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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 2

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Light in the ChurchThe second installment (#1 here) in the series “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church” adds another four issues the Church in the West, in America in particular, needs to address. None of today’s items are earth-shattering, but it amazes me how the simple things get overlooked and fester in our midst:

16. Deal with offenses swiftly
I don’t know when we became so thin-skinned in America. The rise of the culture of victimization, I believe, is the reason that so many people simply can’t get along with those who hold differing views. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, we too easily take offense at what the other side thinks. It’s as if we’re stabbing someone in the heart if we say that we don’t agree with a dear position of theirs. When you get right down to it, though, the source for being so easily offended is just human pride and self-centeredness.Nowhere else is this more evident than in churches. It used to be that churches split because of fierce doctrinal battles, but I heard of a split recently due to differing takes on whether the church parking lot should be expanded. All this rancor bodes ill for a Church whose growth in America has plateaued. The world looks at us, sees the disunity, and thinks, That’s no better than what I’ve got to deal with every day—and they’ve got more rules, too! Should we be surprised that we aren’t growing? Who wants to step into the middle of a group of people who take offense at everything?

The Lord has something to say about this:

There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.
—Proverbs 6:16-19 ESV (emphasis added)

Did you catch that last one? God considers stirring up discord to be an abomination. I’m fairly familiar with the abominations that Christians prattle on about, but offending our brothers and sisters in Christ is curiously left unmentioned. If only each one of us would heed that warning!

It’s time to stop to consider how others think. Time to walk a mile in their moccasins, as the old aphorism goes. Most arguments aren’t worth it, yet we would rather fight than not because we in the Church today have developed a chip on our collective shoulder. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, we have to be right and damn everyone else who thinks differently than we do! Literally.

This isn’t a call to abandon good doctrine, only to realize that it’s easier to get someone to your side by lovingly (with genuine affection) dealing with another person as God directs in His time. We need to pick and choose our battles wisely and be willing to let some things go. Our fellowship with another believer is infinitely more important than the size of the church parking lot. Let’s start living like we believed that to be true. Like the Bible says, if you have offended a brother in Christ (or he you), go and be reconciled before you render your spiritual service. Let’s not pretend that Matthew 5:21-25 doesn’t exist in our Bible.

Let’s learn how to be the bigger people.

15. Not more church plants, but more connection to existing churches
We practice a sort of Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ekklesia that goes hand-in-hand with taking offense at others. Nothing else can explain the need for another church plant in the middle of a region filled with churches. Few church planters ever ask whether another church is necessary in a town of ten thousand that already has a church on every corner, but our predilection toward believing that ONLY WE ARE DOING IT RIGHT tends to lead to that congestion.The result is that estimates put the number of churches in this country at more than 350,000. That means that if every man, woman and child in this country were to be in church in Sunday, each one of those churches would hold about 850 people. Last time I looked, I didn’t see every man, woman, and child in America in church on Sunday. In fact, if you believe church pollster George Barna, we’re seeing fewer people in church than ever before.

I understand that some will cry that we need to build more churches to reach more people who don’t have enough churches around them to choose, but the fact is that too many churches are under-attended. Not only that, but church planters aren’t rushing to plant churches in rural communities where there might actually be a dearth of churches; they’re trying to put one across the street from three other churches in the fastest-growing Caucasian section of town. I know an area near me that is growing like crazy, but nothing explains the half-dozen monster churches built (for millions of dollars that could have been better spent) within a quarter mile of each other. I suspect you could put 2500 to 5000 people in each of them, but I guarantee that not even a third of that are showing up any given Sunday. And if they are, there’s another church somewhere that lost those people.

The plain truth is that we’re just cannibalizing each other’s churches. We’re not talking about the “three thousand added to their number that day” kind of evangelism that everyone dreams about, but no one actually does anymore. No, we subdivide our Christian population like a randy amoeba bent on replicating itself in ever smaller bits until there’s nothing left.

But what if a church decided it wasn’t going to view the church across the street as competition? What if we did a better job bringing people into existing congregations rather than building yet another church? What if we worked with the churches we had rather than build a new one because of a church split (see #16)? Or what if we changed our view that other existing churches can’t possibly be preaching the Gospel, instead suggesting that someone looking for a church might find a better fit in the church across the street than the new one we’re thinking about building?

Until we start getting off our duffs and actually start evangelizing people to the point that our own church is swelling because of new converts, not recycled ones from some other church, we just don’t need another new church to add to the cacophony of churches already screaming, Don’t go to those heretics over there, come in here!

We’ve got to stop thinking about our own little mission and start thinking about what serves the Lord best. Yet another church that is hot today and dead tomorrow is not serving the Lord best. Let’s stop now.

14. Think like a visitor
Over the course of a men’s retreat my own church held, I brought up the issue that churches, in general, rarely think about what visitors experience walking into their church for the first time—especially if those visitors have never been in a church in their lives. The puzzled looks on the faces of several of the men told me that they’d never once thought about that. They’d grown up in a church and knew church practices and culture like the back of their own hand. What could possibly be “scary” about church?I have a degree in Christian Education. One of the things drilled into me by my profs at Wheaton College was keeping an eye open for how churches actually communicate with people. What does a church say through non-verbals? Those unspoken messages can be powerful, in many cases overshadowing the message that comes out of the pulpit.

A church that preaches the love of God, but never talks to visitors, is at cross-purposes to their message. Yet the doing may be even more important than the saying.

I suspect that most people reading this are old-timers. By and large, we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be new to a church—any church at all. We know the Christian lingo, the do’s and don’ts, where to take our kids to the right Sunday School class, and what weekday ministries our church offers. But visitors don’t. And when they find themselves overwhelmed by choices and less-than-helpful church regulars, they won’t come back. Ever.

We Americans are amused when folks from other countries talk about America and what it’s like. We take for granted that we live in a big country that has supermarkets everywhere, or that people drive rather than walk to destinations. We’ve all heard the stories. A Japanese fellow told me how frightened he was to drive on the highways here because of the sheer number of monstrous semis that roared alongside him. He’d never seen so many huge trucks, nor had he ever battled them for position on a highway at 70 miles an hour. That was a source of terror for him.

What sources for terror exist for visitors to our churches? To them, our church may very well be like another country where they don’t speak the language, can’t find anything, and seem stupid about the customs that everyone around them performs without thinking, as if in some intricate ballet.

Start thinking like a visitor. Act like we’ve never stepped foot into a church before. Note the lingo and culture. Brainstorm how to make the church more accessible and less scary.

Five simple things we can do to help:

a. Always be on the lookout for people we don’t know. Don’t leave it up to the greeters to be the friendly and informative ones. Offer to sit with new people. Offer to take them out for lunch afterward—on our tab (or even the church’s if the church is wise enough to see how meaningful that can be to retaining people.)

b. Make sure signs in your church point out where people need to go. We should walk them ourselves to make sure they’re accurate.

c. Install a map in the lobby that pinpoints the locations of all church small groups meetings. Have flyers near the map that have the pictures, phone numbers, and addresses of those small group leaders on them. Ideally, if we’re doing #1, we can take people to that small group map ourselves and walk through options with them.

d. Prominently display a plaque with the church beliefs and vision in the lobby.

e. Volunteer to call people who may have filled out a visitor card, especially if they live near us.

What other ideas for making visitors feel welcome can you come up with?

13. Our neighbors matter to Jesus
Yes, the people who live next door. The couple down the street with the sickly child. The elderly couple across the street who can’t do as much around the house as they would like. The single person in the nearby apartment who gets lost in the shuffle.Steve Sjogren once gave a message where he said that he didn’t understand how someone could jump on a plane to go to India for missions work when that same person’s neighbor didn’t know Christ. Say what you will about the slight that gives to world missions, but he does have a point. I’ve never understood how we can expect to win over another culture to Christ when we can’t even lead our neighbor to that same Christ.

Our best mission field is within a half mile of our homes. What are we sowing in that diameter of one mile? And if we can’t sow there, where can we expect to sow?

Every Christian and every Christian family is like an outpost on an unforgiving and hostile planet. Imagine living on the planet Venus with its 900 degree days, acidic atmosphere, and crushing surface pressures. The house of the Christian is the sole sanctuary from that brutality. If we all lived on Venus, people would be flocking to our little respites from savage living conditions.

Our problem is that we forget that the planet Earth is unforgiving and hostile. Our unsaved neighbors are already living with one foot in hell. Do they find a respite in our homes? Do we take our respite to them in their time of need? Do they have even one clue as to the source of our respite from the storms of life?

If not, why not?

We talk about growing our churches, but we too often forget about our neighbors. Instead, evangelism becomes a concept rather than a reality. If we are not there for our neighbors in their time of need, how can we call ourselves servants of Jesus Christ? Can we expect our neighbors to suddenly fall under the conviction of the Holy Spirit by some random encounter or can we be the ones to bring the Spirit of Life into their homes?

Churches convinced of the need to grow need look no further than the neighbors of the people in the church. That’s where it starts. And if our churches are hindrances to our neighbors, then we need to find ways to take down the barriers without compromising the natural offense of the Gospel. If Christ is the stumbling block, then so be it. He Himself declared that He would be rejected because of who He is. But we, our churches, and the way we live out our faith should never be obstacles that keep our neighbors from Christ.

Tomorrow brings four more issues. Thanks for stopping by. I pray that what you read here stirs your mind, your soul, and your actions.

Blessings!

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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 1

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Shining the light on darknessToday I begin a new series called “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church.” During this five-part series we’ll be examining the ways that today’s Church in the West can rise above mediocrity and get back to being all it can be. We’ll count down to what I feel are the most important issues we need to address by order of importance.

I want to thank all those who contributed ideas. Many of those are included in this countdown, so you have been heard. I pray that the results are satisfying and that all who read this are not only blessed, but begin thinking about how they can implement these ideas in their own churches.

And now on to the first five:

21. Two-way sermons can increase biblical understanding
Given the appalling level of scholarship and biblical knowledge in the Western Church today, few people have enough grounding in the Scriptures and Church history to teach anyone anything. Churches that jettisoned their primary teachings on Sunday in order to present watered-down seeker-sensitive messages that bored the faithful to tears usually have an adult teaching model that pushes all the real meaty Scripture study down to small group leaders, many of them barely biblically literate. With adult Sunday School programs vanishing faster than you can say “ignorance,” fewer and fewer people are equipped to teach, more of that role falling on the pastoral staff.The problem then becomes one of understanding. What good is a sermon or teaching that people can’t grasp? I’ve been around enough churches to know that plenty of people leave on a Sunday scratching their heads, even if we can’t see it. Worse yet, most can’t remember the message a week later; often this retention issue revolves around failing to draw the necessary connections to put the teaching/preaching into practical focus.

Opening up the message to questions is one way that folks can grapple with meaning in the environment primed for delivering meaning. A two-way sermon allows the pulpit to connect with the pew and vice versa. I know that if I were a pastor, I’d like to know when my people were comprehending or not. Too often I think that pastors assume the message got through and take it at that. I would offer that the intractability of discipleship failures in our churches only points out the fallacy of that belief.

Preachers/teachers/pastors—take questions! Open the message up so that folks can truly understand. Don’t make assumptions about comprehension. Welcome the opportunity to let the Spirit guide your responses. You may find your people ask smart questions when prompted!

How can this be facilitated? Have an elder gather written questions that can be answered by the message-giver at the end of the message. If the congregation is small, consider fielding questions as they come to people. If the church is huge, give the message-giver a room in the church to field questions immediately after the service.

Some Emerging churches are doing this very thing and I believe it’s a great idea. Rarely do we give people the freedom to ask questions, so most don’t. But if we create an atmosphere of learning and expectation on Sunday, I suspect everyone in the church will benefit.

20. Leaders should seek out the gifted
We might think we know ourselves, but time and again parents and spouses have keener insights into how we operate than we do. Despite the fact that we live in a self-help culture, most of us are blind to at least a few of our own traits.The same is true of spiritual gifts. Few things are more useless than a self-administered gifts inventory that reaffirms what we already know about ourselves, yet this is how countless people judge their own gifts. It’s amazing how many times our results look exactly how we desire ourselves to be, though.

I personally believe that one of the great failures of the Western Church is that church leaders are not looking for gifted people within their ranks. They’re waiting for those people to self-identify. This is one reason why we have vast swarms of people in leadership roles in churches who are ill-equipped to do the very thing they believe they are qualified to do. How many of us have encountered teachers in our churches who shouldn’t be allowed to teach a preschool class much less adults? I’ve personally lost track.

If we truly believed the Holy Spirit guides into all truth, then we should be able to trust Him to point out gifted people. A pastoral staff that is not going before the Lord daily asking Him to give them eyes to see the truly gifted in their congregations is wasting God’s resources. The tendency is to respond to the boldest extroverts who say they have this gift or that and miss the quieter folks who may truly be the needle in the church haystack.

Not to give pastors one more task, but picking out the folks upon whom the Holy Spirit is resting in power is a critical responsibility. Start taking it seriously!

19. Leaders should primarily come from within a congregation, not from the outside
Want to know if a church’s discipleship and education programs are effective?The surest way to take the pulse of a church’s effectiveness is how many of the pastoral staff came from within the congregation from one generation to the next. Hiring all your pastors and leaders from outside? Then the answer is clear: your programs stink.

The chilling truth is that too many churches have to hire from the outside. Any church that does so is a failure from a discipleship standpoint. If Church A has to go to Church B to get staff, then maybe everyone in Church A should be at Church B.

The surest mark of a church’s health is an unbroken generation-to-generation line of leadership succession. Not nepotism, but genuinely earned positions based on maturity developed within that same congregation. That so many of our churches today can’t do this is appalling. Time to get tougher on how we educate people.

Going hand-in-hand with #20 above, we should be recognizing which young people coming up are gifted for church leadership and we should be encouraging them in that regard. Even more, a church should ensure that the next generation of gifted young people gets the additional training they need to make best use of their gifts, even if that means that the congregation pays for that training! How’s that for a radical idea? If we value leadership and gifting as much as the lips service we give to it, then we should be willing to open up our wallets and put our money where our lip service is.

18. Christian intellectuals must be honored
One of the most insidious trends within Evangelical and charismatic circles in the last thirty years is the absolute scorn with which most Christian intellectuals are held. The wholesale mental slaughter inflicted on thinkers in your average megachurch is contemptible.Everyone loves the people who will let you cry on their shoulder, crying along with you. But how much value do we place on Christian thinkers? My own experience is that they’re treated as carnival sideshows in a lot of churches. Folks who think deep thoughts are somehow inferior to the weeping Wendys and empathic Eddies who get all the attention.

Who can blame intellectually-deep Christians for fleeing the average church? What happened to the Francis Schaeffers and J. Gresham Machens of this world? I’m not really sure where they go, but whenever there’s a “spokesperson for Christianity” quoted in the newspaper or featured on a TV roundtable discussion one truth can be counted on: you’ll never see the theological equivalent of William F. Buckley.

Why so many Christians despise the intellectuals within their midst is beyond me. That so many church leaders allow this confuses me to no end. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the best we can do is Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson whenever the news media wants a Christian perspective.

We need to change this attitude NOW. Instead of poking fun of the theology whiz-kid, we should be holding him up as the standard for the rest of us—unless we’re satisfied with the stupidity we see paraded in public whenever a Christian is asked for his opinion on an important issue.

17. A church’s core values should be obvious
No one should walk into a church and have to ask what people at that church believe. If folks have to go on an extended hunt to get a statement of faith and the general vision of a church, that church has failed to communicate. The first thing folks see when they walk into a church’s lobby should be a big plaque on the wall that lists core values. Also, newcomers should have no problem recognizing the core values because they are proclaimed from the pulpit and lived by the people in the church.In addition, there’s no reason to have people hanging on at a church when they don’t assent to those core values. Nothing drags down a church faster than being loaded with people who don’t want to follow the core values. I think that church leaders should reiterate those values and let people know that if they don’t like them, there’s always some other place down the street that malcontents can attend.

If that sounds harsh, well…it is. But it should only be harsh if the core values of the church don’t align with the core values of the Gospel. If that’s the case, then we should only be happy to leave such a counter-productive church. Otherwise, we should let the dross know just where they stand.
The Church Growth Movement has made us too mamby-pamby about losing people. The honest truth is this: a church of 50 who are all on-board with the church’s core values will grow and make a difference for Christ. On the other hand, a church filled with 5,000 who continually question the core values—or who never live them out—will get nowhere and fight perpetually losing battles until they become worthless for the Kingdom.

I hope you’ve gotten something from the start of this series. Stay tuned for the next four entries coming tomorrow!

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Cheep Cheep Cheep, Talk a Lot, Pick a Little More

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Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
—”Pick a Little” from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man

The image from my favorite musical is a crowd of well-to-do women in a circle squawking endlessly about this person and that, but mostly about River City’s librarian and the questionable relationship she had with the deceased owner of the local library. To drive home the point concerning their activity, the director of the film version of The Music Man juxtaposed the image of the bobbing, feather-hatted heads of the townswomen with hens pecking for grain.

Save for being carriers of bird flu, a hen is not considered a ferocious beast capable of inflicting great damage. Despite this, I suspect that few of us would want to be at the center of a flock of crazed chickens intent on driving us off. A peck is a peck, but multiplied a hundred times over, blood might very well be shed.

I know a couple driven off from a church recently by the relentless pecking of chicken-hearted people who love to hear themselves talk. Their talk is “cheep,” but it still hurts. The Bible says this:

A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends.
—Proverbs 16:28 ESV

Loose lips sink ships, or so the old war caution went. I would contend that gossip sinks people and churches, too. Again, the Bible sets down a clear-cut case:

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.
—James 1:26 ESV

Isn’t it frightening how often the people who think of themselves as the pillars of our churches are all too often the ones flapping their jaws about this person or that, proving with the tongue how worthless their profession of faith is?

In the last few months I’ve witnessed some of the worst outcomes imaginable because of what one supposed Christian said about another. GossipNo matter if what was said is true or not, if the end result is that people are devastated by what was said, then we know the true origin of what the tongues wagged.

This is not about godly conviction —speaking the truth in love to people who are in sin—but about slander, backbiting, and pride. It’s about circulating gossip in the form of prayer requests, the infamous “Did you hear about Sister So-and-so’s sin? Let me tell you all about it, then we can pray for her more appropriately.”

We’ve all been on the receiving end of gossip. After a particularly difficult break-up with a girl, I was asked by a friend to come to a Christian singles group. I’d never been to one before. What I did not expect when I showed up that first night was to find that everyone there knew the intimate details of my break-up. My friend plead ignorance, and I believed him. He wasn’t the type. But I knew some other people in the group who weren’t so careful. How they knew this all, I could not know, but what I did know was that I was never coming back to this little group of gossips

I’d been a Christian for several years before that incident. While it was sickening, I’d built up some resistance to the poison. But what about those visitors who show up one Sunday in our pews and by the next Sunday everyone knows their particular issues? Worse yet is the ubiquitous telephone game that occurs when our oral tradition is lacking and what started out as “She entered her baked goods at the fair” transmogrifies into “She entered into an affair with the baker.” Your first week of considering a church and you’re trying to figure out which Sunday School room is your child’s. Next Sunday everyone is staring at you because you’re “that woman.”

I mentioned a couple days ago that the growth of the Church in America is stagnant at best and going downhill slowly at worst. And this despite being purpose-driven and seeker-sensitive! It seems to me, though, that at the root of our lack of growth is not just our evangelistic compromises, but the fact that we’ve somehow loused up simple human interaction. Perhaps we’ve become so self-centered and self-righteous that we can no longer look at another human being and put ourselves in his or her shoes. What else can explain how badly we treat other people?

I may have gone to a secular elementary school, but they drilled this one into us:

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
—Luke 6:31 ESV

Remember that one, The Golden Rule? How easily it’s consigned to a dusty trunk in the basement of our childhood. How many of us want to be on the wrong end of someone else’s gossip? Doesn’t it just tear your heart out to have it make the rounds for so long that it finally gets back to you? I hate to think that being on the receiving end of hurtful words is the only way to remember the Golden Rule.

I don’t care how great each of us will say our churches are, too many of them are filled with gossip. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that this might be the most prevalent corporate sin in our churches. (“Corporate” because no one person can be an effective gossip without another to willfully listen.) The amount of this will vary from church to church, but I doubt that it drops to zero anywhere.

What an incalculable human toll, though! If true love does not keep a record of wrongs, then our churches should be gossip-free zones 24/7/365. The mere thought of the Gospel and gossip spewing out of the same mouth together should keep us tongue-tied whenever the opportunity arises to scald someone with our words. Better to say nothing at all than to tear down our brother. Or better yet, how about this precious metal standard:

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.
—Proverbs 25:11 ESV

If we’re to be people of grace, then we have to be able to dispense it. Rather than speak ill of others, why not turn that around and find something edifying to say about them, instead? If we can’t find anything nice to say no matter how hard we try, then we’d better say something to the folks who run the discipleship programs at our church because they’re not doing their jobs very well!

Don’t spread gossip. Don’t listen to gossip.

The tongue is a fire. Keep the extinguisher handy.