Issue 4 – My Five Greatest Discoveries

 

Dear Rob

You asked what I’ve learned about ‘church’ over the years – so here’s a quick summary.

The ‘Church’ Challenge

I’ve learned many things – but they came into sharp focus when I prepared a Sunday afternoon talk for some leaders recently.

They lead a church that’s been growing for a number of years as people come to faith in Jesus. So it’s becoming one of the larger Salvation Army churches in New Zealand.

The leaders took the first hour to share their six greatest discoveries about ‘doing church’ – which I passed on in the November 27 War Cry. Then I shared the five greatest discoveries I’ve made in my 20-year journey with the New Zealand Church. Here’s an expanded version of what I said.

1. We’ve got to win on Sunday mornings – when most churches meet.

I’ve written a lot about this in recent years. But briefly, the issues are these.

• The average New Zealand church just has one main church service a week – on Sunday morning. Some churches also have a special focus service during the week for a smaller group of people, or an occasional special event on Sunday evening; but their main weekly service is on Sunday morning. So if we don’t win here, we can’t win anywhere. Put simply, if the people we’re trying to reach won’t attend our services, we simply cannot take them through to membership and maturity. We win here, or we don’t win anywhere. It’s where the above church is winning.
• Most of our Sunday morning services focus on Christians, who’ve already come to faith – many a long time ago. So there’s little if any attempt to connect with the newer, less churched attenders. That is to say, we’re still in 1960s maintenance mode, doing church for those who’ve already decided to follow Jesus; and we haven’t yet moved to mission mode where we include the less churched attenders in our planning and preparation. So as denominational statistics have reminded us for decades, we never get the breakthrough we yearn for because we’re still in maintenance mode.
• But with a little focused preparation and planning, and doing things in a focused way on the day, we can minister to both groups in the same service. It’s what a friend does who leads one of the largest churches in New Zealand – most of their many converts come out of the morning services where he majors on biblical preaching. It was the same in the church in Corinth in New Testament times; 1 Corinthians 14:23-24 makes it very plain that, believers, unbelievers and seekers (or inquirers, as in the NIV margin or text note) were attending the services in this great pagan city of 650,00 people.

However good we may be at doing other things, if we don’t win here we can’t win anywhere – because the people we’re trying to reach won’t buy into our ‘church’ product. We’ve got to win on Sundays!

2. We’ve got to provide enough seating and parking for the people we’re trying to reach – because if we don’t, those difficulties will short circuit the very mission things we’re trying to do.

I remember going to preach at a fine, medium-sized church in a provincial city, and noticed that when the church was full soon after starting time, the people on the door went and sat down. So for the next few minutes, I became the usher, and tried to squeeze the last people into the tiniest spaces – because up till then, the church wouldn’t move into two services (you can guess what I shared with the leaders over lunch!). So there wasn’t any point trying to get any more people along; they wouldn’t fit in!

And I remember an elder of a church I know very well telling me about the day he watched people driving into the full car park of this medium sized church, then driving out and away because there weren’t any parks left in the park or on the street. Again, there wasn’t any point trying to get new people along because they couldn’t get parking.

But adequate seating and parking isn’t just a larger church problem. Certainly seating isn’t usually an issue in smaller churches – although some of our smaller church buildings are very small and restrictive; a little growth and they’re full.

However, adequate parking is quite often a smaller church problem – even in provincial cities. I quite often see churches with parking for five, ten or just twenty car parks with yellow no-parking lines on at least one street nearby. So it makes mission that much more difficult.

Fortunately, many parking problems can be solved with a bit of Kiwi ingenuity – using available commercial parking nearby, intentional car pooling of regular attenders, the most committed members parking well down the street to free up the few available parks – and even moving into multiple services as some smaller churches do when seating or parking is an issue. When we’re intentional, there’s usually a way through.

Bill Hybels first alerted me to this principle several years ago, when he told us they’d discovered the importance of ‘empty seats [and parks] at optimal inviting [and attending] hours.’ So, however we do it, we’ve got to provide enough seating and parking for the people we’re trying to reach.

3. We’ve got to win at vision casting – especially in our services.

Many New Zealand churches live out their entire corporate lives in a vision wilderness – with little or no thought about where they might go in the future, or how they might get there. So vision is never mentioned at church, at leaders meetings, or in conversations. And these churches never grow.

But vision is the stuff that ‘reborn’ churches are made of – because ‘vision is a picture of the future that produces passion in you’ (Hybels); or as Warren Bennis put it, ‘A vision is a target that beckons.’

However, vision dies in 30 days, so it will never take us anywhere unless we weave it into our main services – where our largest gatherings of people take place. The above ‘large church friend’ does five minutes vision casting at all morning services and writes it into his sermons or messages, to keep their church dream alive in people’s hearts.

So we’ve got to win at vision casting – because it’s through vision casting that we create a Christian counter culture, as Martin Luther King did before us. Churches die without dreams; great dreams, frequently cast, take churches to great futures. The 21st century belongs to churches with dreams!

4. We’ve got to win at small groups – because whatever else small groups do, they shut the back door through which many partly connected people leave.

I discussed the small group question at some length in World Vision Leadership Letter 167 so I just add these four further comments.

• Small groups are important because of the relationships that are formed in small group life – people who are close to others in the same church rarely leave through the back door.
• If we haven’t moved into small groups yet, we can start with a short-term course, like the 40 Days of Purpose, and near the end of the course encourage people to continue meeting in small groups. A special focus, like the 40 Days of Purpose, helps us start well – and that’s the first step to winning.
• As I mentioned in Letter 167, we can run small groups in different ways, as the minister I mentioned on p. 4, commented. He defined a small group as ‘a group of people who meet regularly in face-to-face relationships as a sub-unit of the fellowship of …. Church in which there is at least one person or a couple who care deeply for the needs of the people in the group.’ That’s a useful starting point for capturing what small group dynamics are about – which we can fill it out as we wish.
• Greenlane Christian Centre has taken small group ministry further than most, by adding twice yearly pastoral visits to individuals in the groups – and you can read about this additional dynamic on p. 2 of World Vision Letter 179. If I led a church, I’d do the same.

Small Groups are a critical part of dynamic church life. They bond a collection of disconnected people into caring ‘families’. They encourage personal growth and discipleship. They provide basic pastoral care for those attending and shut the back door through which many people would otherwise leave. No healthy church can do without them.

5. Finally, to tie it all together and make all this happen, we’ve got to put a ‘mission wash’ through our entire operation – putting our strokes where we get greatest mission traction, and cutting back or abandoning areas that give us mission slippage.

Churches exist to make disciples; that’s their trade and calling. But over time, the founders’ mission dreams can get overlaid with decades of tradition and local church culture so they no longer function as churches. So the longer a church has been going, the more it needs to put a mission wash through everything so it again ‘delivers the goods’ for the Kingdom of God – as the founders dreamed.

A non-discipling church is a contradiction of terms. So when churches cease to make disciples, the only way to get back into the discipling ‘groove’ is to put a mission wash through the church’s entire operation so it again becomes the discipling agency God intended. Patching the church up with minor tweaking won’t make any difference. The church itself must first be reborn if it is to become a growing fellowship of the reborn – and relaunching a church into mission isn’t as hard as some may think.

That’s the most recent discovery I’ve made in my journey.

The Five Great Discoveries

But to be sure we’re on the right track, consider what happens when we don’t win in these five areas.

When we don’t win on Sunday mornings, attendances decline till finally churches close their doors – as hundreds have done in the past and many will in the future. When we don’t provide enough seating and parking (perhaps after hours of deliberation), members lose their mission edge and people interested in attending turn to other churches. When we don’t win at vision casting, churches lose their way, and finally succumb to the inevitable and close their doors. When we don’t win at small groups, our back door remains wide open, so that no matter how many people come in through the front door, as many leave by the back door. And when we don’t put a mission wash through our church’s operation, we never realise how far it may have wandered from God’s ideal for a church – nor what change in direction may bring it again into the most fruitful days of its ministry.

But win in these five areas, Rob, and the future is yours. And may God bless you as you now go forward to your new church dream.

Goodbye.
 
Gordon Miller
Church Growth & Development Consultant

For discussion at Leaders’ Meetings

• Are we winning on Sunday mornings – and what steps do we now need to take to be more effective?
• Have we enough seating and parking to do mission effectively – and if we haven’t, how could we provide enough?
• Are we winning at vision casting in our service – and if we’re not, how will we now do it?
• Are we winning at small groups – and if not, what steps will we now take to make sure we do win?
• Have we put a mission wash though our church operation recently – and if we haven’t, when and how will we do this?

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