If ever anyone was destined to lead a big church, it is Andy Stanley. The son of Charles Stanley, Andy grew up with firsthand exposure to his dad's ministry at First Baptist Church of Atlanta.
Early on, it was clear that the younger Stanley had inherited a gift for communicating. After graduating from Dallas Seminary, he served as youth pastor at First Baptist for 10 years and had regular opportunities in the pulpit.
In 1995, Stanley and a handful of others launched North Point Community Church. Unable to find a permanent meeting place for three years, the church met every other Sunday evening at different locations. When the 1996 Olympics came to town, the church couldn't meet for nine weeks because its usual gathering spots were booked. Still, the church grew. In September 1998, North Point's 1,500 attenders moved into an impressive, 110,000-square foot building in Alpharetta, a growing suburb north of Atlanta.
Today, more than 5,000 people attend North Point's two Sunday morning services and another 2,000-plus singles meet on Tuesday nights. Editors Marshall Shelley and Edward Gilbreath visited North Point to ask Stanley, 41, about preaching to contemporary audiences comprised of both skittish seekers and mature believers.
A casual observer might assume North Point is rather homogeneous. Is it?
From time to time people will say about us, "Everybody's white. Everybody's young." Our church reflects our location.
We aim at two distinct groups: (1) mature believers who are concerned about evangelism, and (2) people who grew up in church but drifted away. We have a lot of people who left the church after high school and during college. Now they're getting married, or they're in their twenties and life is empty, and they're giving church another try.
How conscious are you of the diverse personal situations represented among your listeners on Sunday morning?
I'm very aware. I'm a relational person. When a member introduces me to a visitor and then whispers to me, "You know, he's not a believer" or "This is the guy I've been trying to get here," I find myself preaching with them in mind.
How specifically do you address that person?
I'm not preaching at them, but I feel like I'm sitting at the table with them. It's an invigorating thing for me because I'm partnering with our members in reaching that particular person. They may have spent four or five months trying to get this person here, and what they're saying is, "Andy, here he is. You'd better deliver."
Is your sermon the pivotal event in the service?
Not necessarily. I often tell our people, "The sermon starts in the parking lot. You are the introduction." In other words, if our members haven't created a positive impression and if they haven't been won in our worship, by the time I get up there, our visitors have pretty much determined if they're going to listen or not.
Most people come to church for the first time trying not to like it. They want three excuses why they don't have to go back. So we do what we can to disarm that. I tell my pastor friends, "You don't introduce your sermons; your folks do. And if they're not trained on how to do that, then you have a problem."
Does this "outsider focus" reflect your personality?
I'm very involved in relational evangelism. I know what I want the experience to be like when my friends finally show up. So we'll go to just about any length to tear down all the walls and to say, "If you're going to be offended, we want you to be offended by only one thing: the gospel." After all, that's supposed to be somewhat offensive to a sinner.
But we don't want anyone to be offended by something that happened in the parking lot, or by some off-the-cuff remark about a social issue. For instance, we don't allow groups to pass out voter guides, and we discourage bumper stickers. We chase people out of the parking lots all the time who are trying to put Christian stuff on people's windshields.
This is about partnering to win souls.
What's the overall strategy at North Point?
Our church is built around three kinds of environments:
- The foyer environment, where people are made to feel welcome as a guest.
- The living-room environment, where they're treated like a friend.
- And the kitchen environment, where they're made to feel like family.
Everything we do hangs on one of those hooks, or we just don't do it. The goal is to move people from the foyer to the living room to the kitchen.
Our worship service is a "foyer event." We expect guests. I instruct our people: "When you have guests in your home, there are certain things you don't do, certain things you don't talk about. You don't abandon your belief system when you have guests, but as a gracious host, you know certain subjects are best left for family or maybe for friends."
Do you avoid "kitchen issues" on Sunday mornings?
When I am forced by the text—which I think has to rule in preaching—to talk about "family issues," then I say to our guests, "If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, this next part is going to sound awfully strange to you. In fact, what I'm about to say may be one of the reasons you don't go to church."
I don't avoid topics, but I let them know that I know how this might strike them. This gives them permission to say, "Okay, they at least understand. Maybe we aren't on the same page in terms of what we believe, but at least they know we're not on the same page."
I don't pull punches, but I qualify a lot of things, because from the world's perspective, we Christians believe some strange stuff. Sometimes preachers are not sensitive to that, and so people are afraid to bring their friends to church because they feel like they have to sit real close and explain, "Here's what he meant," or they're thinking, I hope he doesn't talk about that today.
Our goal is to move people from the foyer to the living room to the kitchen
In a sense, then, you are providing a service to assist members in their evangelizing.
We put it this way: "We want to partner with you in the evangelism process. You do what you do best; we'll do what we do best. We can present the message with color, humor, music, video, all the bells and whistles. But your relationship is the most important part."
We summarize our whole evangelism strategy as "invest and invite." You invest in a life of an unbeliever, and when they're ready, you invite them to a "foyer" event. And in that environment they're going to be presented with the gospel in a relevant way. But then it's back on you as the inviter to pursue that relationship.
How do you keep this vision before the congregation?
Every once in a while I mention in a sermon that this church isn't for everyone: "We don't want any more people who are just coming to take notes and buy tapes and go home and do nothing." We've tried to position ourselves for people who want to reach people—and for the people they are in the process of reaching.
How do you encourage community in a large-church setting where most poeple don't know one another?
In every message, I try to celebrate community. We encourage and equip people to pursue three vital relationships: intimacy with God, community with insiders, and influence with outsiders. That's our strategy.
But community is not going to happen on Sunday morning in a church this size, and we don't even try to make it happen there.
Sunday morning is a foyer event; it's only one part of our overall strategy. Which means preaching is only one part of our overall strategy, but it's an important part.
What I'm doing on Sunday morning is gathering in all the potential people who one day can experience community. I bait them through teaching and stories and through presenting our strategy over and over until they're willing to take the next step.
One observer said, "What makes pastors of large churches successful is their ability to project the illusion of intimacy."
I agree with that, but the word illusion hits me as negative because it implies insincerity. Some of the more successful large-church pastors are able to create a sense of intimacy with their congregation because they have a sincere transparency. They preach from their weakness. And when somebody preaches from their weakness, you feel like you know them, like you have something in common. Of course, that's not a genuine relational intimacy, but there's a clear connection.
I say to pastors all the time, "The advantage of preaching from your weaknesses is you never run out of material." And it's true. I have the same struggles everybody else does. I think the ability of a pastor to be able to share those things is related to his personal security. Typically, the preachers I've gotten to know who are very guarded in their preaching are that way off the platform as well.
Lots of planning goes into your services—music, multimedia, and sermons all work together. So how do you plan your preaching?
We start with Easter. That's the beginning of the preaching calendar year because that's when the most people come for the first time. So we ask ourselves, "What new series can we announce on Easter that's most likely to bring an Easter visitor back?"
That's likely to be topical. But we also need to balance topical themes with more directly Bible-oriented material. So we do a Bible-book series usually toward the end of the year as we head back into Easter.
We think of it in terms of a maturity cycle. It's not perfect. People pop in and out, but you have to start somewhere. So far it's worked.
How much input from other goes into your sermons?
I meet every Tuesday with a worship planning team, and I rely heavily on them for topics.
That's not the model I was brought up with. I was raised with the "go to the mountain, and God gives you the message" model. There's a place for that, and there have been times when I've gone in and said, "I feel like I need to talk about this regardless of what you guys say." But for the most part, I rely on their input about topics and how long I need to talk about a certain topic.
When there's a consensus from six other mature Christians who have a good sense of what's needed in the life of our church, that's helpful.
Where do you get the "hook" for your sermons?
I always think in terms of relationships, because that's where all the tension is. Take, for instance, the topic of money. What's the tension with money? It's a relationship. Everything goes back to some sort of relationship, either between you and God, or you and another person. With money, you may resist giving away your money because you fear God may not take care of you.
You can take any topic and pinpoint where the tension is and how it affects a person relationally. And when you start talking about that, most of your audience will connect.
The advantage of preaching from your weaknesses is you never run out of material
Conventional wisdom would say that money is a "kitchen topic"; you don't talk about that in the foyer. How did you preach such a delicate subject to the spectrum of people in your congregation?
We knew money would be a sensitive subject for unchurched people. It's one of the smokescreens they throw up. "I don't want to go to church. All they want is money." So we had to disarm that mentality.
First, we handed out envelopes to everybody in the congregation. Most people assumed the point was, "Put money in the envelope." But these were sealed envelopes.
I preached the sermon on the idea that everything in heaven and earth belongs to God. The point being that we're simply to be stewards of what He's put on loan to us.
Then I said, "We're going to do stewardship practice. So, I want you to open your envelope." And they opened their envelopes to find. … money! We handed out $37,000 in fives, tens and twenties.
Suddenly, all the tension was gone. It was, "They gave me money!" Now they couldn't be mad at me anymore as the pastor. What can you say if we give you money?
Also in the envelope was a little green card that said: "I'm going to invest in God's kingdom by. … " Their assignment was to take the money and invest it in God's kingdom outside this church. They couldn't give it back to us. We asked them to turn in their cards and write on them, "Here's how I invested it in God's kingdom." This was stewardship practice. They got to practice on us.
We got thousands of the cards back. I'd estimate the $37,000 became a half-million dollars because of what people added and gave to a kingdom cause. And the stories are remarkable. Now, every Sunday, I get up and read a letter from a member about how $5 became $500.
So, the issue isn't so much the topic as the way the topic is presented.
There's no topic we can't talk about. We just have to take into consideration what the immediate negatives are. How do we disarm people? How do we do it in an authentic way?
The great communication issue for a pastor is NOT just about what I want them to know and what do I want them to do. That's the summary. The question that great communicators answer is, "Why do you need to know this?"
Most of the time, the Bible answers the question why. I can talk to a lost person about anything if I will spend my time studying and answering the question "Why would God say such a ridiculous thing as that?"
Most times, the answer is, "Because He's a good God and He loves you, and He wants what's best for you. You don't have to do it, but He's not just up there making stuff up."
The heavier the topic, the clearer I have to be on the why behind the what.
We hear about the shorter attention spans of the contemporary audiences, that this A.D.D. generation can't handle more than 15 or 20 minutes of preaching. Yet you typically preach for more than a half-hour.
My dad preaches an hour, and they can't get everybody in fast enough. The attention span thing is a myth.
We've all listened to communicators, and, number one, we couldn't believe the time went by that fast and, number two, we wish they wouldn't stop because they're great communicators. It has nothing to do with attention span. It has to do with the environment, the type of chair you're sitting on, what happened before, what your expectations are, the interest, the content, the visuals, the pace.
We have to be as clear as MUD—memorable, understandable, and do-able. Can they remember something? Do they understand it? Can they do it?
Most of the time that means the preacher should just make one point, communicate one thing well.
What do you assume is familiar or unfamiliar to your audience?
I'm married, I have three young children, and I'm extremely busy. And that's pretty much my target audience—people who are busy and trying to be good parents and have too many things to do.
You usually use a visual aid in your preaching. Do today's audiences need props?
I want to communicate at every level. There are auditory learners and visual learners. There are people who learn by talking. There are multiple levels, and I want maximum impact. So whether it's props or songs or illustrations or humor, I want to do whatever it takes to get the message across.
We're about to start a series called "Character Under Construction." We're going to turn the whole campus into a construction site—not just the stage, but everything. We're putting trailers and porta-johns outside. All of our hosting people are going to wear hard hats and tool belts to reinforce the idea that we are God's construction sites. The entire church will be a visual aid.
How much of your effort to preach today's listeners is a matter of style as opposed to content?
In general, it's the style we use that gets people's attention. The method is what draws the crowd. The joke around here is we'd have a bigger problem if we changed our music than if we changed our doctrine. We can change our doctrine, and a few people would get upset and leave. But if we changed the music, we'd split the church. So, the method of communication takes precedence over content in terms of audience appeal. I don't think that's a good thing, but it would be hard to argue that that's not the case.
So just presenting the truth is not enough to connect with contemporary audiences.
I talk to pastors sometimes who rationalize their church's lack of growth by saying, "I'm just preaching the truth. If they don't like it, that's too bad." But we're supposed to be a little more proactive than that. That would be like a salesman saying, "Well, you know, I made a few calls, but they just don't want to buy my product." That guy wouldn't keep his job very long.
Preaching today should be less about defending the truth and more about applying the truth.
For ages, preachers have struggled to walk the fine line between wholeness ("God loves you just the way you are") and holiness ("but he loves you too much to leave you that way"). How do you balance those two themes in a seeker-sensitive setting?
That was the brilliance of Jesus' ministry: he didn't try to balance those two extremes. He took them both and brought them together. That's the task we have as the body of Christ. We should reflect that paradox. We shouldn't try to find where we are on a continuum. We need to go to both ends, both extremes, and say, "You are fully accepted, but compared to the standard, you have a long way to go."
There's always the temptation in preaching to compromise at one end because you might lose somebody, or to make this sin worse than it actually is compared to other sins. But that's our challenge as preachers of the gospel.
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