It's about Relationships

Toby Lester, in an article he wrote for The Atlantic Monthly called "Oh Gods" (Feb. 2002) wrote:

 Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, is blunt, amiable, and a classically American maverick. He does scholarship with an often irreverent swagger. Knowing that he had written specifically on how and why religious movements succeed, I called him and asked him to summarize his thoughts on the subject. "The main thing you've got to recognize," he told me, "is that success is really about relationships and not about faith. What happens is that people form relationships and only then come to embrace a religion. It doesn't happen the other way around. That's really critical, and it's something that you can only learn by going out and watching people convert to new movements. We would never, ever, have figured that out in the library. You can never find that sort of thing out after the fact?because after the fact people do think it's about faith. And they're not lying, by the way. They're just projecting backwards.

If you watch a church that's really "On the grow," look at the relationships of the people. Are they informally connected? Will they do things together, without having to have a program to structure it? Are they motivated by a common love, for each other?

And, while we're asking questions here, I should ask, how many friends do we have that haven't yet met Jesus? How many relationships do we have where we don't all belong to a church? What do we need to do to enlarge that circle?

Ok, ok, mebe one more question. If it is indeed about relationships, why do (some) churches seem to do things that hinder rather than help relationships? 

To retain control? To feed the demands of a top heavy structure? To meet a budget? To punish the radicals?

Why?

 

Thanks globalgirl for the link.