Like the taut string of an archer’s bow, a bow with 50-pound pull, pastors repeatedly feel tension from two directions when it comes to outreach. The church tends the world and tends the household of faith. It reaches out to evangelize and reaches in to nurture.
There is the inevitable tension between budgeting for church maintenance and budgeting for outreach, between time spent with churchgoers and time spent with church non-goers, between targeting the uninvolved and targeting the faithful.
LEADERSHIP editors Brian Larson and Marshall Shelley invited four pastors to discuss the pull they’ve experienced.
-Wayne Gordon pastors Lawndale Community Church, a mostly black congregation in urban Chicago.
-Mike Marcey pastors Naperville Presbyterian Church in the mushrooming white-collar suburb of Naperville, Illinois.
-Doug Murren pastors Eastside Foursquare Church, a seeker-sensitive congregation in Kirkland, Washington.
-Bob Thune pastors Christ Community Church (formerly Omaha Gospel Tabernacle) in Omaha, Nebraska.
As you’ll see, these pastors, from widely different denominational and social settings, found that the tensions of outreach, like the archer’s bow, need not divide but can be part of what propels the arrow straight and sure.
Leadership: Can a church simultaneously focus on outreach and on meeting the needs of members? Or does one emphasis have to dominate?
Bob Thune: There’s a definite tendency to push it one way or the other, often in reaction to the other extreme. As I grew up, I saw this in churches. One evangelized from the pulpit week in and week out. People heard the gospel a lot but never were built up. The other extreme swung the pendulum, spending all their energy teaching and perfecting the saints, but they won few converts.
After a while I asked myself, Why does it have to be one or the other? Certainly the apostle Paul had a tremendous passion to see the saints mature, but he had equal passion to get the gospel out to those who hadn’t heard it. But in reality, because of human nature, it’s a tough pair to combine.
Mike Marcey: I think some of that tension comes from how we define maturity in Christ. Is it someone who has memorized lots of Bible verses? Who can distinguish predestination from foreknowledge? That’s not the pattern Jesus sketches for maturity. Rather, the mature believer is the person whose heart breaks for those outside the kingdom, the person who is eager to please God in every way.
I feel the need to consistently push the outreach button because Christians, left to their own devices, are going to get their own needs met; we turn inward.
So in our declarations of church vision and philosophy of ministry and in our preaching we talk about what’s needed to grow and mature, but we stress outreach.
Leadership: Recently we heard from a young woman who stopped going to her church’s singles ministry because she was uncomfortable being propositioned by men in the group, and she felt the church leaders were more concerned about making the unchurched feel included than they were in articulating Christian standards of behavior.
She raises a tough question: Can you reach the “unwashed” without getting yourself dirty? If you’re effective at bringing in outsiders, won’t insiders feel threatened, and won’t the holiness of our gatherings be compromised?
Wayne Gordon: On one occasion several people in our church came to me and said, “We were in the church gym watching the guys play basketball, and we heard some cussing down there.” They were upset about it.
A couple weeks later I brought it up in my sermon. I talked about how we get hung up on the small things and fail to see the broader issues. Then I told them Tony Campolo’s famous line: “Every night a quarter of the world’s population goes to bed hungry,” he says, “and you don’t give a shit.” He stops. And then he says, “The biggest tragedy is that most of you are more upset that I said ‘shit’ than that a quarter of the world’s population is going to bed hungry.”
Then I talked about the cussing in the gym. “I hope people cuss in our gym, because those are the kind of people who don’t know Christ. Our ceiling won’t fall down. Lightning won’t strike them. I hope we’re attracting those kind of people.”
Besides, a church that’s not doing outreach is dirty. A church that’s closed, that has circled the wagons and said, “We want to keep them out,” soon discovers that the people inside aren’t so hot either. Pride and selfishness and introversion grow. So “cleanliness” is a problem when you reach out, but I would rather take my chances with that problem than with those problems that come with a church that’s dying.
Thune: We can’t condone sin. God says, “Be holy as I am holy,” so we’ve got to be moving in that direction. The critical factor is whether the leadership recognizes what’s going on-for example, that the singles group is degenerating into a “meat market”-and addresses it.
Churches can get so concerned about growth and bringing people in that they don’t really care about the quality of life. There’s a tremendous emphasis on church growth in our country, and we can become growth minded just for growth’s sake. If all you care about is growth, you’ll gloss over a lot of things.
Marcey: Most pastors would not say, “We’re here to grow.” They would say, “We’re here to bring and include.” We want these people to feel welcome no matter their sexual practices. We would rather have them in the church than outside the church. Here they have a chance to hear the gospel.
A young woman certainly has the right not to be confronted by guys on the prowl. But I also feel that guys on the prowl have a right to experience a warm, accepting Christian atmosphere that also presents the gospel.
Doug Murren: A leader has to monitor things, because at some point you can cease developing disciples; the degree of acceptance tips the balance in the wrong direction.
For example, we just canceled a weekly Friday night singles’ service, changing it to a quarterly event and developing some small groups. We felt we could not insure a strong spiritual dynamic week after week. We had to slow up a bit and develop more leaders.
I am accused of tolerating sin. I admit that we have a lot of people who are discovering their way morally, but actually I’m more concerned with doctrinal slippage, because we’re in a hot spot for the New Age Movement.
A dentist, a recovering alcoholic, had been at our church for eight months. I thought he was walking with Christ: we had baptized him; he would lift his hands in worship. But after one service, he told me, “There is one problem with this church. A lot more people would come, but all you talk about is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. There are a lot of people really high on Jesus that come here.”
I realized that he had been exposed to Christ, but it just hadn’t registered with him.
Because of situations like his, every once in a while I deliberately see how many people I can blow out the door. Periodically I preach about the demands of Christ on their money. Or I’ll tell them, “Hey, if you’re sleeping with somebody other than your wife, you aren’t going to make it. Read 1 Corinthians 6. I sure love you, but you are not going to make it.”
Leadership: How do you go about convincing the congregation they need to give up their comfort zone to allow the church to reach out?
Gordon: There’s a couple of things we’ve tried to do. One is to help them to see how much God cares about lost people, preaching from passages like Luke 15.
Second, we appeal to their sense of fairness. I say, “If you were on the outside, if you didn’t have eternal life, if you were on your way to hell, would you want somebody to stretch for you? Would you want someone to change for your sake, put up with the mess of your life for as long as they had to, to get you into the family of God?”
Third, we tell people that the longer they’ve been a Christian, the longer they’ve been on the inside, the easier it is to become exclusive.
Marcey: You have to overcome the initial inertia. It’s difficult when you’ve primarily got people who have been Christians a long time, who have experienced upward lift. You talk to them about lifestyle evangelism, but they don’t know any non-Christians to impact with their lifestyle.
Murren: I listen to people’s objections. If a young woman told me, “I’m getting hit on at the singles meeting,” that is a valid objection. We would deal with that frankly and forthrightly. But if people’s objection is strictly cultural-they don’t like rock ‘n’ roll music, drama, wild video stuff-I can become pretty nasty, because one of the greatest threats to a church is the person who has cultural objections about how you’re doing outreach.
Our church was threatened in this way when we moved into our new facility. We had been in a dinky, overcrowded, tacky building. As soon as we moved to the new building with all the accoutrements, we had an influx of “churched” people who wanted to take advantage of our programs.
They started to affect our church style of ministry which is less traditional and more culturally sensitive. They knew what a church was, and they weren’t comfortable with “church” being redefined. With those people I was blunt: “If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from. If God has called you here, then you’ll like our philosophy of ministry. If you’re questioning the culture of this church, it’s a sign you aren’t supposed to be here.”
Such people usually don’t mean to cause problems. They really think God likes the same kind of music they do. In this case, these people couldn’t understand why I would use sermon illustrations from movies. It takes so long to uneducate people that it’s hardly worth the effort.
I admit to crowding the line. I teach our church regularly that if we’re going to do outreach, we’re going to have to be innovative. When you’re creative, occasionally you go over the line.
But I had the privilege of founding the church. I would probably take an entirely different approach if I took an existing church. I would assume that I’m going to spend years getting people to think with me
Leadership: When you appeal to the needs of outsiders, you appeal to their consumer instincts. If you’re successful, somehow you’ve got to transform consumers into producers. That’s like turning the Queen Elizabeth. How do you do it?
Gordon: It may sound like circular reasoning, but that’s the very reason I think we have to keep pushing outreach. The natural tendency is to adopt the club mentality. We’ve had to go through that. People were meeting just their own needs, acting like sponges. That’s why our membership commitment requires people to be involved in outreach.
Murren: I don’t think that can be handled well in a large setting, where you have a lot of visitors. We’ve designed courses that move people in stages through this change in values. In Church 101 we explain our philosophy of ministry. If I lead someone to Christ, I would personally take him to Church 101. After six weeks, I’d make sure he got to Church 201. Then we’d want to get him in a small group.
Leadership: Have you found that specific evangelistic programs (Evangelism Explosion, visitation, literature distribution, etc.) help or hinder people’s motivation to reach out?
Thune: Programs have a place. How else do you go about training people to share the gospel? Some people are naturals for evangelism, and they’re going to do it whether you have programs or not. But the unnaturals need help. So we find Evangelism Explosion to be helpful as a way of training people to share the gospel. We don’t expect everyone who goes through it to stay in it, but at least they get training.
Evangelism Explosion was never meant to be the be-all and end-all of evangelism-we certainly don’t view it that way but it has proven to be a beneficial and fruitful training vehicle. Our people learn the content of the gospel and get some experience sharing it with people.
I think that many of the church growth ideas, especially as they relate to marketing strategy, take a high degree of understanding and sophistication. A program like Evangelism Explosion helps because it gives a track to run on. Churches can take any of their people through it, no matter what their gifting or expertise, and see solid evangelism being done.
Marcey: My son and I have always fished together, but recently we picked up fly-fishing. We love it. We found out that you have to study what kind of fly catches each fish. Sometimes we get out to the water, and we try a wet fly. Sometimes we use a dry fly. If we don’t catch anything, we keep trying different flies, sometimes going through the whole tackle box until we find the right one. When bait-fishing, sometimes we’ll use two or three poles at the same time, one with a bobber, one with weights to take the bait to the river bed.
We do the same thing in our church. Among other things, we have run “The Phone’s for You” campaign, which brought in a good group of people. We sponsored a program called “The Gathering of Men,” which mobilizes men to reach out to other men. It’s hard for me to find a program I don’t like.
We want to catch fish. So, what works? If it’s not working, throw it away and try something else.
Murren: Outreach events and programs benefit a church far beyond the immediate activity. For one, people get it in their minds that we should regularly include outsiders in our lives. It keeps outreach consciousness strong, so I don’t have to harangue people to get out into the highways and byways.
Actually every program in our church-women’s Bible studies, home groups-has an outreach component. If a group can’t show measurable statistics of unchurched people coming in, we say, “This thing isn’t going to be around much longer. Outreach is what this is for.”
Leadership: Do you encourage people to reach out individually in the community, for instance through their involvement in PTA, Little League, and Rotary? Or do you find the church’s organized evangelistic efforts more productive?
Marcey: If you want to have an outreach church, you have to make heroes of people who minister outside the church’s programs. Too often, if someone is active in our evangelism program, we say, “Look at what he is doing.” But if someone else is reaching their friends through a neighborhood Bible study, we think, “How can we get her more involved in the ministry of the church?”
I caught myself making this mistake with one woman in our church who is a fairly new Christian. I chart the involvement of our people, and one day in a staff meeting as I went down the list, I noticed that she wasn’t in any ministry. “What’s the problem here?” I asked. “Why can’t we get her involved in something?”
Somebody said, “Well, she’s got this Bible study going in her neighborhood, and she keeps coming into the office and saying, ‘Help me. Give me some materials. What can I do?’ “
I found out she is doing a great job, but my initial reaction was to incorporate her ministry under our umbrella.
Leadership: Many people come to church with deep hurts (backgrounds of addiction, abuse, or brokenness). How long do you say, “Come and be healed,” and when do you say, “It’s time you take some responsibility in the church”?
Gordon: I think the best way to be helped is to help. I get people involved in serving immediately. One of our women was struggling with drug addiction and alcoholism; she couldn’t get a job and lived on welfare. When she came to us, I immediately asked her to work daily as a volunteer at church, and I told her, “I want you to wear a dress every day.”
Almost overnight her demeanor changed. She gained some pride. She stopped drinking. She’s in a Methadone program for her heroine. Work made her feel significant, gave her some dignity.
You can’t make this person a Sunday school teacher, but you find something they can do right away, whether it’s folding clothes for distribution or sweeping the church.
Marcey: We tell people, “The only way to find the abundant life Jesus described is to be involved in worship, fellowship, learning, and ministry; you don’t pick and choose one or two. Depending upon what’s happening in your life, you may change the percentages a little.”
Thune: There’s got to be balance. Too often I’ve seen people pushed into ministry without any competence or preparation. We’re short of workers, a warm body comes in, and before they know it we put them to work. But they’re saying, “I’m not ready for this. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Leadership: In what creative ways have your churches involved people in outreach?
Murren: Before mentioning specific creative programs, let me note how many of our programs are born. We don’t just think them up out of the blue. This phrase will probably grate on some people, but the church is often product driven (focusing on what it has to offer) rather than market driven (focusing on the community’s needs), and that’s a mistake when it comes to outreach.
You can’t just decide to be an outreach church. You’ve got to ask the questions, “Why does the church exist?” and specifically, “Why does the church in our location exist?” even if that yields only one contrast to the other churches in the community.
Before reaching out to your community you need to love that community, understand that community, and then ask yourself the hard question, “Am I able to reach this community?” or “What will have to change about me for that to happen?”
We analyze our community over and over and over-more than we do ourselves. We analyze it demographically and psychographically. We’ve found out, for instance, that there are 10,000 single moms in our community, within five miles of us. That radically changed how we addressed outreach.
As a result we started “M.O.M.s and Moppets,” a program that enables parents to get a break during the day. We budgeted money, developed parenting classes for single moms, and offered a program to help women repair or buy used cars. We also began deliberately to include single moms in our leadership. I made certain we had a single mother on our council. We worked hard to develop our own understanding and empathy for single moms. We interviewed dozens of them to get their heartbeat.
There are several research organizations that can help churches get information on their communities. We have used CIDS in Costa Mesa, California. We have bought research data from McDonald’s; we just called their regional headquarters and asked for the research department. You can buy most generalized studies for $300-$500. We also periodically hire a secular sociologist, because I find they’re not slanted toward what they think we want to know. Such organizations give data on the values and belief structures of people in your area.
Gordon: Sometimes the church reaches out creatively by just being the church. We don’t have a baptistry in our building, so we go to Lake Michigan and baptize at a public beach. It’s those Christmas baptisms that are tough. (Laughter)
We usually have fifty or sixty people that come down to the beach with us, and five to ten are baptized. We sing songs; we pray; we hold church right in the midst of the crowds. People come up and say, “What’s going on here?” and our people get into conversations with them. Then we move over to a nearby lawn and have a Communion service. People will usually come and watch this as well.
We tend to take the activities of the church, which with Christ were public, and confine them within the four walls of our buildings. The world never sees what the church is all about.
Murren: Creative programs must enhance the overall consciousness of the church toward outreach. And you have to plan from the get-go a way to get out. Otherwise you eventually spend a bunch of energy keeping something alive that God ceased to be a part of years earlier.
And there’s nothing wrong with failing. A lot of people won’t even try something out of fear of failing. Often people paint themselves into a corner when at the start they say, “God told me to do this.” If things don’t work out, it embarrasses everybody. So we tell our people not to say, “God said.” Just try it, and if it works, then we’ll say he did it.
You can’t sustain outreach if you think you can be both effective and problem free. If you’re going to reach out, you’re going to have problems constantly. Our goal is not to create a problem-free environment; it’s to be doing stuff.
Leadership: Even among pastors of growing churches, we sense a frustration: “I wish my people were doing more in evangelism.” Do you share that?
Thune: I wouldn’t say I’m frustrated, but I’m certainly not satisfied.
Our church has always been missions minded, heavily involved in overseas work, as well as concerned with outreach in our community, but a couple things detrimental to outreach happen as you grow.
First, you have to deal with the appearance of success. You can’t start saying to yourself, “Hey, we have a great thing going here. There’s a lot of people coming and the church is big.” If you do, you get complacent.
Second, there are the problems that come from dealing with a large mass of people. People get a bit weary and dulled by the crowds and they start saying, “Why do we want to grow any bigger?”
Third, there’s a tendency to compare yourself favorably to other churches or to your own history. People say, “We’ve grown a lot, and we’re still growing. Why should we be concerned about outreach?”
But then I look at the community and the need that’s there.
Murren: Our people’s willingness to participate in outreach has exceeded our ability to develop ways for that to happen.
We had the distinct advantage of pioneering a church, and we built in the concept: “We exist for missions.” That has allowed me, without appearing reactionary, to assault one of the American paragons of church life: that the Christian is a consumer of religious commodities, and that’s why he comes to church. In our philosophy of ministry classes, in my sermons, we state over and over again that the church exists primarily for missions. We’ve been able to create an outreach environment largely because there was no pre-existent consumer environment.
Gordon: Overall I feel good about our people’s level of involvement, and I think I know why: I make sure that people own the outreach of our church. It’s not owned by me.
For example, when we had fifteen people, we sat in a room about the size of a hotel room, had a chalk board up, and said, “We believe God wants us to obey the second greatest commandment: love your neighbor as yourself.” So we wrote on the chalk board, “What are the needs of the community?” We soon listed thirty or forty things.
Then we said, “Is there anything on that list we can do?” There was nothing that the fifteen of us could do. We couldn’t start a medical clinic, for instance. In fact, we’re still trying to get everything done that was on that first list in 1978.
But we did hit on something. One of the mothers had put up on the list: “Start a laundromat,” because she was afraid to go to the neighborhood laundromat. I never would have had that idea. One person said, “Maybe we can get a washer and dryer and put them in the church.” (We were in an old storefront at the time.)
I said, “That’s a good idea. Maybe we can. Let’s pray about it.”
About a month later somebody that lived in the suburbs called and said, “We’re changing the color scheme in our utility room. We’ve got an avocado washer and dryer, and we’re not going to use it anymore. It’s in perfect shape. Would you want it?”
So that was our answer. We moved them in, and we started our laundromat. The church owned that. It wasn’t my idea; it was the people’s.
Leadership: What’s a realistic level of outreach to expect? When can a pastor be satisfied?
Gordon: I expect everyone to be involved in outreach in whatever capacity that God has given. We teach that some people are plowers; they’re out there getting the soil ready. They may never plant, but they’re a part of evangelism. They help their neighbors, taking the lady who doesn’t have a car to the grocery store and shopping together-relationship building. I teach our people never to feel guilty if they don’t use the name of Jesus. Love people and be sensitive.
Then there are some who plant the seed. They share some of the message of Christ.
Third, there are cultivators. After people have heard the gospel, cultivators weed the soil, put on fertilizer, and water the seed. They live the Christian life and by their example make it attractive.
Finally, there are the reapers, who may only do something as simple as asking, “Have you ever made a commitment to Christ?”
If you’ve got that view of evangelism, there’s no reason that 100 percent of Christians shouldn’t be involved.
Murren: I am reluctant to publicly push the church to do outreach. We’d rather develop an environment in which outreach is a natural product. I think that no matter what program you have, no matter how you train people, 15 to 20 percent will be leading people to Jesus, and that’s the best you’ll ever do. It’s just something that’s naturally in the body of Christ. The efforts to equip people for evangelism are probably worth it, but the number of hard-core evangelists is limited.
My people are cynical about leadership. They don’t want to be part of achieving any leader’s goals. If they perceive that you want them to do evangelism so the church will grow, they won’t have any part of it. They want leaders to affirm their ego needs. You can almost see them sneer if you even get close to suggesting what could happen numerically if we evangelize.
So I hardly ever use the word evangelism. I use the phrase bringing and including.
Jesus didn’t do evangelism; he just included people in his life and brought them to God. Anybody can include other people in their life. If Christ is in your life and you include others, they’ll find him.
In order to foster an environment of bringing and including, we design our Sunday morning services to be highly seeker/visitor/unchurched sensitive. We explain everything. We’re a charismatic church, but we don’t do a lot of traditional charismatic things. I explain the gospel every week in all kinds of creative and non-religious terms. We create an environment where people can bring people and know they aren’t going to get blasted. Most Christians are comfortable inviting others to come to a meeting where they will be dealt with gently.
This approach is more process oriented. I baptized a young woman the other day who came for two years before she accepted Christ.
Gordon: I think we have to be careful about what we’re satisfied with. When Paul and Barnabas were commissioned in Jerusalem to go to the Gentiles with the gospel, the apostles requested that they make sure to do one thing. In Galatians 2:10 Paul recalls, “All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor.” Paul describes that as “the very thing I was eager to do.”
Whenever we do outreach, we need to make sure we’re thinking of the poor, the hurting, the distraught, the down-and-out person in our community. When we do that, our outreach becomes what God fiercely desires.
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