He stunned the room of peers, this pastor of a seeker-sensitive mega-congregation, with his confession: “I don’t want my kids to grow up to be pastors. We’ve created a Christian entertainment business. The only way to attract people today is to entertain them, but after they attend awhile, no one wants to do what it takes to become a devoted follower.”
In awkward silence we identified with the senior pastor’s frustration. What do you have to do to get people to take Christ seriously? Most of us who see front-end results of pre-evangelism and evangelism find the back-end challenges daunting. What it takes to attract people today is not necessarily what helps them learn the sacrificial life of servanthood.
Are we presenting a bait-and-switch message? “Welcome, let us meet your felt needs: more meaning, joy, and family bonding. But after you’ve been here awhile, we ask you to pursue self-denial, sacrificial giving, and serious commitment.”
The good old days, when people understood that coming to Jesus meant the high cost of discipleship and commitment to a church, seem too good to be true. If, as some suggest, we are moving toward an Early Church spiritual environment, perhaps we can now identify with Jesus’ days more than in recent memory. Jesus faced a similar challenge of finding truly devoted followers amid the crowds seeking food, healing, or “an experience.”
On more than one occasion, Jesus challenged “experience seekers” to commit themselves, but we read of those who were unwilling to leave a new field or an aging father, or to give their wealth to the poor.
Beyond bait and switch
Current times exacerbate the dilemma of spiritual formation. The self-help society sees Christianity as a side dish, not the entree. Our consumer culture assumes God is into serving us, and the church exists to meet our wants.Prevailing American values, which advocate the rights of the individual, bring out our self-centered tendencies. Those of us raised in such a culture may struggle with moving beyond ourselves. President Bush, in his inaugural address, told us as citizens “to seek the common good beyond your comfort.” What makes good Christians makes good community as well.
But the challenge of forming selfless followers of Christ isn’t just a seeker-church problem. Traditional, non-seeker congregations are often oriented toward maintaining their own styles and methods, unwilling to change for the good of others. Too often, the transformation we see within churches is from secular self-centeredness to Christian ego-centricity. This is akin to the alcoholic who exchanges his drinking for smoking or workaholism.
Dressing up self-serving attitudes in religious garb does not sanctify them. When “good” Christians are unwilling to give up personal preferences of worship style, dress, or preaching in order to obey the Great Commission, how much are they displaying the emptying out of Christ (Phil. 2)?
Have we lured people into virtual-Christian showrooms, providing misleading glimpses of what the real experience is all about?
Development, not deception
So how does a congregation attract today’s self-centered persons and redirect them to the selflessness necessary to become mature disciples of Jesus?One way is to talk honestly about it. People are not fearful of truth when it is presented in a way that does not belittle or condemn them.
If I drive from Los Angeles to my home in Scottsdale, Arizona, I take Interstate 10 east to Highway 202 and then north on 101. If I’m going to get to Scottsdale, I can’t stay on I-10. The road to becoming Christlike is similar.
If we want to make our destination, we don’t necessarily take the same highway for the whole journey. As we begin our journey with Christ, we often pursue faith for the purposes of self-renewal, fulfillment, and hope. But as we follow Christ, we discover that the directions change and that we have to take new paths in order to arrive at our goal. Somewhere along the way, we must become outward focused, be broken in the right places, and lose ourselves in God. As Bill Hybels says, “We become Theists versus Meists.”
The goal of spiritual maturation is getting to our destination of Christlike obedience. The consistent, persistent, and relentless teaching that someday, somewhere along your path, you may need to take another road and redirect your life to complete your trip, prepares people beforehand.
The destination has never changed.
The question is when and how, as spiritual guides, do we explain the journey directions?
Show them the next step
Growth in grace tends to be developmental, not instantaneous—much like the growth of children.Can a seven-year-old understand why his eleven-year-old brother gets a bigger allowance and goes to bed at 9:30 instead of his 8:30? No. We wouldn’t expect him to. Nor would we talk to the eleven-year-old about sex in the same way we do with a fifteen-year-old.
Increasing maturity creates a readiness for the instructions necessary for the next step. Prior to that, the further instructions are valueless—something akin to swine’s appreciation for pearls.
The leadership challenge for those guiding spiritual children is to present next-step scenarios in a way that encourages the people to try them.
Fast Company ran an ad recently depicting a mouse in a maze. He avoided roaming the halls by gnawing a direct path to the cheese. Most people aren’t that intuitive, and their developmental paths are meandering. The spiritually hungry hunt and peck their ways through the maze of spiritual growth, and in most churches, they are provided little in the form of individualized counsel and next-step recommendations.
So, how do you assess where people are on their spiritual journey and where they should go next? We are experimenting with a ministry called The Journey.
Our goal is to develop an array of personal trainers who will assist growing believers to work on specific spiritual areas. Using non-threatening, one-on-one interviews, the counselors discern clues about the person’s past church involvement and current level of interest. This helps us make recommendations to appropriate small groups and ministry opportunities that will provide the next step for their spiritual development.
Break the consumer barrier
Recently I listed some people in my church who appear to have made significant strides in their spiritual growth, who seem to have broken the consumer barrier.Interviewing some of these people, I asked what it was that helped them grow. Their only consistent answer was “getting into an intentional spiritual formation small group.” The transformation from taker to giver has to be done via trusting relationships. In that setting, we earn the right to confront people with the more difficult claims of Christ.
Our tumbleweed lifestyles do not naturally provide such a context. Our first challenge may be getting people connected with intentional, faith-growing relationships.
As pastors, we should present this need often and in ways young Christians can understand. If we do, then later—after the desire to become a fully-devoted follower of Christ has replaced entertainment value as their reason for church attendance—we can’t be accused of “bait and switch.”
The growing believer will say, “I may have come for the music and what the church could offer my kids, but I stayed because I met God.”
Alan Nelson is pastor of Scottsdale Family Church in Scottsdale, Arizona.sfc@primenet.com
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