Last week I wrote about Pipelines, Pathways And The Church’s Supply Chain Crisis.
It wasn’t about computer chips, potato chips, toilet tissue or gasoline, it was about the lack of new attendees, and much more importantly, new converts to Christ, coming in our church doors. This paragraph was the heart of the post:
Even in churches where we have great systems, pathways or pipelines for moving people from conversion to leadership, we don’t have much “product” coming in the front-end of the system. We know we’re supposed to make disciples – devoted followers of Jesus – out of the raw material of lost people (including adults), but the new attendees and new converts just aren’t showing up.
Here are two more quick thoughts from last week: (1) Churches that have emphasized the attractional method – pulling out all the stops to get people in the doors on Sundays – are frustrated because lost and/or unchurched people are not showing up, and (2) Churches that have worked hard at crafting comprehensive, disciple-making pathways (“Simple” or otherwise) are frustrated because they don’t have new converts coming into their systems.
I’ll let you return to that post for more detail on that.
But I promised that we would return to the subject with some suggestions for reversing the supply chain crisis, so here they are:
(1) Prayer can be re-directed from “outer man” needs (Aunt Lucy’s angina) to “inner man” needs (Lucy doesn’t have Jesus as her Savior). It takes concerted effort to get folks “praying our priorities” (we are missionary organizations, not medical organizations) but it can be done. In the Book of Acts, prayer was for boldness, not protection.
(2) Personal evangelism is more important than ever. Many of our favorite evangelistic methods don’t work anymore. I’ll let your group compile the list. Yes, this is frustrating! However, I believe that personal, lifestyle evangelism works as well or better than ever. Why? Because everyone is frustrated, and confused, and discouraged, and People say they don’t trust the church and they don’t like Christians, but if you live like a real Christian among them and you love them, they confess that they do like you, because you are different. They won’t listen to the preachers on television and they won’t immediately come to your church, but if you listen to them, eventually, they will listen to you.
(3) Personal evangelism can be re-inserted into our discipleship paradigms. In the New Testament, sharing one’s faith was a normal – and vital – part of the Christian life (Acts 8:4, Philemon 6). In the Navigator’s famous “wheel” diagram, evangelism is one of six basic elements of a balanced Christian life.
Why did this happen? Very simply, most of us find personal evangelism to be excruciatingly difficult. We would rather get root canals than to get serious about Jesus with our co-workers or neighbors. It’s so much easier to “work a program” at our church. It’s so muchg easier to love believers than unbelievers. It’s so much easier to work with lost children than it is to work with their parents.
Those of us who have opportunities through the normal course of our lives to rub shoulders with non-Christians need to use those opportunities. Those of us – like pastors and many Christian retirees – who aren’t normally in close contact with non-Christians, need to go way out of our way, if necessary, to develop relationships with people who need Christ.
(4) We can un-clutter our church programming. Here’s a new question I’m asking during church assessments: “Are you using your ‘busyness’ at church to excuse the fact that you’re not sharing the gospel with lost people?” It’s not an artful question but I think you get the point. If we’re so busy with church that we have to rush past the victim lying beside the road (Luke 10:25-37), we’re too busy. Let’s unclutter our programs and free up our people – whether they resist the idea or not – to return to being the church’s best “program.”
(5) We can continue to offer attractive church services and enjoyable evangelistic (or pre-evangelistic) events. Here’s the change from the past: Many churches work hard at making Sunday mornings “seeker friendly” for seekers who don’t come. Other churches work hard at creating fun evangelistic events that unchurched people don’t attend. In 2022 it must be made clear that unbelievers will only come when their good friends invite them; they won’t come on their own. Nada. Won’t happen.
(6) A good web site really is important. I look at a lot of web sites. Most are, ah, not so good. Some are awful. Do you know that there are ministries which do great web sites for churches for bargain basement prices? It needs to look nice, be written well, and above all, it must be accurate. I’m not sure you should put your services on it (or on Facebook or YouTube) unless you can produce the videos unusually well. It’s probably better to pay someone to put one service on your site, professionally recorded so it looks and sounds great, than to have regular Sunday services produced badly. Unchurched people may want to take a look at your services before showing up, but it won’t work well if they have to suffer through poor production quality.
Reaching the lost required an incredible act of adaption and a literal, terrible death on the part of our Savior (Philippians 2:5-11). Solving our supply chain crisis will require “death to self” on our part, as the Apostle Paul modeled in I Corinthians 9:19-23. We have been called to this and by God’s grace we can do it.
