faithful over the long haul (76).

DeYoung goes on to say: Until we are content with being one of the million nameless, faceless church members and not the next globe-trotting rock start, we aren’t ready to be a part of the church. In the grand scheme of things, most of us are going to be more of an Amliatus (Rom. 16:8) or Phlegon (v.14) than an apostle Paul. And maybe that’s why so many Christians are getting tired of the church. We haven’t learned how to be part of the crowd. We haven’t learned how to be ordinary. Or jobs are often mundane. Our devotional times often seem like a waste. Church services are often forgettable. That’s life. We drive to the same places, go through the same routines with the kids, buy the same groceries at the store, and share a bed with the same person every night. Church is often the same too-same doctrines, same basic order of worship, same preacher, same people. But in all the smallness and sameness, God works –like the smallest seed in the garden growing to unbelievable heights, like beloved Tychicus, that faithful minister, deliver the mail and apostolic greetings (Eph. 6:21) Life seem pretty ordinary, just like following Jesus most days. Daily discipleship is not a new revolution each morning or an agent of global transformation every evening; it’s a long obedience in the same direction.

It’s possible the church needs to change. Certainly in some areas it does. But it’s also possible we’ve changed—and not for the better. It’s possible we no longer find joy in so great a salvation. It’s possible that our boredom has less to do with the church, its doctrines, or its poor leadership and more to do with our unwillingness to tolerate imperfection in other and our own coldness to the same old message about Christ’s death and resurrection. It’s possible we talk a lot about authentic community but we aren’t willing to live in it.

The church is not an incidental part of God’s plan. Jesus didn’t invite people to join an anti-religion, anti-doctrine, anti-institutional bandwagon of love, harmony, and re-integration. He showed people how to live, to be sure. But He also called them to repent, called them to faith, called them out of the world, and called them into the church. The Lord “didn’t add them to the church without saving them, and he didn’t save them without adding them to the church” (John Stott) (76-77).

What we need, according to DeYoung, are fewer revolutionaries and a few more plodding visionaries. That’s my dream for the church—a multitude of faithful, risk-taking plodders. The best churches are full of gospel-saturated people holding tenaciously to a vision of godly obedience and God’s glory, and pursuing that godliness and glory with relentless, often unnoticed, plodding consistency (76).

DeYoung conludes, Don’t give up on the church. The New Testament knows nothing of churchless Christianity. The invisible church is for invisible Christians. The visible church is for you and me . . . (so) stop the revolution, and join the rest of the plodders. Fifty years form now you’ll be glad you did.

With the mobile and disconnected society we live in today, what is needed is church members that are indelibly united to a local body of gospel-saturated Christians. It will do our souls good. Let’s plod together for the next fifty years and see the glory of Christ revealed in a long obedience in the same direction. Let’s finish well.