How do we create communities which form the likeliest context for an unchurched person to embrace Jesus and his movement? While churches today often get tied up in many different things, this should be the question that drives them harder than just about anything else. My hope is that the first part of this line of thought sparked some conversations. Let us keep examining this important issue together.
Jonathan Waits
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Before going much further in this thought process, though, let us put down a few realities so we are all on the same page. First, people were naturally drawn to Jesus. Now, once they got a good taste of him, they may have hated it and started working to oppose him and His mission, but at the very least the idea of a guy who loves everybody and speaks with confident authority draws a lot of curiosity seekers.
The second reality is packaged into this first one: Jesus’ message is naturally offensive. While people may have been naturally drawn to Jesus, when he started talking, many were offended, turned off and driven away.
Here’s reality number three: the church represents both the person and the message of Jesus. But we do not necessarily do both of these at the same time and to them we regularly add all of our own brokenness to make our community even less naturally attractive.
The truth around which we need to wrap our minds is that, because of the primary constituent element of the church (people), individual bodies of Christ are not naturally attractive to outsiders. On their own, and without something pushing them in an unnatural direction, people who have been in the church for very long serve as some of the most effective goalies, keeping unchurched people out of it.
Think about it. Jesus’ loving actions drew huge crowds. If we practiced those consistently so would we. Jesus’ words drew many curiosity seekers. If we proclaimed his words in a manner anywhere near as engaging as he did we would have all kinds of people coming to take a look. Furthermore, were these the only two elements on which we needed to focus, we would have long ago solved our problems. Obviously there’s something more.
But what? At the risk of oversimplification, perhaps thinking in these terms would help. Why is it that people don’t come to church? It’s not because they don’t know what those odd buildings with lowercase T’s on their towers are. It’s because they’ve either been to one or heard about one. Why do young people leave the church? Because they grew up in one. Perhaps they were treated unlovingly at some point or perhaps they were bored to tears by unengaging presentations of the Word of God, but there is a thread running through all of these: culture.
Left to our own devices and without some force working vigilantly to counteract this effect we will naturally create cultures which are highly exclusive and insider-focused. We will create communities with a high bar to clear for membership. We will create cultures that outsiders have to be very motivated in order to join. Perhaps this should be able to go without saying, but in case you haven’t noticed, census data over the last several years show that people are not as motivated to break into communities of faith as they once were. The church, by and large and with several notable exceptions, is not a place where unbelievers love to be.
How do we solve this problem? At last we are back around to where we stopped last time. We solve the problem by doing just the opposite: we do everything possible short of sin to create places where unbelievers love to be. Far too often when people enter a church they step into a totally foreign culture where there is a different language, different social expectations, different behavioral patterns, and so on and so forth. No one likes being in a place where they uncomfortably stand out. Similarly, no one wants to join a community into which they very obviously don’t fit. In the sum of my life I have traveled outside the U. S. only once. Other than English, I speak barely rudimentary French. If I moved to, say, Mongolia to plant a church as I am now, short a miracle, I would fail miserably. Why should we expect different results when doing church in a culture that is no longer what it was when many of our churches were planted or at least last thriving? In short, we shouldn’t.
What does this actually look like, though? Well, I don’t know. Your church is in a different culture than mine. Your church has a different culture than mine. Your church has different neighbors than mine. We both need to do our homework and figure out what things are currently standing as barriers between the unchurched people we are trying to reach and our communities.
For too many years the church has needlessly offended where it should have loved — often entirely in ignorance and with the sincerest of motives — and in many ways we are reaping the harvest of what we have sown. Let’s not be unfair, though: your church is not the root of this and neither is mine. Yet reaping we are and so we must plant new seeds. We must make absolutely certain that the only offensive thing about us is our message which Jesus indeed promised would offend. Let us think hard and deep about what our barriers are. Let us design — or redesign — our communities and ourselves such that people would rather be with us and like us than they would anyone else.
Let us do this so that it may be said of us that, “The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”
Jonathan Waits ([email protected]) is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Church Road, Va.