My painful Confession

Last week I wrote about how people are leaving the church and in many cases it is because they feel that they are not cared for or loved.  They feel they have simply become a pawn in the objective of growing a bigger church and that their value was not as a person, but as a tool.  It could be said that people are not leaving churches, but leaving leadership that has not the desire or ability to care about them.  I want to look at the other side of this same coin. 

I have to take you to a moment of confession.

To that moment follow me to a non-descript basement in an equally non-descript city in a non-descript town.  Sitting around the room in folding chairs holding Styrofoam cups of coffee are about a dozen or so people.  I am to say a few words to the group.  I have known this day, this moment, was coming since the first night I came to a meeting and I have not looked forward to it.  I step up to a small music stand and look at the non-judgmental faces that are a mixture of concern and compassion.  I begin:  “Hi, my name is Charlie and I am a seeker-driven minister.”

In unison everyone answers, “Hi, Charlie.”

There, I said it.  It is out and I can’t take it back. 

Growing up in a parsonage my heroes were always preachers, especially preachers with dynamic and growing ministries.  While my friends had cassettes of rock bands or disco groups, I had cassettes with titles like, “Re-digging the wells of our historic faith,” or “It took a flood”.

My freshman year of college I started volunteering as a weekend youth minister.  When I graduated 4 years later, I wanted nothing more than to grow a great church.  I read about “The Frog in the Kettle” and how I should market my church.  I poured over the Leadership Journal interview with Bill Hybels.  I tried to incorporate drama in worship, introduce keyboards and songs written in the same century in which we lived.  We progressed from overhead projectors all the way to PowerPoint and to video.  Seeker-driven worship and felt need ministries were the two engines that would make a church take off.

I embraced the Seeker Sensitive/Seeker Driven model of ministry and the churches I served grew, most of them doubled in size during my ministry.  They set all time records for attendance, additions, and opened new and creative ministries. 

But along the way misgivings began to set in. 

I felt like I was on a treadmill in ministry.  There were no quiet pastures.  There were two appetites that had to be fed.  To fail to feed them meant that the two engines or seeker-driven worship and felt need ministry might sputter and die. 

First, it is exhausting to always have to do the latest, “latest thing”.  Like receiving notice of the latest update for your I-phone, the invitations to conferences were endless.  There was always another book to read, another training to attend-a new better way to do worship.  To keep up you had to, if not attend the conference at least, buy the kit with the VHS tapes (later DVDs) a three ring binder of notes and a book by the expert author.  “All this is yours, for a limited time only, for $199 plus shipping and handling.”  At one church I served, their library contained no less that 35 of these ministry kits.

We created an insatiable appetite for novelty.  If you didn’t have the latest innovation another church in town would.  They would be reaching the un-churched, and stealing a few of your sheep along the way.  As if every innovation for the church and ministry was part of planned obsolescence, we seemed to need to reinvent ourselves on almost a weekly basis.  Every successful program or book had as many incarnations as the “Chicken Soup of the Soul” series.

Without a baseline where do you end? 

When we focused on seekers, which by the way is a little difficult to define and more difficult to recognize in life, every opinion poll, survey and statistic from researches has the potential of a required, total, revamping of ministry.  There are two things which never say enough, three that are never satisfied, the experience-seeking seeker, publishing companies, and the market for church growth.”

When attraction is the objective, leadership is based on attractivity.

One of the terms used to describe the seeker-driven ministry is “Attractional Ministry”.  We attract people to our service, demonstrate that being a Christian has unheralded and unnoticed advantages and then invite them to follow an attractive Jesus and His attractive pastor.  The attractional approach sets up a scoreboard by which we can judge success.  Leadership becomes the ability to attract and leadership based on attractivity is prone to follow forces other than a Master carrying a cross. 

But worst of all was the bitter fruit of perpetually immature believers. 

Like it or not, a ministry that is focused on meeting the needs of the latest group of “seekers” and addressing their felt needs has little room for serious discipleship.  We can dumb down discipleship so that it can fit.  So that it can be part of a Christian karate class or a Christian self-help book club, but there was little to explain why we should die to self or what that means.

Why people left my church. 

To come full circle, sometimes people leave the church because they feel they are not cared for, but sometimes because they don’t want to be disciples.  I was not a perfect pastor and some folks may have left the church because they sensed that they were not cared about.  But let me share a few examples of why people left the churches I served.

There was the couple that was offended that the church did not allow their teenage daughter and her ‘baby daddy’ to leave their 3 month old with grandparents and go on a week long, youth retreat.

The refusal from the church to issue a tax receipt for $10,000 for goods left in the fellowship hall caused one couple to leave.  It was about 25 cases of old plastic Halloween junk, which was left over from a failed, flea market business.

When I told a lady she had to end an affair with a minister in the next town, she left and told me I didn’t understand her loneliness or that his marriage was just a pretense of a marriage.

But perhaps it was summed up best by the comments of a good friend.  The short of a very long conversation was that he was living with a girlfriend without being married and when I told him that scripture was clear about the situation he said he didn’t care.  When I asked him, “Who is really in charge of your life?  Who decides what is right or wrong?  Who is the ultimate authority-you or Jesus?”  His answer was cold and crystal clear.  “I’m in charge.  I call the shots.”

Pragmatism is tasty, but it is a poisonous fruit.

It would be unfair to say every seeker-driven ministry is fraught with people who are utterly unconcerned with being a disciple.  But we need to take time to ask, “Is the way we’re doing the ministry causing us to make something other than disciples?”

Next week: The move from just plain silly to an awakening from cultural faith.