It's cheesy, I know, but I loved "The Magnificent Seven" when I was a kid. It was something about the dash and elan of the seven gunmen, hired to protect a village of ordinary farmers; and also something about the pathos of the ending, when the surviving gunmen realize their lives only have any meaning when seen in the context of the prosaic, unglorious, and enduring life of the village they have protected.
As the lead gunman Chris says, "Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose".
A couple of decades ago, I was involved in a group for people seeking to learn about Christian faith (so long ago that it was before Alpha!). I was particularly impressed by a lad who was ex-Army, Warwickshire Fusiliers. He told me about the essential rôle of the infantry. They don't do twice-the-speed-of-sound, he told me, nor do they do high-tech armoured vehicles weighing 50 tons, nor are they primarily involved in any of the other glamorous tasks of a modern army. What the infantry do is this; they hold the ground. Once they have dug in, it is extremely difficult to remove them. And (stripped of the military baggage of this analogy) that's the local church for you. Usually not glamorous, sometimes dull, but once they are dug in to a local community then they are the fact on the ground, very very difficult to remove. Paul the Apostle knew this (Ephesians 6:13).
It's easy to get frustrated with a local church; I know this too well. The church can be too slow or trying to rush ahead too fast; the vision can be limited or too extravagant; people may be working hard but wasting time and energy by working at cross-purposes, or failing to communicate properly when they can't deliver on promises made on rota lists; the focus can be excessively prosaic or dangerously super-spiritual; the community may be stuck in a past glory which no longer works or may be jettisoning invaluable tradition in favour of hollow modernity. And yes, it is frustrating, and it's worth struggling to persuade people to do things better. But in the end the church is like the community of farmers in "The Magnificent Seven". All the workshops on church growth, all the books on new ways of worship, all the weekend courses are like the gunmen; useful for a season, but only when they aid those who hold the ground itself.
It seems to me that the late great Mike Yaconelli had the same thought when he wrote A better idea than Youth Ministry (PDF). Westerns, infantry, St Paul, youth workers, all with the same thought ...
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