Transforming Church

Face it; a big part of the problem is that we are much more into membership than we are into discipleship. Membership puts the focus on us instead of Christ. Congregations were shaped more by member preferences than offering to others a nurturing living relationship with Jesus Christ. With member preferences shaping ministry, over and over this led to some members being happy and others being unhappy. If everyone is happy, it likely indicates you have shrunk so small you will only continue to shrink and never grow.

Members motivated by self-interest are not able to model Christ to one another. Over the years where this prevails, a great many members who came in the front doors of the congregation went out the back. Worst offending congregations eventually don’t even want new people coming in the front door; they only rock the boat. As to those who went out the back door, we have always been aware that even though many did not try to be members again, they do still claim to belong to Christ and bear His name. A recent survey done by the Barna Group shows that unchurched Americans today may be different than expected.

For one thing, only 28% of the adult population has not attended church in the past six months. That’s amazing when you look at how few people totally are in church on any given Sunday. Although for years over 90% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, another survey indicated that number has dropped to 75%. This survey, on the other hand, indicates it is still 83%. Realize, though, that if you are looking only at the unchurched and not the total population, all of these percentages would be lower.

Very revealing, Stephen Mansfield in his just released book titled ReChurch shows that most of the unchurched people out there – more than four out of five – were formerly regular participants in a church. And most of these left the church because of personally experienced pain with other members and widespread church disruption. Mansfield, as a former mega church pastor, experienced this very thing himself.

Back with the Barna study, it shows that nearly half of those, 4 out of 10, left because they were turned off by painful experiences with other members. Both studies in their investigation clearly assess that this pain can be reversed. Never have there been more self-identified Christians who have distanced themselves from the church than today. To an outsider it begs the question how this can happen. Are the unchurched Christians changed or is the church the reason? Since the church is almost reticent to change, the answer is not difficult to discover.

To understand and realize how to approach these once-or-more-often rejected Christians with Christ is of utmost importance. Two-thirds of them hold a biblical view of God, that He is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe and still rules that universe today. This characteristic and others are similar to what we find among our church members today. Only one-third of unchurched Christians agree to any extent that the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teaches. In further evidence of their pain, only 15% claim their religious faith to be very important in their life. Just over one-fifth contend that the greatest purpose in life is to love God with all their heart, mind and strength, but remember, the wounds they live with can be healed.

Now shift gears a bit with input from yet another survey. What we have identified so far about the unchurched better describes those thirty and older. When you look at just that group the percentages increase. The eighteen to twenty-nine group, the Millennials, are different. The majority of this group have never been in a church. According to a survey by Guy Lyons of Lifeway Research, Millennials see themselves as spiritual but not religious. The 1,200 surveyed had a variety of perceptions regarding what is “spiritual” and what is “religious,” but most of them saw the traditional Christian Church as judging and self-justifying based on “their own consensus” of faithfulness to biblical principle and what is spiritual. Most Millennials think the church has very little or nothing to offer them.

A mere 15% of Millennials attend church regularly and less than 3% stick with it. But again, 65% still call themselves Christian, just non-religious Christians. They neither pray regularly, attend worship services nor read the Bible. Though claiming to be Christians, half are unsure whether Jesus is the only path to heaven.

Their main turn-off with today’s church is to the 80% of its members who believe that the heart of what it means to be Christian is following the rules. Not only is that a gross misrepresentation of what is Christian, over half of that 80%, while they recognize Easter is important, are hard pressed to explain why. If those percentages of our present members do not understand the significance of or personally experience a relationship with Jesus Christ, what is there to offer Millennials that would even give them the opportunity to see what a Gospel relationship with Jesus Christ can mean? Millennials are already all about relationships in their lives, but they do not see church members sharing that, or having become disciples who experience Christ themselves.

The church’s own confusion today misleads Millennials. They themselves lean toward “moralistic therapeutic deism” – ‘God wanting you to be happy and do good things.’ While that is not really Christian, Millennials tend to misread that as being faithful Christians.

To let all this new information being discovered about the unchurched help shape evangelism ministry, begin with this first step before you try to reshape how you witness to the unchurched. Do this first and it will greatly impact how you are able to reach both Millennials and those over thirty. Unfortunately in many congregations today this is not a quick fix and not everyone is able to see the potential. Most would rather buy into the same warm fuzzies and fellowship, and market them as friendship. Christ intended the church to be the best place in which to realize a personal relationship with Him, but while most congregations give lip service to that, reality in most of them is that everything is all about the members. Follow these suggestions and you will discover little difficulty witnessing both corporately and individually to both of these unchurched groups.

For some time each younger generation has put more value and importance on relationships. Though this may have manifest itself more with peers of their own generation, frequent marked examples are cited with those more than a generation difference in age. Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook in her article titled, “Evangelism and the Under-Thirty Crowd,” quotes Tom Brackett, church planting specialist for the Episcopal Church, saying that more positive approaches to evangelism today lie “in pointing out the ways that God is already active, transforming lives, and connecting us to each other.” As the church has gotten further off track with membership instead of discipleship, injurious compromise resulted also in experiencing the day to day living relationship with Jesus. From today’s Christians and our congregations the faith practice of witnessing to Jesus and what He has done in our lives has become all but completely lost.

To recover this we must first become an advocate for discipleship. Work hard to keep the distinctions of discipleship and membership separate from each other in your congregation. Realize that trying to import discipleship into membership will end up compromising discipleship. Do not just rename any part of what your congregation is now doing as discipleship. Instead develop a separate, intensive and comprehensive ministry to grow discipleship through the seven conduits (faith practices) Jesus identified to connect us daily in a living way to Him.

Do not mix or make substitutions with the words for “disciple” and “member.” To do that everything will default to membership as it has for the last five hundred years. This is why one must not simply reconstitute what has been done to date as disciple or discipleship. Trust me; it has already been tainted by membership. Likewise DO NOT simply rename members as disciples; that accomplishes nothing. Convince the congregation to abandon as much as it is able any use of the word membership as well as its philosophy. Take your powerful “member” vote and offer it in proxy to Jesus Christ. Your significance is not in being a member of His church, but in being His disciple.

If today’s “members” are not able to understand the difference, how can the church ever witness anything different to the unchurched. A disciple belongs to Jesus, does His bidding and uses the spiritual gifts one has received to serve Him directly in personally called ministry. Disciples are not part-time volunteers of the church. Witness to these things and it will lead you in turn to right relationships that will welcome back both the unchurched of former painful experience and the Millennials who, until now, have not discovered how to experience spiritual in new and deeply meaningful ways.

Salvation is through Jesus Christ. One can meet Him anywhere, but one should certainly not miss Him in His church.