As a Seeker Driven Pastor was I driving people from the church?

It is one thing to question another person’s motives. 

It is something else to question their systems, tools, processes and operations.  I have no doubt that the vast majority of ministers are operating from the most noble of motives.  Loving the Lord, His church and the lost they have looked for effective systems, tools, processes and operations to reach the lost and grow the church. 

The problem is that when we focus on the wants and perceived needs of the un-churched we slowly untie our connection to eternal things.  This transition was by no means instant, but like the frog in the kettle we began to cook ourselves to death.  We began with music that was more culturally appropriate and the illustration of Biblical truth with skits and drama. 

Somewhere along the way things got silly.

For example I once talked with a minister that was highly contemporary in his approach-which included a liturgical dance during communion-and whose church plant was in attendance free fall.  (See liturgical dance for communion).  He told me that what he thought they needed was a copy of a picture he had seen of Jesus laughing.  He felt that if he could put that picture in the entryway of the church it would make people feel happy about being a part of a church that loved a Jesus that loved to laugh.

A preacher I know led his church to spending $40,000 for a light system for the stage.  This was a smallish congregation with an auditorium that would max out at about 250 in seating.  The preacher felt that with this lighting system they could control the mood or atmosphere of the worship service better.  I will give you one guess who spent most of the time in the spotlight.

One church I visited offered me earplugs when I came in.  They did this because in their words, “We like our music loud and that bothers some older people.”  Let me state, I don’t mind being older.  Actually, I like it.  But I couldn’t help but feel this was less of a service to those of us in the advanced years of our 50’s and more a statement about the church’s youth and hipness.   It was similar to the worship service in which during the second song of the worship set a fog machine started belching out white smoke.  By the time the set was over, a good 6 inches of smoke had rolled off the stage and covered the floor.  Nothing says “God” like a fog machine.

Once, at the beginning of the sermon, I was shocked to hear the preacher say, “I want to apologize for reading so much Scripture today.”  Apparently, reading a lengthy passage of scripture was in someway unacceptable to his audience.  He really didn’t want to do it because it wasn’t what they wanted, but to make the point he had to, so he begged for their indulgence.   

From Silly to Idiotic

When those we want to reach drive our systems, tools, processes and operations we can move beyond silly to stupid and idiotic.  There was the church that gave a way a free motorcycle in worship one Sunday.  Under every seat was taped a ticket. Whoever had the matching ticket matched drawn during the sermon won a brand, new motorcycle.  It was a lesson on grace.  The good news reduced to a carnival game show.  

Put and Arm-Bar on your declining attendance!

Or like the preacher who delivered the Easter sermon wearing a bunny costume.   He promised that the Easter Bunny would show up.  For those who have a more macho ministry your church can now schedule a professional wrestling ministry.  Large sweaty men in tights will come to your church, yell at each other, beat on each, other strangle each other all the while your congregation can boo, hiss, and yell at the “bad guys” in Jesus Name of course.  If being a spectator is not enough you can go to a Christian wrestling school or a mere $1,200.  No mention was made of accreditation.   We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but they do!

Is this why the church is in decline?

When those we want to reach drive our systems, tools, processes, and operations there is no way for us to draw a line and say, “No more.”  As I try to imagine the next level of ministry driven by the wants of the world I am afraid.  The abuses of the pre-reformation church come to mind; a great show followed by the offer of salvation- for a small fee of course.

I believe that part of the reason that the church is in decline is not our lack of being contemporary or relevant but because of it.  As we have kept offering newer levels of greater novelty we are experiencing the law of diminished returns.  In other words, the church is in decline because we have exhausted the supply of the “seeker’s” curiosity.  The seeker has come and seen the novelty of that which we have to offer; they have seen it and now they are moving on.  We the church have forgotten that only God can be the source of inexhaustible fascination, attention, and adoration.

In our attempt to adapt to the culture, which can be appropriate at times, we have succumbed to the culture and have simply become a religious expression of the culture.  In too many cases the church is the expression of the dominant culture not in terms of economics, fashion, or entertainment, or politics, but an expression of the culture in religious terms.  Our culture is oriented toward showmanship, power, entertainment, wealth, popularity and a matrix that measures success in numbers.  That is not an unfair description of the church in many cases.

We must awaken from our cultural slumbers.  Having eaten Lotus we are numb to the changes in our own soul and spirit.  That awakening is difficult, but it is possible.  In fact, I believe it is already beginning to happen.

To be continued.

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.

What Pep Boys can teach us about why people leave the Church.

I drive a lot.  More than I like.  In fact, last year my business mileage was just a tick over 32,000.  That is not including family trips and personal trips.  That means I change the oil in my car often, every 3500 miles to be exact.  My Honda has 330,000 miles and my goal is 500,000 before I sell her.  I have become fast at changing the oil in my car-7 minutes not counting putting the tools up.  Part of my routine was to go to the local Pep Boys, pick up the filter and oil, and occasionally a few other things.  The trip to Pep Boys took longer than the oil change itself.

Last month, I received a $10 off coupon. I was thrilled because last year I estimate that I spent about $500 at this Pep Boys.  I would get the oil change done for less than $20.  Alas, it was not to be.  The bar code on the coupon was apparently unrecognizable to the register.   Things were tried, other things were tried, and the clerk pronounced curses against the computer and its descendants. 

The supervisor was called over.  Things were tried again and other things were tried, and the ancestry of the computer was questioned.  Finally, the clerk turned the screen to where I couldn’t see it, hit a few keystrokes and said, “There, that takes care of it.”  But the $10 was not taken off the ticket.  When I questioned the total I was told, “No, it is all good.”  The supervisor left and disappeared into the place where staff members go to hide in times of frustration.   I felt like my concerns were less important than company policy.  I felt like I was not heard.  I felt like they wanted me to go away with as little noise and trouble as possible.  I am not the sort to make a scene so I paid the ticket and left.  All total, I had spent 45 minutes in the store, the vast majority of which was at the counter. 

By that evening, I had discovered that I could buy oil filters and oil from Amazon.  And if ordered in sufficient bulk it is just as cheap as the local Pep Boys.  Not only that, a nice man saves me the trip to town by delivering it to my front door.  Yesterday, it was oil change time again.  I went to my shed, got my tools, filter and oil and had the job done before I could have driven to Pep Boys.  Now that Amazon knows my car make and model I can order almost everything I need and have it at my front door in a few days.  What do you suppose the chances are that I will ever go back to Pep Boys?

I doubt that the two clerks were evil people. They wanted to be helpful, but they didn’t have the will or most likely the ability to step outside of policy and protocols.  They very likely, like me, felt powerless against the “machine”.  Somewhere in the vast 800-store chain the needs of one $500 a year customer is not terribly important.  After all, I am just one.

Interestingly, my experience at Pep Boys is not unlike the reasons people are leaving organized religion in record numbers.  Jason Jennings in his book “Hit the Ground Running” refers to this provocative quote, “People do not quit jobs, they quit bosses.”  We might restate it for our purposes to say, “People do not quit churches, they quit leadership.”  No one ever left a church because they were so well loved, so appreciated, so cared for, or so listened to that they were overwhelmed by grace. 

I fear that in the Church’s mad rush to grow numerically, to be the next cutting edge ministry, to have great systems, music, teaching, light show, fog, etc. that we are forgetting the individual.  People are lost in the processes and become frustrated.  Sometimes churches and leaders can treat people like dairy cows, “give your 5 gallons a day and the rest of the time stay out of the way.”  The member gives and gives and gives and then one day, drops off the face of the church and we wonder what went wrong. 

To illustrate from the world of business, a focus group of clients were giving their honest evaluation to the executive team of a company.  One of the clients was an admiral who took his turn to ask how many of the executives had even been on a ship or even talked to a sailor.  The answer was none, not a single one.  The admiral went on to offer the advice that instead of trying to sell products or services to the Navy the business leaders should take some time to listen, to see what sailors do, how they use the product and how it fits in their life at sea.

When was the last time as a church leader you sat down with your people, without an agenda, or a meeting and asked, “How are you doing in life?  How do you feel about the church’s direction or progress?  Are you getting the help you need?”  Most church leaders are deeply dedicated men and women of God.  But they are feeding a monster called church growth.  They unconsciously know that if they don’t feed the monster, the monster will eat them.  So, they are always after the next thing.  But in the process of the next thing, people become giving units or available volunteer hours, or a human resource to be used. 

I was once tasked with contacting a high profile individual from a mega church to be a speaker at an event.  I could not speak to this individual directly, nor could I reach their executive assistant, but I could speak to the secretary to the executive assistant that would make sure my message got at least that far.  I wondered what it would be like to be a member of that congregation.

People are leaving the church in America in staggering numbers.  The back door of the church is open wider now than ever before.  The only way to close that door is for the priority of people to return to the forefront of the life and ministry of the church.  We can only close that door by making sure that people know they are a priority as an individual.

Bee Keeping and Growing a Church

I am a beekeeper now.  But it is mostly by accident and I don’t deserve much credit.  In fact, I would like to keep track of who does get the credit.  Let me give a little backstory and then make an application for the church.

Late last summer, a friend called and asked if I would like a couple of bee boxes.  Her ex-husband had bees in town, but the colony died off due to the city spraying for bugs.  I have long been interested in keeping bees, so the offer of free equipment was a no-brainer. 

·      Credit:  My friend and her ex-husband.

A couple of days later, I make the arrangements to go pick-up the bee boxes and a few other things associated with bee keeping.  It was more than would fit in the back of my little Honda, so my son agreed to help me and to use his truck to haul all the  stuff home.  Counting the cinderblocks on which the boxes sit it was actually two loads of stuff.  Not only did my son use his truck he did the heavy lifting and loading the collection. 

·      Credit: Mostly my son, but I get a little.

Once home we found the boxes had been neglected for a long time.  They were dirty and I thought they might need to be burned.  But with the advice from real beekeepers and the hard work of my wife and I, the boxes cleaned up very nicely and were stacked and ready to use.  (Side bar: of all the hobbyists in the world I believe that beekeepers are the most helpful for novices.  Their willingness to offer council and to help is remarkable)

·      Credit:  Beekeepers, my wife-and I will take a little.

I learned that late summer/early fall is not the best time of year to start beekeeping (see above comment about the helpfulness of beekeepers).  So, I stored the boxes by my shop where they sat through the winter.   During this time I talked up by new hobby with a neighbor who sells honey; naturally, he was interested.  Then last Saturday his wife calls and asks if I wanted some bees.  Their neighbor discovered a honeybee colony in a lawn decoration that looked like an old fashioned well house.  I was out of town, but later that evening I went over to look at the bee colony.  There were a few bees and some comb in the overturned well house.  Not a lot of bees, but it would be a start.  I told the neighbor I would come and get them as soon as I figured out the best way to do it. I had the beginnings of a bee colony.

Credit: My neighbors

Saturday night I re-cleaned a bee box, affixed a jar of sugar water and began to look up Youtube videos on how to capture a bee colony.  I came up with a plan (which was not a very good one) and went to bed anticipating the beginnings of a new hobby.  Sunday morning before church I walked over to the over turned well house to find less than a dozen bees.  I was crestfallen.  When they turned the well house on its side the bees were so disturbed they swarmed off.  After church I finished setting up the bee box planning to buy a colony soon, but I did so without much excitement.

·      Credit:  In this, the least successful part of the process, I get the credit.

In the middle of the afternoon, I was checking on a sick chicken when I heard a buzzing roar.  I could not tell where it was coming from.  I called my wife, who had been over near the chicken pen a few minutes before, to help me identify where the sound was coming from.  I think it is coming from the old water oak overhead.  My wife came over and points to the bee box and says, “There they are!”  Thousands of bees were swarming around the box, hundreds were hanging off the front, and thousands more were in the air above us. 

·      Credit: The bees.

As of sun up this morning, the bees were coming and going, and now I am the most unmerited and unqualified beekeeper in America, perhaps the world.  I did very little to get the bees.  The most that can be said is that I provided an environment that was conducive for bees.   They would not have come if I had put kerosene in the feeder instead of water.  Based on my experience I should not expect to be asked to speak or write about beekeeping, at least not beyond this blog.

Many times in ministry we work hard to grow a church.  We do all the right things. We pray, we serve, we teach, we care, we market, we do all the things recommended in the books written by the guys at the big churches and yet our churches don’t flourish.  We blame ourselves.  We blame our people and if we don’t blame God we might occasionally question Him and His ways.  There are things we can do to provide a environment conducive for church growth, but we can’t make it happen.  I know a church where folks swarm in every Sunday and within a few miles are dozens of other churches that experience very moderate growth.

The point of this blog is not to argue for or against church growth principles or techniques.  Nor is it to offer advice on how to make your hive conducive to growth.  It is simply this word of encouragement for minsters, pastors and church leaders: if the bees swarm to another church and not yours, don’t assume that it is because in some way you are not adequate to the task or deficient in personality.  The other preacher is not as good as they may look and you are not as bad as you may feel. 

BUZZ ON