Healthy growth and change, Part 4: What is your church aiming at?

“Squirrel!”

The dogs from the movie Up have become a symbol of easy distractibility. Every sound, sight, and smell pulls the attention away in an instant.

Unfortunately, many churches have been distracted by squirrels – tasks that pull your attention away from the mission Christ has given the church. Churches can get caught up in putting on events, helping the poor, maintaining a set of “essential” ministries, raising the children, successfully putting on a Sunday morning worship event, staying financially solvent, etc. These may be good goals, but they should not become the church’s central mission.

“Churches can get caught up in putting on events, helping the poor, maintaining a set of “essential” ministries, raising the children, successfully putting on a Sunday morning worship event, staying financially solvent, etc. These may be good goals, but they should not become the church’s central mission.”

After He rose from the dead, Jesus ascended into Heaven, but He left His disciples behind. Why? Because He has a mission for us to accomplish. As He said before He left earth: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20a).

Often, Christ’s mission to us is broken down into two parts: making disciples and teaching them. Obviously, we can quibble about terminology. After all, doesn’t “making disciples” include “teaching them”? However, the fact remains that people need to first convert (and be baptized) before they can be fully taught.

When I look at the churches in New England, I believe that most churches have a tendency to fail in one direction or the other. Some churches are doing constant evangelism. They record many baptisms, but they teach the new believers only at a surface level. As a result, they can lose people out the back door as quickly as they bring them in the front.

Most often, though, churches fail by not doing enough to reach their community with the Gospel. Such a weakness can grow greater the longer the church exists. Eventually, the church enters maintenance mode and plateaus.

The balance of these two extremes can be clearly seen in a surprising place in Scripture – Paul’s teaching on speaking in tongues in 1 Corinthians 14. Paul instructs the church in Corinth not to allow people to speak in tongues in their gatherings unless there is an interpretation provided. He gives two reasons. First, he says that all things in the church must be done for the edification of believers, and speaking in a tongue edifies only the speaker (vv. 3-5,12,17). Second, speaking in tongues will scare away the unbelieving visitors who have come to your meetings (vv. 22-25).

Paul’s reasoning here provides a two-pronged approach that should influence most of what we do at the church, especially our main gatherings. We should aim our gatherings to edify believers, but we should also aim our gatherings to speak to unbelieving visitors. According to Paul, we want our worship gatherings to be such that it could be said of a visitor, “…he is convicted by all and is called to account by all. The secrets of his heart will be revealed, and as a result he will fall facedown and worship God, proclaiming, ‘God is really among you.’”

“We should aim our gatherings to edify believers, but we should also aim our gatherings to speak to unbelieving visitors.”

Your church needs to be continuously reminded of the mission Christ has given us. The mission needs to be taught and re-taught.

Then, everything in the church should be evaluated according to the mission. Does this or that help the mission or hinder the mission? Everything in the church should help the mission, otherwise why are you wasting the resources of Christ’s church on something that is not His mission?

Take a secret shopper approach to your church. First, evaluate your church’s gatherings and ministries from the perspective of a secret shopper believer. Do these gatherings and ministries help you grow and learn?

Second, evaluate your church’s gatherings and ministries from the perspective of a secret shopper unbeliever. Do these gatherings and ministries communicate the Gospel effectively to you? Are there things about your church that would unnecessarily turn off or scare away an unbeliever? Certainly, the Gospel is offensive to people, but Paul did not think that was an excuse for acting weird.

Being a Baptist church, you may not literally speak in tongues, but that does not mean you don’t speak in a foreign language. Your music, prayers, and preaching may be so full of “Christianese” or old-fashioned words that a visitor might sincerely not be able to understand what you are talking about. The style of your building, your clothing, and your music may be so foreign to a visitor that he may wonder if he entered a time machine or a parallel universe.

“Your music, prayers, and preaching may be so full of Christianese or old-fashioned words that a visitor might sincerely not be able to understand what you are talking about.”

Our mission is to make disciples. To fulfill this mission, we need to effectively communicate the Gospel in ways unbelievers in our communities can understand. We need to remove obstacles to conversion, not create and perpetuate them. And we need to consistently feed the sheep when they join the flock.

In the final installment, we will look at the controversial area of music in order to see how the principles in this series apply in practice.

Randall Curtis serves as the Rhode Island regional coordinator for the Baptist Churches of New England.