the audience and the church

An idea thats been rolling around in my head for a while came up a couple of times in the last couple of days. Once with my friend the rock star and once with my sister who works at a megachurch.

It’s not that earth shattering an idea, and I think I may have stolen it from someone else, but it is a helpful way of looking at church numbers. Plus with my sister at the megachurch talking about it someone might write a book and I want to be able to take credit.

The basic idea is this: In any gathering that calls itself church, there are at least two groups. The first group is smaller. They are people who are committed not just to your gathering but also to the mission of Jesus in your context. They get that church isn’t just about meeting their needs,but that their needs will be met by participating in what God is doing. They care enough to commit what is most valuable to them, be it money or time. We call this group the church.

There is another group that makes up the larger whole. They come to the church. They participate in what the church does. They may contribute financally. They may even be quite vocal and opinionated on church matters, but ultimately, their role is that of an observer rather than a participant. We call this group the audience.

Now, to be clear, the audience isn’t bad. It may contain people who don’t follow Jesus yet, or wounded people who need time and space to heal. There are many valid reasons why people are part of the audience.

The point of drawing the distinction isn’t to force decisions, but to be helpful data in influencing decisions.

When I was in Medicine Hat the church grew in attendence from around 80 people to around 180 people within a few years. Within that the church numbers grew from roughly 50 in the beginning to probably eighty later. The fruit was that we couldn’t pat ourselves on the back to much because while the church had grown, we really needed to invite the audience to become part of our community.

So for friend the worship pastor, does here gear their services toward the church or the audience? He gears toward the church.

Church and audience. Just a helpful question to ask while planning.

If anyone recognizes who I stole this from let me know.

I’m going to invite you to church

In my completely informal and non scientific study of people I know and work with and have come in contact with who have no church affiliation, poll data reveals the following troubling “fact”:

Most people have never been invited to church.

In retrospect this isn’t that surprising, because I haven’t invited most of these people to church, so why would I assume that someone else had? And I’m a pastor, for pete’s sake.

I can understand why this happens. You don’t want to come across as that pushy church guy, so you don’t ever bring it up. Your church is kind of weird, and the pastor makes really terrible puns, and he sometimes still likes to make everyone hold hands in the service. Also, we emerging folk like to point out that the worship service is not the whole of church, and we should best de-emphasize the worship gathering at every opportunity. Mr. Gallant is going to be there, and he’s still ticked off that you don’t use the King James anymore, and if he finds out that there is someone new there he’s going to want to know where they stand on seven day creation. And if your friend is single then Mrs. Klassen is already going to have them mated to one of the other singles. Altogether, a negative experience that is best avoided.

At least those are the excuses I’ve used. Maybe yours are different.

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m not going to make peoples’ decisions for them anymore. Church is still weird. I often make bad jokes. There are odd people there and people who don’t always have the best social skills, and we do strange stuff. Some of our language is different, but that’s us and that’s church. I figure people like to be invited to stuff. Even if they have no interest in ever actually going, people like to be included. It’s a way that we tell people we care about them. We ask them to participate in stuff we like and are passionate about. We share good news.

So, throwing caution to the wind, here goes…

I love Jesus, and I think that he is good news for the world, and because I love Jesus, I try to love the things Jesus loved, and one of those things is the Church. It’s weird and messed up and often wrong, but that’s who we are. Anyway, you wanna come to a church service with me? It’s going to be different and possibly uncomfortable, but it’s better than anything that’s on T.V. on Sunday mornings.

And we can go to Wendy’s after. Promise.

As of the last time I checked, I’m still alive

I’ve been on a blogging hiatus, or at least that’s what I’ll call it in retrospect. Mostly I’ve been tired and my brain hasn’t been functioning on a high enough level to share my thoughts with the world.

What has been encouraging is that there are still people who come to read stuff here. Not a tonne of people, but people nonetheless. That’s cool, thanks.

It seems that most of you are here for church planting stuff, more specifically Church Planting Sucks. While this thing is still more for my benefit than yours, I’ll try to write a little bit more about that.  If I can throw a little bit of hope out I’ll be more than happy to.

So, soon, something silly to get my feet back under me and back to the grind