What Attracts People to the Church?
From The Forum Magazine, Spring 2013 - view the full issue here
Last week one of our attendees, baptized a few months ago, sent this email to our Pastor of Hospitality:
Hi… This morning I brought my brother and a young friend of ours to church. The topic was perfect. My brother is having surgery this week. He has a hard time meeting people, so I didn’t introduce you. He’s not been to church in more than thirty years and I was a little nervous to bring him. But he wants to come back!!!! I just wanted you and the church to know ...
An email like that is music to our ears. Staff people and elders read it and want to dance around the church building. The gospel is making a difference. The church is truly “being the church.” Folks are daring to bring their friends. What good news! (Of course, I could also provide emails from people leaving our church for the most flimsy reasons, but that’s another topic.)
Our question here is how can church leaders (and all Christians) help make such sentiments a regular part of church life? To the extent that our actions help folks along their spiritual path, what can we do? After twenty years in a church plant, and as part of a cluster of church plants, we are profoundly aware that no formula exists. We doubt easy answers. But over the decades we’ve found some things that work.
To sum it up in one statement, we work to build a church-wide missionary mindset. Lesslie Newbigin was born a Brit and then spent forty years as a missionary to India. Returning to Britain, he found it a “mission field” much like India. In his book Gospel in a Pluralist Society he asks, “How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross?” He continues, “The only answer, the hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.” Countless activities are important, he believes, but they “have power to accomplish their purpose only as they are rooted in, and lead back to a believing community.” Jesus, he says, “did not write a book, but formed a community” (p. 227).
In this cynical world that is skeptical of Christians who want to “convert them,” he encourages congregations to live the gospel. This is the missionary mindset we’ve found so helpful. A community living the gospel truth doesn’t need hype or propaganda. We can speak honestly, our conversations shaped by the “modesty, sobriety, and realism which are proper to a disciple of Jesus” (p. 229).
How might we live out a church-wide missionary mindset? One way is to acknowledge the presence of spiritual novices and skeptics in our worship services. Consider a preacher’s prayer before the sermon, regularly called the “prayer of illumination.” Often that prayer is oriented around the preacher. I’ve frequently heard, and prayed, a prayer like: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing and acceptable in your sight.” Those beautiful words are from Psalm 19. But what if the orientation of the pre-sermon prayer shifted from the preacher to the spiritual skeptics present? Imagine such a renewed prayer of illumination as a ship’s rudder steering the entire sermon toward the deep grace of hospitality. Fred Harrell, Senior Pastor of City Church San Francisco, recently prayed this before a sermon:
Gracious God, We ask now that you would meet us here. We ask that you would meet us in the midst of our questions, in the midst of our anxiety, in the midst of our depression, and in the midst of our fog. Meet us in the midst of our poverty and affluence, joy and pain. Meet us in the midst of all of our glory and in our shattered brokenness. Meet us in those paradoxes and contradictions of our life. Help us to believe that you understand and see us completely and your response is always to move towards us in restoring, in redeeming, and in healing love. And help us to see that you’ve done this and are doing this now through the person and work of your son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
Clearly his prayer isn’t only for the spiritually curious. Echoing the tone and language of the psalter, it gives veteran churchgoers permission, even an invitation, to ponder a sermon amidst the pain and doubt they bring to church.
Consider another example from a church liturgy. In an extended series on the book of Ephesians we came to the famous text on marriage, 5:21-33. We wondered how we might, as a key part of the service, pray for married and single people in our church. Our first draft of the liturgy included a prayer drawn from words of thoughtful believers:
God who loves us forever, hear our prayer. In your faithfulness, you have brought us together to be one family—the family of God. Teach us to serve Christ together in Christian community. God who loves us forever, hear our prayer. Single for a time or a life, devoted to the work of God, help us to offer our love and service to the building of the kingdom. God who loves us forever, hear our prayer. Married, in relationships of lifelong loyalty, may we offer our lives to the same work: building the kingdom ...
That text is wise. Even profound. But how do those words sound to a person who strayed into a church building for the first time in a decade? As a confession of faith, these words sing. But we wanted to offer a prayer that the brother of our emailing friend might offer. Here’s an excerpt of the prayer we used that day:
God, who loves us forever, hear our prayer. We thank you for the beautiful gift of marriage—for bringing people together in relationships of lifelong loyalty to share life together, to encourage each other, and to work together to serve you. We pray for all those who are married—whether they’ve been married months, years, or decades. May they share life together with joy, encouraging and supporting each other. God, who loves us forever, hear our prayer. We also pray for those who are not yet married, but are dating or considering marriage. Give them discernment in their relationships. May they honor each other and you in their thoughts and actions. God, who loves us forever, hear our prayer. And for those who are single, bring fulfillment in the relationships they have in community. Give them wisdom to neither over-value nor under-value marriage. God, who loves us forever, hear our prayer … We say thank you for the gift of marriage, but we also lament—we mourn the brokenness we see in our relationships. For those who are married but are struggling …
The differences are subtle, but crucial to creating a gospel-focused, missionary mindset. In a hundred ways, through our worship services, lobby conversations, and printed or Internet materials, we send signals about who is welcome and who is ignored. We don’t want or need to “dumb down” the gospel; rather, in the spirit of the gospel we want to say, “Jesus offers you grace.”
Some may argue, “But there are no spiritual novices in our church. Why should we bother to speak as if they are present?” One way forward is to imagine that in every empty seat or pew there sits a spiritual novice. When I was pastor of a church in a small town in Minnesota, we began praying for and talking as if spiritual novices were there for more than two years before any actually came. But in the end, they did!
This same hospitality works in sermons. One Saturday, during a recent “Gospel Preaching” seminary course taught in Sacramento, students presented the sermon they would preach in a church plant the following morning. One student’s assigned text was Ephesians 4:28, “Those who are stealing must steal no longer.” During her (very fine) sermon she said, “None of us here are thieves, but let’s talk about stealing because the text does. …” When evaluating her sermon later, listeners suggested she might rephrase that section. After all, we pointed out, the Heidelberg Catechism speaks as if we are all prone to steal (Q&A 110). Being a teachable and clever Calvin Seminary student, she took our advice. Preaching her revised sermon in church the following day she began that section, “We are all ‘thieves …’”
After the service a woman offered the seminarian her heartfelt, tearful thanks for creating room in church for a thief like herself. The sermon’s revised words demolished the unintended, but too-frequent moral divide we create separating “good people” and “bad people.” Its renewed language presented, in the spirit of the gospel, ways for all those present to find grace.
A congregation-wide missionary mindset can refresh every part of church life. I’ve offered a few simple worship-focused examples to begin a conversation you might have in a small group or council room. Every congregation can find ways, custom to them, to live the gospel’s call to profound hospitality.
A few weeks ago I met with a couple that has been attending our church for the past year. She has cancer. Again. And they wanted to talk with me about pain and suffering. It turns out it had been fifty years since she attended church regularly. She stopped going after her brother died of leukemia at four years old. “We love coming here,” they told me, “because your church is real.” Behind the scenes we church leaders might say their evaluation is a result of a “missionary mindset.”
(Kevin Adams, Ministry Partner Professor)
