Consulting, Coaching & Chatter

Okay, over the years I’ve visited a LOT of churches. Lots of them. And I can’t help it, but when I visit, my consultant hat is always part of my couture. Normally this doesn’t cause me a lot of consternation … sadly, my expectations for most churches is pretty low. My hopes are high, but I’ve been in way too many churches that are more like the Rotary than the body of Jesus Christ in motion.

So I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised that the last four churches I’ve visited seemed apathetic about growing. Oh, they all made some noise about welcoming visitors - “Especially first time visitors” - but their actions, or inactions spoke way more loudly than their words.

I’m just going to mention my last two church visits as examples. Last week I attended a new church start. It was my first visit to the congregation. They’ve been doing public worship for about a year and last week they “relocated” to a theater where they could seat almost 1200 people. There were less than 200 there for the opening worship service, which was a significant increase for them according to the pastor. So far so good.

The worship was fine. They didn’t make the guests stand up or in any way identify themselves. They did the innocuous “Shake hands with those near you” moment and I got to meet another first time guest. The music was authentic and the worship leaders worshipped first and led second. All good stuff.

But when it came to getting guest and member information … well, that was pretty ineffective. There were guest registration cards and pens on every third theater seat. They invited any first-time guests to fill it out and “give it to the pastor or his assistant [hand waved to identify the assistant] when you leave.” The church didn’t “pass” the offering plates so I could drop the completed card into it. Instead, they used an offering basket up front where you could drop your offerings in when you took communion. But we were specifically instructed to give the cards to the pastor or the assistant.

Not the best way to get contact information, but not the best. But, like the compliant kind of guy I am, I saw the assistant on my way out and gave him the card. It’s now one week later … I didn’t return this week … and as far as I can tell the ONLY thing they’ve done with the card is sent me one email newsletter and a card with the pastor’s signature and note about being glad I was there.

No contact with the pastor or anyone else. No phone call. Frankly, no meaningful follow-up.

How many times do we have to say this? Church growth gurus have been saying it for almost two decades … if you want visitors to become returning guests, there needs to be an in-person visit by the church within TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. And currently, the up front pastor needs to be the one doing the visit. The odds of a visitor returning if your pastor isn’t doing this within twenty-four hours drops significantly. And this is a church plant where the pastor has to be the number one net-caster.

The church I visited today made a mistake that is even worse that the one above. Way worse.

They didn’t get my contact information at all. In this case, the church is well established. In fact, they hope to go multi-site within the next year. The worship was fine. They didn’t identify me as visitor in front of everyone. The music was quite good, but the worship leaders were leading first and worshipping second. I didn’t leave marvelling at the incredible spiritual level of the congregation. Common mistake - not a good one, but pretty common. Did I mention I don’t really have high expectations when I visit churches?

Anyway, back to their big mistake. During the shake hands with your neighbor time, the pastor said … he actually said this … “If you’re a first time visitor, if you’ll look around you’ll see some black registration books and pads in the pews. If you’d go get one and fill it out ….”

You’ve got to be kidding me! First, we’ve been preaching that pew registration pads are the very worst for gathering contact information from guests … and frankly, from everyone else. But if you’re going to waste your time using them, at least use them. Don’t ask the visitor go hunt one down. In fact, there wasn’t a registration pad in my pew and frankly, I don’t really want the whole world to know “Hey, there’s a first time visitor - let’s go mob him and tell him how friendly we are,” so I wasn’t going to crawl over my row of chairs to get the one that I could see.

So they can’t even blow it when it comes to follow-up because they have no way of following up. In other words, they’re not interested in growing.

Well, that’s not true. I suppose both churches want to grow, but like the duck, the dog, the cow, and all the rest in the Henny Penny story, no one wants to do any of the hard work it takes to make disciples of Jesus Christ.

So, just for the record … how is your church effectively getting the names and contact information of your visitors, guests, and members? And once you have that information, what are you doing with it? If you have great ideas, we’d love to know.

(back) Becky, Toni, Shannon (front) James (Britt), Katrina

We’re celebrating T-B Day today, although the real date is August 21. T-B Day is the anniversary of the day the adoption for my three youngest children - Katrina, Shannon, and James (AKA Britt) - became final. It’s a special day in our lives and we always try to have a grand time. We’re thinking picnic on the Missouri River for the celebration.

Adoption is one of those important concepts in the church too. Sure, there’s the whole theologic part that says when we become disciples of Jesus then we’re adopted as Children of God (see John 1 if you somehow were wrongly taught that “everyone is a child of God”). Adoption is equally important when it comes to how guests in our churches become part of the tribe. For instance, after a small group has been meeting for over 6 weeks, and in as few as 4, it becomes a “closed” group. That means those members of the group, no matter how well intentioned, have created enough history together in terms of stories shared and events witnessed that it’s difficult, if not impossible, for a guest to “break in” to the circle. Unless … the group as a whole decides to adopt the guest. Then, with adamant intentionality, they recreate themselves as a new group. This re-creation can be facilitated by each member sharing their personal life story within a spiritual framework (such as, their faith story that culminates in how they came to be a disciple of Jesus, etc.).

In a family sized church, i.e., churches typically between 0-50ish, the only way a guest becomes a family member is for an intentional church-wide attempt to adopt them. If only a handful of people engage in the adoption, the guest is unlikely to become part of the family and will drift away from the church. This, by the way, is why so FEW family sized churches ever jump past their size-ceiling. It’s work to adopt someone … whether it’s three young children or a family of guests.

So, if you want to grow your “family,” I heartily recommend adoption. Whether it’s my three youngest awesome kids (okay, the youngest is 22 now), or a guest in your small group, or a new family is your church … adoption is the answer to many of life’s and church’s little questions.

I’ve been working with churches and pastors now for more than two decades. During that time I’ve come to know a lot of churches and a lot of pastors.

Recently, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that when a church is “looking” to call a pastor, or if a judicatory is looking for a staff pastor for a church leadership position, that in reality there are only five “types” of pastors out there.

Now, let me offer a disclaimer before I go any further. These five types or paradigmatic pastors don’t cover varying theologies, beliefs, doctrines, or even tribal affinity. I’m talking about five kinds of “Christian” leaders based on “how” they lead. This is a behavioral/personality typology that should be helpful in choosing a pastor for your church.

The five archetypes of pastors are:

• Catalytic
• Cultivator
• Conflict-Quelling
• Chaplain
• Catatonic

These five types will be fully developed in an upcoming article in Net Results magazine, but for now, here’s a brief description of each.

The Catalytic Pastor: The catalytic pastor is wired to stir things up. They’re gifted in the prophetic and tend to be charismatic leaders. These pastors have lots of energy and are focused on the mission of the church … that is, reaching the community for Jesus Christ. In the “right” church, they’ll grow it without a doubt. In the “wrong” church, they’ll create conflict, they’ll be frustrated, and they’ll either burn out or they’ll move on … assuming they’re not fired first. Catalytic pastors are ideal church planters but often lack the finesse and patience for church transformations (except in those VERY rare churches that are truly willing to do anything to reach the community for Jesus).

The Cultivating Pastor: The cultivating pastor is wired to break up hard ground, plant seeds, nurture the fields, and are both willing and able to bring in a harvest. They’re gifted in big-picture understanding, systems analysis, and systems manipulation (in a good way). Because of their systems understanding and their patience, they are able to cultivate change and transformation over time. However, they’re tenacious and are used to getting their way in the long run … because they know how to deal with obstacles that get in their way. Cultivating pastors are well suited for church transformations in churches that can afford to effect gentle change that takes significant time … as many as seven to ten years.

The Conflict-Quelling Pastor: The Conflict-Quelling pastor is exactly the type that the name implies … they’re the guys and gals who are natural or skilled peacemakers, mediators, and/or conflict managers. These pastors are wired differently than any of the other pastoral types. They’re not catalytic and they’re distinctive from chaplains. Instead, these folks can walk into a congregation and in short order assess the situation and instinctively seem to know who the major players are. They are affable and able to build bridges. They tend to be quiet and reflective … when they speak, they do so with conviction, wisdom, and certainty. Conflict-Quelling pastors make excellent interim pastors and/or troubled-church pastors.

The Chaplain Pastor: The Chaplain pastor is wired for peace, harmony, and pastoral care. This is the type of pastor that has been produced by seminaries for several decades, though a few … a very few … seminaries are retooling. Chaplain pastors eschew change and value status quo. They don’t want to stir the waters; rather, they want to bring healing to hurting souls. They are excellent listeners and tend to be good networkers within the community, primarily so they can extend their ministry, but also so they can refer those in need to oasis’ of help. Chaplain pastors don’t grow churches. In fact, a Chaplain pastor will hasten a congregation’s demise because they tend to focus on those within the congregation rather than in bringing new converts to Jesus Christ. Churches that have very little hope of transformation and church growth do well with Chaplain pastors who serve as hospice care.

The Catatonic Pastor: This type of pastor is, frankly, either lazy or sick. There are far too many of these pastors. They take refuge in their offices ostensibly to do sermon preparation, create brochures, sum up numbers, and so on, but ultimately they’re spinning their wheels and accomplishing very little. They may or may not do the hospital visitation, but they seldom miss an opportunity to have a meal with one of the inside buddies. Catatonic pastors tend to be well liked by the power holders in the church, because the Catatonic pastor is easily manipulated and seldom, if ever, makes waves … except when they need to accomplish something and fail to meet even the lowest of expectations. Indeed, Catatonic pastors may remain as the senior pastor of a church for many years because they know how to schmooze their way into grace. Churches that hate change often end up with excellent examples of Catatonic pastors. Catatonic pastors may spend a lot of time “at work” but any congregation that sets performance goals for their Catatonic pastor will quickly discover that time in the office does not guarantee results. Of course, Catatonic pastors do not grow churches, are poor chaplains - even poor hospice chaplains, and they pretty much destroy wherever they root … and they’re more like crabgrass or bamboo that, once established, is almost impossible to irradicate.

A couple posts back, I wrote a piece on the PS2 UTube video on training fleas and related it to the church. I spend most of my church consulting hours working with churches that have been banging their heads on an imaginary lid that has kept them stuck at some level. I was working with a church recently that had been unable to break the 200 in worship … for over five years. Another recent church had been stuck at 300 for over a decade. Each one stuck like a flea in a jar: “Leap … boink.”

If your congregation is “stuck” at some level, whether it’s at the 50, 100, 200, or even 350 level … the vast majority of you can jump just a little bit higher … you can break through the imaginary lid that’s keeping your back … by making one shift.

Change your music.

Sounds simplistic, but the “science” and experience behind that statement is virtually indiputable (okay, everthing is disputable, but this axiom has a proven track record). If you want to bump your church to the next level, you’re going to have to get honest with your music.

It all starts with the answer to the question “Who are you hoping to reach.” If your congregation is serious about reaching 70 year-olds, then you’ll want to keep on using the dueling organ and piano and singing Reformation-era hymns. But if you’re trying to reach younger families (and who isn’t these days … they’re the most highly sought-after demographic by the church today), then singing O Worship the King with a pipe organ probably isn’t going to inspire them to come back next week. In fact, if you’re going to reach out to young families today, Come, Now Is the Time to Worship is pretty old school. That’s so … Baby Boomer (which is a fine group to try and attract, but you’ll not be growing your youth group with those grandparents … and Baby Boomers are the fastest growing grandparent demographic today).

What music should you be doing? Here’s a hint. If you are serious about reaching the unchurched for Jesus Christ, then turn off K-Love or XM-32 The Message or whatever Christian radio station you’re listening to and flip through the stations. Are most of them Classic Rock? Pop? Hip Hop? Country Western? Urban R&B? Oldies? Gettotek? Crunk? That wil give you your first indication. If you have seven stations playing styles of hip hop, one classic station, one oldies, three C&W, and Jack FM, then you’ve learned something. You’ve learned that the marketers in your listening area, who have invested many thousands of dollars in demographic research, have discovered that there are a lot of younger folk in your community … a lot, if they’ve got seven hip-hop stations going. Once you’ve got an idea of the general listening genre, call a radio rep from each of those stations and find out who charges the most for a 30 second spot on Friday at 5 (a peak drive time). When you know what station is the most pricey, you’ve just discovered the preferred music style by the largest audience in your community. If you don’t know who’s listening to that music, you can call the station’s advertising rep who will be happy to sit down with you and share everything they know about that audience.

Knowing the music style, though, doesn’t mean it’s going to be a walk in the park. If you’re going to reach a different demographic than the majority of those currently occupying your sanctuary seating, then you’ll not only have to change your music style, you’ll have to do it very well. How frustrated must be the churches that added a guitar and a keyboard to their service and then mistakenly thought that they’d grow their worship service. For music to be attractional, it’s got to be excellent. It has to be done right … and that may mean you have to recruit or even hire musicians and vocalists who know what they’re doing.

Oh, and then there’s this last little tidbit. If you suddenly change your traditional worship service style to … well, anything besides traditional … you may well have a war on your hands. Better by far to add options rather than removing the traditional option. So, go ahead and bite the bullet. Start a new service … but if you’re planning on reaching the under 30s, probably the 8:30 Sunday Morning hour isn’t going to be an attractive alternative. Launch the new service no earlier than 10 AM … and 10:45 is better.

New Music + New Service = New People. New People = leaping past the “Boink” point.

BTW, Tom Bandy and I just did a Radio Show (available as a Podcast) on Worship Wars that covers this topic in depth. Give it a listen here!

A week or so ago, my wife and I attended the World Convention of the Christian Church in Nashville, TN. It was a nice convention and we enjoyed Nashville. One evening we decided we wanted to eat something other than Tennesee barbeque, so we stopped in at the Stoney River restaurant. It was a great experience … pricey, but excellent food and service. It was pretty much everything one could ask for and when we go back to Nashville, Stoney River will likely be one of the destinations on our meal menu.

Of course, even though it was good, there were about six different places we ate meals in Nashville. Many of them were quite good. But if you ask me to name any of the others, I couldn’t do it. There were a couple barbeque places down on Broadway. There was a really nice place out by the mall that’s currently under construction (complete with a nightmare visit I’ll not soon forget). But I remember Stoney River by name … and I could find it again too. Why? Because two weeks after our visit we got the postcard you see here from David T., our server.

What do you notice about it? It’s hand written. He managed to spell our names correctly (yes, he copied it from our reservation form, but you’d be surprised how many churches don’t seem to get the name right from their Registration Pads or Visitor Cards that we ALWAYS fill out). And it was timely. Sure, we live hours and hours and hours away from Nashville, so we’re not likely to go back next week … or next month … but we were important enough to warrant the postcard. And they captured a loyal customer.

A friend of mine from Jefferson City, shared a similar event from a church in Colorado. He and his wife were visiting a large church there in the “West” (BTW, how does Colorado make the designation “West”? Seattle is West. LA is West. Denver is at best the Mid-West). They filled out the requisite visitor’s card and figured they’d get the photocopied “Welcome to our church” letter “Signed” (ha!) by the pastor. But a week later, a box of goodies arrived at their door. Inside was a church mug, branded pen, information about the church, a very nice “Come back when you’re visiting in the area again” letter, and several other branded “gifts.” He guessed that there was more than $5 worth of stuff in the box and they’d paid well for the postage.

Seems like a waste, doesn’t it. The spent $8-$10 to “woo” a family who lives in Missouri. Where’s the return in that?

Ask Stoney River. Handwritten card and they’ve won a customer. And you’ve read about the restaurant. And we’ve mentioned it in several conversations.

Our friends may never return to Colorado. But he tells this story to almost everyone who passes through his doors. And if someone is heading to Colorado, they make a recommendation to the church … by name and location.

Both Stoney River and the Colorado Church know follow-up. They’re good at it.

Lessons learned …

Glenn Kelley at www.churchmedic.com found a great 60 second video on how to train fleas in three days. It’s a great video and I’ve embedded it here as well. Take a look and then scroll down for more.

I’ve often quipped that if a church tries something new in worship it’s called innovation. If it does it the next week it’s viewed with suspicion. If it does the third week, it’s called tradition. Weeks, days, same difference. The church, by and large, has been stuck within the lid for over fifty years. In the 1950s the church shifted gears from a wartime church to a family church lodged inextricably in Modernity. “Everyone” went to church, and anyone who missed this week knew they were “supposed” to be in church. This way of doing and being church seemed to “work” for a couple of decades - long enough for it to become well intrenched as tradition. The problem is, these traditions became indistinguishable from our cherished beliefs. Preaching to the converted was the norm (the New Testament models “preaching” as something done for the non-believers … the church’s mode of teaching came from “dialogue”). Songs from the Reformation era, with a few Fanny Crosby songs aded to the mix became the “sacred” and all other music types were deemed secular and out of sorts with the church.

Leap … boink. Leap … boink. Leap … boink. And when the lid came off beginning in the mid-sixties, there was no escaping it. In the words of Stephen King in The Dark Tower, the world had “moved on” but the church at large did not.

What wil it take for the church to figure out how to communicate the Gospel with the Culture it has alienated? The evangelism course I’m teaching for the Missouri School of Religion is dealing with that very topic tonight. And Tom Bandy and I are dealing with a related topic (Worship Wars) on our call-in radio show Church Talk on Wednesday. I think one of the keys is listening and respect. We don’t have to like the culture we find ourselves in (though most “Christians” have accomodated themselves within it pretty thoroughly), but we’d better understand it and be able to relate to it … like Paul did on Mars Hill (Acts 17) … and not spend a lot of energy bad mouthing it … again, check out Paul’s response to the idolatry of the Athenians - oh wait, he didn’t respond to their “heathen” ways. Instead, he related and respected the culture well enough to be able to converse about it … and he didn’t say one negative word about the “idols” (input your own word in the quotes … tattoos, piercings, alternative lifestyles, etc.). But the folks in Athens wanted to “hear more.” When was the last time people in our culture asked to “hear more” from the church?

Leap … boink? Or will we jump just a little higher to reach our neighbors?

Most of you reading this probably already know that I’m ADHD (Attention Deficit, Hyperactive Disorder), which means that (1) I don’t sit still well and (2) I am easily distracted.

“Oh look! A chicken.”

Yeah. That kind of distracted. That being so, I’ve had to learn to cope with focus most of my life. I’ve done a fairly good job of it … I have managed to write six books (so far - check out Prayer for People Who Can’t Sit Still as an example) and am working on another with my business partner and friend Bill Easum.

What I’ve discovered, in my church consulting gigs across the nation, is that there are a lot of church leaders out there who must be at least ADD. In fact, I don’t think I’m stepping to far out on a limb to suggest that maybe even most church leaders who are struggling to grow or transform their churches suffer from serious distractions. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be struggling to grow or transform their churches - they’d be growing them.

I’m in the process of writing an article on the most damaging distractions in the church, so I won’t go into exactly what those distractions are in this post.

Well, maybe just one. For most church leaders one of the greatest distractions is … what you’re doing right now. Computing. Many churches would actually have a shot at a turnaround if the pastor would shut down his/her computer for seven hours a day and actually do some networking and evangelism. Geoffrey Mitchell Tweeted about one of his Facebook friends “How does anyone with nine social networks have time to work?” I’m amazed at the amount of time “transformational” pastors spend on their computers. The truth be told, there’s an inverse principle to the amount of time spent on a computer and the results seen in a church’s transformation.

I get amazed at the number and length of posts church leaders make on a variety of online and email forums who are asking how to transform their churches and then write voluminous posts on what they read online, commenting on churches they’ve visited or heard about, and even offering advice to others about church growth, etc. How does any growing church pastor have that kind of time? The reality is that growing church pastors don’t. When I was a church planter I had to spend most of my day in the presence of people … mentoring my new leaders, networking with new neighbors, and going anywhere I could strike up a conversation with a living, breathing, local resident … all this just so I could keep gathering people for the new churches.

But I digress (surprise, surprise). What I want to share is a solution to focus that doesn’t eliminate distractions, but helps folks like me get past them well enough to, say, write a bunch of books (or to get through your one-hour of computing time each day so you can go spend time with real flesh-and-blood people). A couple years ago Dave Lakhani wrote a book that codified what I’d been practicing for a long time. His Power of an Hour has a gem that’s not buried in the pages, but lies there in plain site. That gem is this: Virtually anyone can hyper-focus for an hour. Even those of us with ADHD can generally find a way to get really, really, really focused on something for a single hour (if you can do it with a video game, you can do it with whatever you decide to do). The only question, then, is what do you do for an hour?

First, you decide what you need to do/accomplish. Like, I decided I needed to write this blog entry. Once you’ve decided, then you turn off Twitter. You turn off Outlook. You turn off Skype. You turn off all IM Chats. You turn off Facebook and MySpace. You turn off your cell phone - off, not on vibrate or flash. You turn off your phone. You turn off the radio. You turn off the television. You put the dog and the cat outside or in another room where you can’t hear them. Do the same, by the way, with the spouse and kids (or you go somewhere). Remove anything and everything that might be a distraction and then insert bottom into chair and focus.

If it helps, take a deep breath, close your eyes, and clear your head from distractions. Then get to work … but just for an hour. Turns out, that’s about all the time anyone can effectively spend in hyper focus. Do an hour and then take a ten minute or so break. If you have more you must get done, then do it again, but most of us can only do this a couple times in succession before we loose our energy, drive, and interest.

Here’s the bottom line. You’ll get a lot more done if you’ll kick into hyper focus drive a couple of times a day than if you do like most non-transforming pastors do … a little bit of this, a little bit of that. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. A little bit of … you get the idea.

It’s said that the average leader spends 80 percent of their time doing little that will further their mission. That means that the important stuff gets short shrift by a bunch. What would happen if the average leader spent 80 percent of their time on the real important stuff … on those tasks that would further their mission the most? Well, they wouldn’t be average leaders anymore. They’d be excellent, high powered leaders.

Before I reveal the five things every church leader must do every day, let me remind you of the one thing every leader must have before they can even be as good as an average leader. This is Curley’s “one thing” that you have to figure out. The One Thing is your personal mission … your purpose … the reason you get up each morning. The sad reality is that most leaders I work with fumble around, mutter a bit, and get flustered when I ask them what their mission is. How can a leader know when they’re on task or not if they don’t know what their mission is? How can you know what tasks are important and which tasks are not if purpose is a mystery? It’s been said that without a mission, we live in a fog and simply respond to whichever foghorn is loudest at any given moment. So, what’s your mission? If you can’t spit it out immediately with conviction and commitment, stop reading now and go get it figured out. (BTW, my mission is to be a source for spiritual transformation … it’s not only what I do, it’s who I try to be).

So, with mission in hand and heart, here are the five things every church leader must put on their to-do list every day.

1. Spend an Hour in Prayer. Though this should be obvious, according to scads of research the average Christian leader prays less than three minutes each day. Jesus asked Peter if he couldn’t pray “just one hour.” That should be our daily minimum requirement.
2. Project Your Day. Take a few minutes before your feet hit the floor in the morning to look ahead in your day and project how you would like each of your upcoming interpersonal interactions to manifest. How do you want to interact with your spouse? Your children? The barista? Your secretary? Those in the committee meeting? Your networking lunch with the newest church member? And so on. Play the interactions though your mind and commit the time and your interactions to the Spirit.
3. Meet/Introduce Yourself to at Least One Stranger. The point here is to have a conversation with someone you don’t know. Get to know people in your community that you’ve never met. I know in some small towns this can be a challenge, but take the challenge. Go find someone and get to know them. And if you’re “bad with names” make sure to get a business card and to jot down a few of the important details you learned about this new acquaintance.
4. Take Care of that One Thing On Your To-Do List that You Don’t Want to Do … and do it now. Great leaders take care of business no matter what. It doesn’t make any difference if they don’t want to. They do whatever it takes to accomplish their mission. So, whatever it is you’re putting off, get it done.
5. Reflect On Your Day. The final thing to do each evening before you close your eyes is to take the time to reflect on your day. Did you accomplish the important stuff or were you caught up by the “urgent”? Did all your interpersonal interactions play out like you’d hoped? Are there relationships you need to repair tomorrow? Undone tasks you need to deal with tomorrow? Socrates wrote that the unexamined life isn’t worth living … so take the time to examine your day so you can “do better” tomorrow.

There are at least another five must-do’s for your to-do list, but do these things and I can promise that you’ll begin to rise above the average leader mark.

According to virtually every researcher in the US, the vast majority of churches in North America are declining in both membership and in attendance. However, all over North America, there are exceptions to the rule … some in the most unlikely of places. Some churches in rural areas are seeing significant growth … as much as 300 percent in one case here locally (the’ve gone from 70 to well over 200 in less than a year). There are churches in small towns – towns that are declining themselves – that are doing baptisms left and right. And, of course, there are those suburban and urban churches that seem to be doing something right.

And though that is indeed good news - perhaps even optimistic news - the fact is, the majority of our churches in North America are plateaued at best and declining at worst.

There are many reasons why there are so many unlikely churches growing. For some, they’ve hired consultants who have come in and pinpointed exactly what the problems are and how to take corrective action. For others, they’ve hired a coach who’s taken the leadership to the next level by encouraging and holding them accountable for excellent practices. Some are attending training events that have been designed specifically for them and their contexts.

But there’s a third, and a more important, reason why these churches are growing. Change. Churches that grow behave differently than churches that are stagnant or declining. These churches may, or may not, be familiar with Einstein’s rule … “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” That seems self evident, even though it took

"If you always do what you always did ..."

a real genius to put into such succinct words. If your church is essentially unchanged in form and function since the nineties, eighties, seventies, sixties, or even the fifties, well, you might want to ponder Einstein’s rule a bit. The world around you has changed. You have a cell phone. You use a computer. You’re not the same person you were ten, fifteen, or fifty years ago … why would you think that the unchanging church would be inviting to today’s neighbors?

Dr. Charles Ridley, of Indiana University, has written what I call Ridley’s Corollary to Einstein’s rule. He wrote, “The best indicator of future performance is yesterday’s behaviors.” In other words, if you want to know what your church’s tomorrow is likely to look like, look at yesterday and then factor in time. If you’re going to grow your church, you’ll have to be different than you … and your congregation … was yesterday.

Take a look around your congregation this week. If you’re a member of one of the plateaued or declining congregations, ask yourself, what percentage of those attending will still be there in five years? Ten years? If your congregation is like most, fifteen years from now there won’t be enough living people in your church to pay to keep the lights on, let alone engage in effective ministry. Of course, that’s if you don’t do something to get beyond Ridley’s corollary and Einstein’s rule.

In December, my new book on Evangelism will be released by Chalice Press. Hitchhiker’s Guide to Evangelism takes a peek at the “new” evangelism needed for reaching today’s world. Let’s face it, if the ways we do evangelism were really working, our churches would be filling up. But that’s clearly not the case. Indeed, in North America we’re not just losing the battle of the church, we’re losing the war. Less than 15% of North Americans will find their way to a church this weekend … and the numbers are dropping sharply.

What’s not working is trying to cajole our church members into doing evangelism like it was done “back then.” Back then you could knock at a door, do a quasi-real survey about checking the religion practices of the neighborhood, and then dropping “the” question towards the end: “If you died tonight, do you know for sure you’d go to heaven?”

It’s not that this method never works anymore. It still does in some communities and with some people. The question to ask is this: Is it worth alienating 98 people, people who will have had their worst fears about the church realized when you show up at their door, in order to share the Gospel effectively with 2 people?

The main problem with this kind of evangelism is that in some circles, this is the only “method” of conversion. I call this the Paul method … conversion happens at a specific moment in time. Paul’s version of conversion has become the model, and yet it is the most invasive, most intrusive, and most aggressive of almost all other evangelism models. And, I’d add, that if Jesus was the one who’s knocking you off your horse, that’s one thing … but I’m not Jesus - and neither are the many “evangelists” who press for a conversion “experience.”

The second problem with this kind of evangelism is that it bolsters the notion that being a Christian is mostly a matter about what you believe. The problem with “believing” Christianity is that this is what’s gotten us into this black hole. Seventy-eight percent of USAmericans “claim” to be Christian. And by the definition that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus, they are Christians. So praying the “sinner’s prayer,” walking an aisle, or even being baptized doesn’t necessarily mean much. I won’t argue about the salvific value of these actions … I’ll even surmise that they may be all that is “necessary” (but I’m not the one doing the judging - see Matthew 25). However, the “conversion” model of evangelism puts so much emphasis on the act of conversion that too often living a Christian life becomes of secondary importance and emphasis.

Now, I’m not advocating that we stop … there are times and places for conversion invitations (see Glenn Kelley’s recent blog entry on Youth Evangelism). But I am suggesting that there’s a better way for the rest of us.

The “New” evangelism is really a very old evangelism. Instead of it being about conversion, it’s about having spiritual conversations. It’s about first being a part of something, such as a friendship, a small group, a work group, a service group, a cause, etc. It’s about exploring the faith by watching it modeled, by associating with it, by practicing it before deciding it’s about believing and accepting and converting. This “new” evangelism is what the twelve apostles experienced. There is no discernable moment when Peter or Andrew of John or James or Matthew or Thadeus or any of the others “became” a Christian. Was it when they left their professions? When they made the great confession? When they walked on water (or not)? When they denied or fled at Jesus’ arrest? When they ate breakfast after the resurrection? When they were on the road and Jesus ascended, even though some doubted? After Pentecost? The fact is, we don’t know. We can guess. We can speculate. But we simply cannot be sure.

Conversations. Modeling. Living such a radically different life that someone actually does ask us about the reason for our hope … people are asking you, aren’t they? Living in community. All this is part of the “new” evangelism.