Even big church splits better than small church

Okay, that was a satirical title for this post. What I meant is that we, the Vietnamese churches have much to learn, even in the painful church split cancers around here.

I wrote a few weeks ago about Pastor Mike Farabez's church splitting. (And I was wrong in thinking that PastorMike.com was the web site of his new church. No, he has PastorMike.com for a while now, and in the process of building the new church website, he was just host the staging pages there. Not a wise thing in my opinion, but not as egotistical as I billed him to be. But hey, take it with a grain of salt, I am just a web surfer who happened to stumble upon the whole thing. I don't even know the guy. Just read his book and pick up a few things here and there from it. That's all.)

Now to another big church split. Pastor Mike's church was about 1,200 people with less structure. First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood was about 2,800 people with more structure. I learned more about the split today from Tod's blog, especially the valuable Presbytery document for official committee members, and the moving analysis from a former elder. It was an amazing split (if one could use that term).

To asking the question of "which one splits better?" is like asking "would a semi stumble better than a minivan in off-the-cliff crash?" Splits are as painful as crash. But at least the support structure may be able to absorb a lot of shock, pain, and reduce fatality. No doubt that in the case of Hollywood, since the matter got dragged out over a long time, through multiple layers of organizational structures, a lot of negative energies were spent and absorbed in a lot of places. People will get hurt and bruised. But fatality? I am not so sure.

Now enter the Vietnamese churches. In the last few years the cancerous church splits caused damages here too. Just in this region, you can count a few terrible splits. If Hollywood was a semi, Pacific Coast was a minivan, we are like motorcycles. We have no structures, no fighting rules. People won't just get hurt and bruised. They died!

So, learn from the crashes of the big churches and try to figure out what support structure will need to be in place today...