fix

I’ve been asking myself the following question/s tonight: What church would admit that it doesn’t want to reach new people? When a church says that it wants to “change” or “move forward” to reach its community, what in the world does that actually mean? Give me something tangible.

Does is mean that they now have a new rotating list of door greeters in case a visitor comes? Does it mean that they will be friendly to any visitor that comes? Does it mean that they’re really hoping and/or praying that new visitors come? Does it mean that they’ve cleared out some space and put in a pool table, in the hopes that a visitor will come? In short, does it all revolve around visitors coming…and then somehow finding something about that church that relates to their needs?

I’ve been talking to a lot of churches about this lately. It seems that everybody wants to grow. They want to move forward. They’re open to the changes necessary to see growth happen. But are they really? I’ve quoted an old friend of mine many times on this blog who once said to me; churches say they want to reach lost people, until they figure out what that means.

For Jamie and me it meant stepping WAY outside the box and probably also our comfort zone at the time. It meant that church might not look a lot like the church we once new. And it certainly meant that our ministry path would not take any of the traditional routes. And in the end we met more lost people than we ever had inside the box. So why would we ever get back in?

Every church says that it wants to reach lost people, but what does that mean? I think it means that they want the excitement that new people bring. I think it means that they don’t want their church to grow old and literally die. But I think very few churches are really open to the changes that might be necessary to make that happen. I think some churches think they’re open to those changes. But I don’t think they really even know what those changes are. Again, it’s more than just a new door man, or a new “blended worship service” (which is a really….weird word to use in that context), or a pool table downstairs in the basement. And it means more than just hiring a new youth minister who will “go out and get those kids” and then somehow, in defiance of sociology, psychology, relevance, and possibly even the gospel itself, talk those kids into wanting to attend a weird concert and short (or sometimes really long) lecture every Sunday morning.

A number of years ago I was serving in a church that will, for the purposes of this post, be known as Church X. I was really struggling. It was a very traditional church that had all but lost its young people. Unbeknownst to me, I had been hired to reverse the trend. The trend was that the church was now out of touch and hadn’t successfully and meaningfully discipled anybody in years. So even the adults who had managed to stay were of no help and, in their current state, and as harsh as it is to say, were also of no use. Again, I was really struggling.

Finally one day, after the pastor and I had had it out, he stepped into my office and suggested that maybe I wasn’t doing my job. That maybe I hadn’t accomplished what I had been hired to do. And before I could even think about what I was saying, I blurted out; “Of course I’ve not done my job! You’re asking me to perform miracles here! You’re asking me to fix two decades of total failure on your part!”

It was an awkward moment. As soon as I said it, I thought “Oh no! What did I just say!” It was like referring to the huge pink elephant in the room that everybody had worked so hard to ignore. But instead of giving me a verbal bashing, he just stood there, looked at me, blinked, and after a minute, finally suggested that we had to figure out a way to get along.

If you can look over the course of your life and pinpoint turning points, those two minutes were a turning point for me. After he left, I sat down at my desk and realized that, as crazy as it might have been to say what I’d said, what I’d said was true. And it was true for a lot of guys. And it was going to be true for a while.

We now live in a day and age when churches hire professionals to do the foot washing. And after years of complete and utter failure on the church’s part to disciple, be relevant, and to evangelize, they go out and hire twenty years olds to fix things. And when those twenty year olds suggest something as crazy as, say, an after game dance in the fellowship hall, the pastor/deacons sit down with him to discuss how he might model his youth ministry and own personal style on the adult congregation’s model and style…which had been doing so poorly that they had to go out and hire a “professional” to help them fix it.

What do churches really want?

What they want is for their methodology to work. They want to be able to somehow appease the older people in the congregation, and for that same methodology to be relevant to the needs of youth and young families. They want to turn back time. But they can’t. So what in the world are they going to do?

Again, what in the world are they going to do???