Newsletter Articles
Where Have All the Visitors Gone?
The vast majority of congregations today have a limited number of visitors. Starting fifty years ago these numbers were in gradual decline for decades with few taking notice. Now, all these years later, the total number of visitors is very different. Though that depleted number of visitors has been the norm for awhile, the disconnect between the congregation and the community is continuing to widen.
The explanation of why can be learned from two completely different perspectives: from those not today a part of the organized church and from those within congregations. Each perspective contributes to understanding the problem and offers clues how to change it.
But before getting into that we should identify the visitors who are still coming. They make up three unequal-sized groups. First there are the relatives of members who are visiting them. In most of our congregations today this makes up the vast majority of visitors they receive. A second but much smaller group of visitors are those who have found their own way to that church. What motivated them to make their way was they recently (a relative term) moved into the community or something happened in their personal life that prompted the desire to get to church or back to church. The third group is the invited visitor. Apart from a very occasional visitor, these are found mainly in the few mostly missional congregations where members are motivated to want to invite visitors.
The first group of visitors it would appear has remained about the same size over recent decades. Because the other two groups have declined significantly, it is our intent to offer some insight as to why this has happened. It is only in understanding the realities affecting this change that we can discover how to address and alter it.
The perspective of those not in churches on Sunday mornings
A search for that which is spiritually fulfilling permeates our society today, no less for those outside the church than those within. Because there have been no universally identified sources that provide this spirituality, everyone has a different spin on how and where it might be found. Although the vast majority of our population professes a belief in God, most of them feel that the church sitting on a street corner in the community has very little to do with God and they have all but written off the church as having potential to be a source of that spirituality.
If this search for that which is spiritually fulfilling even has anything to do with God, they are convinced they would need to experience God. There is absolutely no interest or desire to just learn things about Him. Nor are they interested in what someone might suggest He has to say. Short of the church possibly being a place to hear directly from Him, they believe anything the church has to offer is merely some person’s opinion. With the huge difference between experiencing God and learning things about Him, there is tremendous skepticism the church has anything to offer.
The chance for nearly all of them to find their own way to the church on the corner is less than zero. They absolutely do not want the church on the corner trying to force their own interpretation on them. When it is even suggested that the church on the corner might have the true or best interpretation, they respond, “You’ve got to be joking! Do you know how many extremes there are of you folks claiming the same thing?”
Denominations mean absolutely nothing to the people outside the congregation. For that matter, apart from the rural and small town congregations that represent the last dying remnants of European immigration, denominations are at most only a name even to the majority of those who sit in the pew. So it doesn’t matter how many times or different ways the congregation on the corner says, “You-all come!” It won’t happen.
The only chance for which the door is not completely closing is if someone they personally know well enough to respect invites them. And then, we are assuming, with the person about to be invited, that their doubt regarding the church is not so pervasive they would just laugh. The problem compounds with the vast majority of churches that have no one doing any inviting. Whenever it is identified that people, i.e. Lutherans, are too shy or feel too inadequate to invite anyone, it distracts from the real reasons for outreach failure. We will return to this later in the article.
The perspective of the vast number of our congregations
While each congregation will shape its own collective explanation for the absence of visitors, most remain confused why more people don’t come like they themselves have. In addition we need to say that not everyone has the same desire to reach out and include others. Many become selective listeners when it comes to Jesus indicating He started the church to reach everyone with His Good News.
There is a group within the church (Lutheran or others) that believes either they have the only truth, a bad thing to claim, or they at least have the best or most accurate. From their perspective it’s just a matter of the rest of the world somehow coming to their senses. They listen to the details others share about their congregation, and they wonder how people could even believe some of those things. They feel if they can just get them inside their church they will surely see the light.
Again regardless of denomination, another group is so concerned with keeping things exactly the way they want them, they only want a select group of visitors, often commonly identified as those from the same denomination. “It doesn’t matter if they don’t like how things are done here; not everyone is a ‘… (fill in the denomination)…’. We are here for …, and if you are really going to push, we’re here for our kind of ….” Because they don’t want to lose their hold on keeping things the way they are, “newcomers” have to be around quite awhile before they can be trusted to hold some of the reins. They definitely cannot do anything until they have become a member. The reasoning is they don’t want to have to put the broken pieces of wild ideas back together again.
Congregations that are missional, however, have another group within them. They want to be responsive to the Great Commission given the Church by Jesus. Their struggle over recent decades has been how to “attract” the outside people inside. Evangelism Committees have searched for the right technique or program to put in place to pull them in. Unfortunately the whole effort is backward. Jesus never did sit in a synagogue and try to figure out how to get people to come in.
The key is going to where the people are and making a true relational contact. Cold calling offers very little chance of that happening. The key is relational. No learned or memorized “pitch” is going to do it. One life has to touch another, and for that to happen, one life has to be excited enough to want to share something with another life. In the 21st Century this is how over 85% of those who were outside the church are coming inside.
It is doubtful that a membership-based congregation will ever mount this kind of spiritual excitement. If they exist, they are few and far between. Only a disciple-based congregation, excited about their personal relationship to Jesus Christ and filled with passion about fulfilling their own called ministry will generate this kind of excitement. To engage those outside the church it will take an invitation for them to come and check it out for themselves rather than promising some authoritative truth waiting for them. It will take a witness of spiritual experience and not just spiritual learning. As the gap continues to widen between church and community, this bridge that Jesus demonstrated in His own ministry is the last one standing.
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