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July 09, 2008
Faith : Should church be easy?
The biggest trend in Christian churches in America over the last 20 years has been the desire to create “seeker friendly” church services to attract the “unchurched.” The idea is to create an environment that is comfortable and entertaining so that people who normally wouldn’t go to church would be willing to attend and thus be exposed to the gospel.
The technique has worked – to a point. There are churches in America that have over 20,000 people attending services every weekend. The question is: how many of those people ever move beyond showing up to be entertained? Studies have shown that very few of those people become anything other than passive member of the audience, and many simply stop coming if the church starts to expect more of them. It seems to me that these “seeker friendly” meetings tend to serve as inoculations against Christianity – giving people a small, weakened version of the faith; just enough to make them feel good about themselves and thus make them resistant to the “real thing”.
It doesn’t take being a “Seeker friendly” church to see the effect. I’ve been a part of churches that had Sunday morning services, Sunday evening praise service, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and home groups. We’d see the biggest crowd on Sunday Morning, about half that number on Sunday evening, half again on Wednesday, and perhaps 10% of the Sunday morning crowd going to a home group. This is considered normal, and I have even read books that advocate this as a good thing since it “supports people with a wide variety of commitment levels.”
I have however started to wonder recently if “supporting people with a wide variety of commitment levels” is really part of the mission statement for The Church. Becoming a Christian is a matter of making Jesus your Lord; and is there really a place for people who only want to make Jesus slightly their Lord?
To be clear, I am not talking about Christian maturity here. After nearly 40 years I am still learning new ways I need to submit myself to God – I am still learning what it means for Jesus to be my Lord. The question is a matter of commitment to do whatever God leads them to do at whatever stage of growth and transformation they are at. As an example, a Christian should be spending regular time in prayer and studying their Bible. A new Christian may not yet understand how to pray well or understand everything they read in the Bible, while a mature Christian may accomplish much more in their prayer and studies; but both should be equally committed to doing it. Yet most churches I have been a part of understand and accept that most of the people who show up at Sunday services never study their Bible outside of official church meetings and never pray unless someone in their family is in desperate need.
Nor am I saying that church should not be welcoming to people who are not (yet?) willing to make that kind of commitment. People should be allowed to come, watch, and participate if they want to without anything more being expected of them. My point is that what people should see when they come and watch and participate should make it clear that if they want to become a Christian that it is going to take a real commitment on their part – not to the church; but to Jesus. I think the church needs to do a better job of communicating that becoming a Christian is costly (with benefits that far outweigh those costs); while at the same time welcoming people in our midst who are not yet ready to pay that price. Yet too often we downplay the costs to keep people coming, hoping that eventually they will be willing to make a greater commitment. The problem is that in most churches the people who only show up on Sunday never see examples of what it means to be a committed Christian other than in the person of the "professionals" (pastors, staff, etc) that are paid for their "commitment".
I don’t know what the answer is. The solution for much of the first few centuries of church history was that people had to spend months if not years proving their commitment to Jesus before the church would baptize them and thus formally accept them as part of the church; and this started at a time when people could have their property taken away from them for being a Christian – talk about a costly faith! Yet despite those high barriers, the church grew exponentially though those times. I suspect there is some middle way on this, some way to show "seekers" all of what it means to be a Christian without them feeling they have to make that commitment to stay involved. Certainly promoting Christianity using the soft-sell had just given us a bunch of soft "Christians" with no sense of what it means to make Jesus their Lord.
Posted by Steven at July 9, 2008 05:00 AM
