Time For Plan B Photo by Bjørn Giesenbauer via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Churches don’t reach people… People do.
Maybe that’s a statement of the obvious for you. But if you read enough church blogs or look at enough books or listen to a bunch of pep talks you may begin to believe the lie that churches, their leaders, and their programs reach a lot of people.
They don’t.
Less than 5% of our culture is actively involved in church. That’s a lot of smoke and not much fire.
Neighbors loving neighbors reaches people. Which involves talking and getting to know people who live next door to you. Which involves you being home and not hiding in your house.
Here’s a little secret I learned from working on church staff.
It feels good to keep people busy.
It makes you think you’re being productive. It makes you think that they are keeping your ministry a priority. You look really good with lots of things going on and people running around like busy little bees.
Having a lot of people involved in your programs is a powerful temptation as a church staff member. The bottom line is that you feel like its your job to grow a program. Heck, there’s a good chance it IS your job to grow a program.
But if you step back for a minute and think about it– For every moment you are keeping a person at the church “doing ministry” you are actually preventing them from doing the one thing we know works. And the one thing every believer, including your pastor, is called to do universally.
A lot of church involvement is actually counter intuitive to your church actually reaching a community.
It might feel good to keep people busy. But in the end it is killing your ability to grow the church.
Reality Check
For Kristen and I it took stepping out of a busy bee church and into a situation where we could simply say no to everything but church attendance to have this truth awakened in us.
Believing in the “churches reach people” paradigm is really just an excuse for me to not reach out in love to those in my neighborhood. I might feel pretty good about keeping busy in the church. But my life ends up with a lot of smoke and not much fire.
We try to do the bear minimum and I still feel like we are over involved. We have church on Sunday. Community group on Monday night. And youth group on Tuesday night. (I’d skip church and youth group over community group, by the way. Community group is our lifeline.)
And it still feels like too much.
Wondering
What if community service became the program of the church? What if you had a simple service on Sunday morning and then sent the people of the church out to apply what they’ve learned in their life?
What if the role of the staff is to go out with the people of your congregation and work alongside? Not as a program overlord, but as an encourager and equipper.
Wouldn’t that be a biblical expression of church?
Or have we bought so firmly into the current paradigm that we don’t think simple expressions of faith in action will work anymore?
A few weeks back I talked about a quick trip I made up to Irvine to do a video shoot with Dave Gibbons, pastor of Newsong Church. I was privileged that he made time for me and thought enough about YS to share some thoughts about why a youth ministry training event is still important even when times are tough financially.
Even in the best of times church decision makers wrestle with continuing education dollars. It’s so refreshing to hear senior leaders who understand the value in training and encouragement from people in your tribe. If you’ve never been to NYWC… there is a magical component when you meet hundreds of other youth workers and you have an instant bond. The community of a shared burden and experiences is so renewing!
p.s. Random sidenote. Check me out! This video is well lit, in focus, and I even did a quick sound check before we began.
There are times when I realize that I’m not showing a ton of depth. Or maybe, it is that I get so pigeon-holed into being the person someone needs that I don’t get to exhibit depth.
I feel that way right now.
I’ve gotten ingrained here in San Diego as a social media geek. Within my world that may be true. But I recognize that within that skill is a tie to lifelong passion. But the passion itself is much more important than the method I’m trying to master. At work this is perfectly natural. I have no doubt that people there value me beyond my skills because I know that, in turn, I value their friendship beyond their skills or positions.
Let me restate what I’m saying. I care a lot about building community online. I care deeply about networking people and ideas. I have learned best practices, nuance, and supporting skills to make it easier to convey my passion in more effective ways. Ultimately, that’s a skill set that could be applied to a lot of genres and businesses. But my passion is for working with middle and high schoolers and encouraging/networking/sharing life with those who do the same thing.
Take the passion out of what I do and I don’t want to do it. I may be able to give some sage advice or share a few things about what works… but if you’re out there trying to network with me so I can help you build a social networking strategy, I’m probably not going to be that useful to you. I know you are just using me.
At the end of the day, I’m good at social media only because I care so much about the message I’m trying to convey.
The frustrating thing is that I think I am only interesting to some of the new people I’ve been getting to know in San Diego because of those auxiliary skills and not because of what I’m passionate about. It’s as if my only value is tied into some skills I’ve learned and that feels really, really shallow. It’s a slight that I see right through. Asking me about my kids or my hobbies to try to get me to share some tricks of the trade is lame. I don’t ever want to tie my value as a human being into the fact that I can build a website, or develop a brand, or tie that into a social media strategy. Lame. Lame. Lame!
I don’t think this is unlike people who become fake friends when you work at a church. You kind of know they are fake but you’re so desperate for friendship that a fake friend is better than no friend at all. When we worked at churches there were plenty of people who valued our friendship because of a socialogical positional thing. 24 months ago if I had written down a list of people who would be our friends if we stopped being their pastor and I would have have been 100% correct. Not to sound emo, but the shocking thing is how sincere people pretended to be all those years. You’d be surprised by how few people we hear from after nearly 10 years of full time ministry friendships. 10? 15? 20 tops.
For church staff, this is one shallow nature of relationship that makes the job so hard.
But, now that we aren’t there anymore we have no value to them and we’ll never hear from them again.
The flip side for church staff is simple. Open your lives up to those who are legitimately sincere in their friendship. Trust your gut. Just like Kristen and I have found real friendship over the years… a couple of bad apples shouldn’t catapult you into a life of keeping people at a distance.
