Why Faith Needs Time, Not Programs
Written by Russ Johnson
A Real Tension
Recently a friend sent me a photo he was excited about.
It showed his pastor standing behind the counter of a new coffee shop their church had just built. The pastor was preparing his sermon there, laptop open, Bible beside him. The church had converted part of their building into a café space for the community, and my friend was proud of it.
But when I looked at the picture, something else jumped out at me.
A senior pastor
Leading a formalized church
That owns a building
And prepares sermons for people seated in rows
And yet not one of those things can be found anywhere in what Jesus did, called us to do, or what the New Testament Church ever did in His name.
I mentioned that to my friend—not to rain on his parade, but to ask a question I’d had to wrestle with myself: Why do we invest so much of our time, energy, and money into something Jesus never actually created or commanded?
My friend didn’t argue theology.
Because he couldn’t.
The modern structure of church—buildings, clergy, services, stages—is simply not there in an undiluted reading of the New Testament.
So instead, just like I used to when I pastored a fast-growing, popular church, he pointed to the numbers.
Look how many people attend.
Look how many professions of faith.
Look how many students came to the leadership conference.
And honestly, I get that response. Because when I was leading a church, I used the same one.
Which creates a tension worth sitting with, especially if you’re one of the millions quietly wondering whether something about modern church life feels… off.
Do the Numbers Tell a Different Story?
Numbers are persuasive for a reason.
They give leaders something to point to. But they also give members something to attach themselves to.
Big attendance feels like validation.
Growth feels like momentum.
Success feels like belonging.
And slowly, without realizing it, people begin aligning themselves with the success of the institution because it helps them believe something about themselves.
I’m part of something important.
I’m on the right team.
I belong.
But that’s the quiet seduction of numbers.
They don’t just measure what’s happening. They help all of us—leaders and members alike—construct an imaginary self we hope finally matters.
Which is why numbers can make something feel spiritually successful even when it has very little to do with the life Jesus actually started.
When Numbers Equal Blessing
Here’s the assumption hiding behind most of these conversations: if something is growing, God must be blessing it.
But if that logic were true, God would have to be wildly enthusiastic about prisons, cancer wards, and overdose funerals. After all, people “find God” in those places all the time.
But no one would argue that God desires incarceration, disease, or addiction.
What’s happening is something simpler—and far more gracious: God meets people inside human desperation.
That doesn’t mean He designed the circumstances that drove them there. And it certainly doesn’t mean He wants us to build systems around them.
If that idea feels uncomfortable, welcome to the Old Testament.
Six hundred-plus laws.
A massive temple system.
Endless sacrifices and rituals.
All of it God meeting people where they were in their limited and often distorted understanding of Him—not endorsing what they thought He needed or where they thought He lived.
In short: God moves because He is faithful, not because what we’re doing is right.
Which explains why Jesus shows up centuries later and says something shocking to the religious experts of His day: “You have no idea who God actually is or what He’s really like.” (John 8:19)
That realization forced me to confront what we’ve come to call “church,” along with a couple of questions that became deeply uncomfortable when I was pastoring one.
Is Your Church Doing What Jesus Did?
Because Jesus didn’t build a stage.
He didn’t organize weekly services.
He didn’t create a formal leadership structure.
He didn’t host leadership conferences.
Sure, those things can draw thousands, span the globe, and dominate Christian culture.
But those ideas didn’t come from Jesus. They came centuries later, borrowed from Roman models of empire, organization, and control. (see: This Is The Backstory)
Is Your Church Saying What Jesus Said?
Because Jesus didn’t preach a distant God who must be appeased.
He didn’t preach sin as rule-breaking that threatens God’s holiness.
He didn’t preach acceptance once the right conditions were met.
He didn’t preach faith as a strategy for getting your act together.
Much of what we call the gospel today was shaped long after Jesus by philosophical frameworks that imagined God as a cosmic bookkeeper and faith as the payment plan.
Which brings us to a deeper question.
Why Does This Happen?
Philosophically, false ideas about God produce insecurity. Insecurity produces anxious ambition. And anxious ambition creates leaders and members who quietly depend on each other to feel like they’re enough.
Practically, unconditional grace doesn’t sell well in a world obsessed with achievement. And that creates a problem for institutions that rely on participation and visibility to survive.
By contrast, the Church Jesus started wasn’t an organization.
It was a way of life.
A life built on friendship.
A life sustained by trust.
A life animated by the risky freedom that faith was meant to bring.
But systems built around control can’t function that way. So they offer safer substitutes.
Decisions to make.
Programs to run.
Metrics to measure.
Things we can control.
Because control feels like faith—even when it isn’t.
I know that sounds harsh.
But formalized churches don’t grow because people are trusting Jesus more deeply. They grow because they offer something much easier to believe in:
The illusion that we can manage our standing with God.
And systems that promise control will always outgrow a gospel that requires trust.
The Hidden Cost
But there’s another cost to all of this: time.
Modern church life consumes enormous amounts of it.
Services to attend.
Programs to run.
Events to champion.
Buildings to maintain.
And the result is that many sincere Christians end up spending most of their time sustaining a religious system instead of engaging the world around them.
Which is tragic.
What Success Actually Looks Like
Once you see this, a different question begins to emerge: What if the goal of the Church was never to gather as many people as possible inside a building, butto set people free?
Free from religious anxiety.
Free from the endless project of self-improvement.
Free from the constant demands of maintaining a religious institution.
Because once people experience that freedom, something remarkable happens: they suddenly have time.
Time to notice the people around them.
Time to care about problems in their neighborhoods.
Time to build things that actually serve the world.
And that’s where the Church Jesus started begins to look very different from the one we inherited.
Instead of a centralized institution consuming everyone’s weekends and relational bandwidth, it becomes something far more ordinary—and far more powerful.
Friends around tables. And from those tables, something beautiful begins to happen.
People join or start nonprofits to invest their time, energy, and resources into real needs. Because the Church was never meant to consume people’s lives. It was meant to release them.
Which means success isn’t a packed auditorium, a growing budget, or a campus expansion.
Success looks like ordinary people discovering grace around ordinary tables—and then walking out the door with the freedom, time, and courage to love the world in Jesus’ name.
And the good news? You don’t need a stage for that.
In fact, a stage would probably get in the way.
Grace has always preferred a table.