Church Growth

7 Ways to Cultivate a Church Culture for Gospel Growth

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

When churches think about sharing the gospel with visitors, we can easily jump straight to outreach strategies and event planning.  But here are seven ways to cultivate a culture for greater gospel growth in the church – foundational pieces that need to be put in place:

1. Gospel Clarity – Make sure your church is clear on the gospel, consistently clear.  We can easily fall into using Christian language in a sloppy way.  The gospel is good news, not vague news.  So do not settle for a gathering of people that are united by church tradition, or who know how to behave a certain way and dress like they belong.  Speak about the transforming power of meeting Jesus and following Jesus.  Present the good news of who Jesus is and what Jesus did for us on the cross.  Feature the importance of the resurrection as a historical fact and the basis of genuine faith.  Explain what it means to respond, to repent, to receive, etc.  Do not assume a vague gospel agreement in preaching, or in conversation.  Too many churches rely on a specific event and a specific speaker to give a gospel message.  There is a place for special events and overtly evangelistic speakers, but the church should have the good news of Jesus in its DNA, permeating its culture.

2. Loving Community – The church is not just another social club in a society full of social clubs.  The church is a family that does not make sense.  Why do these people love each other like this?  There should be a level of love, concern, practical support, patience, graciousness, and warmth that is genuine and profoundly different from any social club in society.  A healthy church will grow in diversity.  Everyone will not be the same.  Obviously, if a town is full of very similar people, then that will impact the church.  But few towns are!  There should be diversity of race, of class background, of education level, etc.  Then the unity of believers in a church community will be magnetically attractive to visitors who don’t experience that kind of family warmth anywhere else – in many cases, not even at home.  This takes more than labeling to be genuine.  It is not enough to say from the front, “we are a church family.”  It has to be true.  Live it out at the leadership level and encourage mutual care wherever you can. For example, don’t overcrowd the schedule with meetings so that people don’t have space in the week to connect relationally.

3. Obstacle Removal – Will visitors feel awkward?  The church is a very different subculture than the world around.  It will feel different, but it does not need to feel unnecessarily awkward.  In our church, we have often said that we only want visitors stumbling over the gospel and Christians loving one another.  We do not want them feeling like they do not know where to go, what is happening, if their children are safe, if they will be embarrassed, if they are welcome, etc.  When I was in seminary, in one class, we were required to attend a religious service of a different religion.  The benefit was huge.  Most of us had always gone to church so it just felt normal.  But thrown into a different subculture, we became profoundly self-conscious.  It taught us to try and imagine coming to church as an outsider.  What could we do to make that experience warm and welcoming, rather than starkly awkward?

4. Whole Experience – What does a visitor experience when they park their car or arrive at the venue?  Do they know where to go?  Are they welcomed and introduced to children’s workers if they have children, or helped into conversation with someone who will be sensitive to their being first timers?  Will the service itself be explained in non-jargon terms?  Will they know if they are supposed to stand for singing and when?  Will there perhaps be a simple explanation of why Christians sing at all?  Will the location of Bible readings be given in Bible code, or will there be a page number given if people are using the church Bibles?  Will “normal people” who are not officially welcoming guests be genuinely friendly too? 

5. Assume Visitors – When we started our church, we had a period of several months where we were learning how this new church was going to function.  We did not actively promote the church at that time.  There was no website, no signage, etc.  People were welcome, but our focus was on getting used to functioning in a new way.  Every week we opened the service as if guests were present.  The small number of believers would sometimes look around with a grin, fully aware that there were no guests present.  Why would we do that?  Because they needed to grow in confidence that when they did bring someone along, it would be a safe environment.  We don’t want our people hesitant to invite others to church.  It can be risky to a friendship if you invite a colleague and their experience is poor.  So, the experience has to be consistently trustworthy.  A number of people in our church had past church experiences where some weeks the preaching was guest sensitive, but other weeks when you would hope no guests were present.  We had to work to earn trust and cultivate a culture where guests could come any week.

6. Every Service – Every service is a gospel service.  Obviously, there are sometimes church business meetings that are restricted to members.  But a normal church gathering on a Sunday (presumably) has the potential to attract visitors.  They could be there because they are visiting family members.  They could have found the church online.  They could be looking for a church, or passing a couple of hours in a one-off visit.  But the point is, we should not be wishing they would come back in four weeks’ time when there is a special guest-friendly gospel service.  It is possible to make every gathering guest friendly, and it is possible to make every sermon relevant to everyone.

7. Driving Values – Is the church driven by tradition, by the preferences of influential people, or by defined values?  If the church is driven by denominational tradition, then there will be plenty of opportunity for what is normal to actually be strange to first-time visitors.  At least explain it but consider changing it if necessary.  If the church is driven by the preferences of influential people, then there will be plenty of ways in which the church is quirky for guests.  It is harder to explain an eclectic set of church features when they are present because of someone sitting in row three.  Changing this internal power dynamic will be necessary for genuine gospel growth!  As much as possible, seek to define the values of the church and aspire to be a church that God will trust with newcomers and new believers.  The whole congregation may find it uncomfortable to be consistently and genuinely welcoming to others.  By identifying its value, the leadership can then model buy-in and help the whole church take the steps necessary to live out that church value.

God may bless outreach strategies and special events whenever you implement them.  But my sense is that deliberately cultivating a church culture ready for gospel growth in these seven ways will prepare the church for greater fruit from outreach and special events.  What would you add to the list?

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7 Reasons Guests Don’t Return

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Why don’t guests return? This is a question most church leaders will ask themselves. It is encouraging to see visitors come into the church, but it can be discouraging when the vast majority seem to only be one-time visitors. Here is a list of possible reasons that may be helpful as you evaluate what is happening in your church. Some churches run guest services every week for years with hardly any outsiders ever coming in – that is a different situation that will also benefit from honest evaluation. But if your church gets lots of one-time visitors, what could be contributing to their reticence to return?

1. It is not the church for them. Not every visitor is new to church world. Some will be new to the area, or leaving a local church and considering their options. Your church might not be what they are looking for, and that might be perfectly alright. Your church should not be trying to attract and keep every possible churchgoer. They might want a legitimately different type of church, and you do not want to become that type of church in order to attract them. Or they might be troublemakers that continually need to find a new church to get their hooks into, and hopefully, your church might seem too healthy for them to be able to influence in the negative way they prefer. For good reasons or bad reasons, let’s recognize that no church is ideal for every visitor. And some visitors are just visiting their family members. Change whatever you like, they will not be joining a church that is hundreds of miles from their home!

2. It is not a friendly church. It is so hard to sense this when you are in a church. When you walk in, people smile, people talk to you, etc. But what about the visitor? I am amazed at how unfriendly some churches are. No conversation, no welcome, no friendly questions, no clarity on where to go or what is happening with the children. Some churches are also effectively unfriendly by being awkwardly friendly – putting visitors in the spotlight is not helpful. Don’t ask visitors to stand up and feel awkward, it doesn’t help. And don’t expect them to just enjoy the service and return without any meaningful connection with other humans – they might, but it would not be normal. If church culture is new to them, then look for ways to make them feel comfortable, don’t just underline their awkwardness.

3. It is too much of a mystery. The sub-culture of a local church is very alien to some visitors. If they come from a similar church, then they already know the language and rituals, but if they are new to church it could be like a foreign country to them. If they spend their time guessing when to stand at the start of a song, guessing where a Bible reference is without any page number to help them, guessing when they are supposed to say something out loud with everyone else, guessing how long the service will go on for, etc. then their experience will be draining.

4. The children did not have a good time. If a family comes, then every voice in that family matters. But some voices can be louder than others. If a parent feels uneasy about the children’s program for any reason, that will be a loud voice in their decision making. Does this church look after the children? Are they safe? Is it clean? And the children’s voice will speak loudly too. If they loved it and made friends, they will push to return. If they didn’t, then parents will probably keep looking rather than try to convince them. The children’s ministry of your church matters – whether it is three volunteers in a room or a purpose-built facility with paid staff.

5. The environment was offputting. Was it easy to find the church? Was it easy to park? Was it easy to find your way in? Did you feel safe? Was it easy to find seating (the front row does not count)? Was the atmosphere before and after conducive to conversation and connection? Did the place have a strange smell? Was it warm enough? There are so many details that can have a bearing on the suitability of a church facility. Whether you have your own building or are renting the space, you need to somehow see it through the eyes of a first-timer. Ask family members who visit what they noticed. When people keep coming, ask them, before they get used to everything, what they noticed their first week.

6. The service needs to make sense. We thought about some elements of mystery in point 3 above. People will be drained trying to work out what is going on. But there is another way the service needs to make sense too. The elements of the service need to be explained and need to fit with the experience as a whole. If the style of the church is somewhat contemporary and appropriately warm (not flippant, but somewhat informal or casual), then it doesn’t make sense to have an overbearing pipe organ to lead the sung worship. And there probably needs to be some consistency between the size of the gathering, the quality of the music, the standard of presentation from the front, etc. It might be fun to hear “quirky Quentin” mess up the notices at the start of the service for people who know him, but for a visitor, his weird manner may be off-putting (especially if it isn’t a cosy group of thirty friends like it might have been when Quentin started “doing the notices” – a church phrase, by the way). Actually, the exact style of music or format of service is probably not as important as the consistency between the size of the church, the quality of the music (whatever style is used), and level of participation. A professional quality band with a congregation that doesn’t seem to care does not make sense. Neither does poor music in a significant-sized gathering.

7. The preaching didn’t connect. The preaching could fit into what was said in point 6 above, but let’s place the sermon in its own point. It really does matter. People will join a church because of the preaching, and they will leave a church because of the preaching. Therefore visitors will stick or move on because of the preaching too. If the manner and style is too lofty, too academic, too angry, or too affected, then there will be a disconnect with the listeners. If the manner and style is too flippant, too humourous, too desperate to sound relevant, or too weak on Bible, then there will be a disconnect with some listeners. Can they follow what is being said? Does it feel like they are being pastorally fed from the Scriptures? Does it lift their gaze away from themselves and point them to God’s goodness in Christ? Unbelievers motivated to find the truth, or believers starving for good food, will be drawn or pushed away by what they hear during the preaching segment of the service.

Ultimately, we cannot cherry-pick our visitors, nor determine who will choose to settle in our church. Jesus is the one who promised to build his church, and he is still doing that. But let’s evaluate our churches and make sure we are not adding any unnecessary barriers for guests that come along. It does not have to be all about the guest. But if we never consider their experience at all, we shouldn’t be surprised if we seldom see them again.

When Preaching Is Restricted

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

This year has thrown up all sorts of challenges for the ministry of preaching. Many of us have been learning quickly how to adjust to preaching to a camera, taking church online, etc. But still, something is missing. Maybe we can’t gather, or maybe the gathering is restricted. Is this restriction actually curtailing the work of God?

The Book of Acts offers us an encouraging section to read when we feel our preaching is restricted. As you know, Acts shows the progress of the witness of the Apostles from Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, to the ends of the earth (see 1:8).

The Jerusalem section, chapters 1-7, is thrilling. We see the church birthed and growing rapidly. We get to enjoy the boldness of Peter’s preaching, Peter and John before the authorities, even Stephen’s courageous final proclamation. It feels like preaching to crowds is central to the growth of the church. But opposition is building along the way. The apostles are warned in chapter 4, beaten in chapter 5 and then there is the execution of Stephen in chapter 7.

This brings us to the middle section of Acts, the Judea/Samaria section, if you like. It stretches from Acts 8 to Acts 12, where the summary statement is found in v24: “the word of God increased and multiplied.”

So what do we find in Acts 8-12? We see the gospel spreading to Samaritans and then Gentiles – a massively significant step of progression. But we also see a change of ministry opportunity. After the stoning of Stephen, we read this: “…there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles . . . Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word.” (8:1,4)

They went about evangelising – that’s what it is saying here.  They couldn’t bring friends to big gatherings in Jerusalem to listen to a great apostle preaching.  They were scattered.  Challenging circumstances, scattered believers, speaking about Jesus.

We immediately get the example of Philip who took the challenging circumstances as sovereign appointment and proclaimed Christ in Samaria.  He spoke to crowds, but he also spoke to an individual in a chariot.  Normal followers of Jesus speaking to people about Jesus wherever they found themselves.

In these chapters we see the conversion and commissioning of Saul to carry the message to the nations, and we see Peter being coached by God to understand how the gospel had to move beyond traditional Jewish boundaries in order to spread.  But we also see normal believers representing Jesus.  People like Tabitha/Dorcas, who was full of good works and acts of charity.  In their words and in their deeds, they evangelised wherever God put them.

We know from Acts 12:24 that the word of God increased and multiplied, even away from Jerusalem, away from the big preaching events, away from the primarily apostolic pulpit.  But there is one thing we have to recognize to really grasp what was going on then, and what is going on today. Challenging circumstances that scattered believers who then spoke about Jesus. 

It sounds like a fruitful formula.  None of us want the challenging circumstances, but when they come we see how believers find themselves in unique situations to speak of Jesus.  So why do we hesitate today?  Why aren’t we confident that our congregations will all gossip the gospel enthusiastically in these challenging times?  Is it a matter of training, of example, of spiritual gifting? Perhaps, but not primarily. 

Perhaps it is more to do with Acts 8-12’s truth not gripping us as it should. Luke returns for a summary of the ministry of the scattered believers in Acts 11:19-27.  It tells us that the post-Stephen persecution scatterees travelled to Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch.  It tells us that they spoke the word.  It tells us that the message of Jesus spread to Greek speakers as well as Jews. But notice verse 21:

“And the hand of the Lord was with them.”

That is massive. They needed that. They were witnesses in Judea and Samaria because they had received power when the Spirit came upon them (Acts 1:8). They were able to effectively do their part, not because they were really good at it, but because God did his part.

The same is true today. You may not be able to preach to a normal sized crowd this Sunday or next month. The typical autumn and winter events at the church may not be possible this year due to Covid-19. God’s plan may be to place you and me, and the people in our churches, into divinely ordained one-on-one situations where we can speak of Jesus.

Challenging circumstances that scatter believers who then speak of Jesus to anyone that crosses our path. And we can do so with confidence because the hand of the Lord is with us!

If you and your church folks are convinced that the hand of the Lord is with us this week, what difference will that make? Maybe we will discover that God’s plans are not on pause. And even if the pulpit is partially paused, God’s great plan to reach this world for Jesus is marching forwards, even in October 2020!

God’s Great Evangelistic Plan

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

God’s plan to reach people with the gospel is not primarily evangelists or apologists, although both are vitally important.  God’s plan to reach people with the gospel is the church.  We can make no greater investment of our resources than to help churches become infectious communities of gospel-gripped people motivated and equipped to bring others into God’s family.

So what does a church need in order to be this kind of evangelistic tool in God’s hands?  It seems like there are three vital ingredients in the mix.  These could be seen as three legs on a stool, and the stool needs all three legs to be used as it was intended

1. People need to ENJOY God and the gospel.

It is easy to encourage or pressure believers to share their faith with others.  Many Sunday sermons end with the call to read our Bibles every day and witness to somebody this week.  The problem is that pressure without motivation will produce poor results.  Many will simply default to doing nothing.  Those that try to do as they have been instructed will often give a clear sense of their own obligation and reticence.  The best witnesses and evangelists will always be those that are truly gripped with the goodness of the good news of who God is and what God has done for us in Christ.

We do not want a church full of reticent and obligated witnesses.  We do want as many as possible to be so enjoying God and the gospel that they can’t help but spill that good news out to others.  This is why simply telling Christians to evangelise is never very effective.  We would achieve much more evangelistically if we invest more time in showing them Christ that their hearts become enflamed with love for him.  When someone gets engaged they can’t help but smile big and show off the ring to anyone around them.  O for churches full of people thrilled that they are more than engaged to Christ!!

2. People need to CONNECT with people outside the church.

A highly motivated community of Christians will not have much impact on their local culture if they live in isolation from it.  The New Testament does not instruct us to purposefully make connections with the people around us because it was automatically happening.  Not only is the church in the book of Acts an example to us, so is Jesus himself.  He was known as a friend of sinners.  Sadly too many churches are full of people that feel their main job is to find ways to avoid contact with non-Christians.

As leaders of churches let us lead by example and let us encourage through our teaching.  God is relational and outwardly focused to the core of his being.  Christianity has a missionary and evangelistic inclination in its very DNA.  Many Christian leaders can easily spend all their time with Christians.  Set an example by joining a club or taking a class, finding some way to connect with people that may have no other contact with true Christians.  If you are working alongside not-yet-Christians, set an example to your church by guarding time to invest in those relationships.  Invite a colleague to your home for a meal, socialize together, move the conversation beyond the superficial.  Many Christians seem to have lost the art of conversation, and asking questions seems to be a dying art.  Set an example and even teach believers how to ask questions and care about the answers.  Our local churches need to be communities that connect with those around.

3. People need to be able to COMMUNICATE the gospel when they have opportunity.

We may have motivated and connected believers in our churches that are unclear on how to present the core gospel message.  We can be overt here – tell them the value of a personal testimony that includes the three elements of before conversion, how I became a Christian, and the difference it has made since.  The power of the personal testimony is massively under-utilized by many Christians.

And why not instruct our churches with a simple gospel presentation.  I heard a famous preacher suggest the simple use of John 3:16 with four key points some years ago.  It is still my go-to explanation if the opportunity suddenly crops up.  Obviously I will adjust the explanation in light of what I know about the person I am speaking to, but still it is a useful presentation.  1. God loved so (2) God gave.  3. If we believe, then (4) we have eternal life.  It starts with the kind of God we are presenting, moves naturally into what God did for us in sending Christ to go to the cross.  It keeps the invitation unencumbered with unhelpful baggage by calling us to believe in – that is, not just believe that, but believe in … to entrust the full weight of our lives onto the person and work of Christ, with no backup plan!  And it allows us to define the Christian offer not as a free pass or a ticket to heaven, but rather as coming into the forever relationship that we were designed to enjoy.

So that is the three-part recipe for helping a church to be more effective in its evangelism.  There are other things that could be added.  For instance, it is important for a local church to establish an evangelistic baseline (for our church it is about making every Sunday accessible to guests, and running a regular evangelistic course – we use Glen Scrivener’s 321).  Then there are special events that can be highly effective.  But first and foremost, the church is not the program, it is the people, and if we can help the people in our churches to enjoy God more, be intentionally connected, and be able to communicate the gospel, then we are unleashing God’s great evangelistic strategy on the world: the local church!

Healthy Revival – 7 Thoughts

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

You cannot go far in church world before you hear people longing for revival. It gets mentioned in prayer meetings. It gets mentioned in outreach planning. Preachers long to experience it through each new sermon. Reports on social media stir our longings. I want to share some thoughts on the subject.

This is not a technical introduction to the subject. When I refer to revival I am referring to those unusual seasons of heightened responsiveness to the working of God’s Spirit among and through God’s people so that the church is renewed, reinvigorated and revived, resulting in an unusually high harvest of souls.

Seven thoughts for us to prayerfully consider:

1. The Bible does not invite us to live a life of frustration. It is totally understandable that people pray for revival. The state of our church and the state of our world mean that we long for a season of real spiritual breakthrough in our ministry. However, it is important to recognize that the Bible does not anticipate that God’s people will always live in a state of perpetual frustration. As George Verwer, founder of OM International has said, “Personal revival is our daily privilege in Christ Jesus!” By all means, let’s look to God like never before, but let’s not fall into the trap of living life as if we are missing out on something until a bona fide revival breaks out.

2. The Bible does include descriptions of specific seasons of unusual responsiveness. To put it another way, it is not wrong to long. The drift in society, the apathy in the church, and even the coldness of our own hearts should cause us to grieve and to yearn for something more. Paul anticipated the drift when he told Timothy that in the last days people would be lovers of self, of money, of pleasure, rather than lovers of good, or of God. If this does not bother us then we are not reflecting the passionate heart of God. There will always be a longing for revival in any healthy believer.

3. It is healthy to ask if we can be trusted with a season of evangelistic fruitfulness? While “revival” may be primarily about renewing the life of the church, it is often associated with heightened fruitfulness in evangelism. This is wonderful and something we should all long for, but it is healthy to ask whether God would entrust an unusually ripe harvest to our church? Are we committed to the spread of the Gospel, or to defending a Christian sub-culture? Are we offering Christ, or just some type of Christianity? Is our gospel offensively grace-focused, or is it just another version of self-help, law-based religiosity?

4. Part of being prepared is anticipating the aftermath. Jonathan Edwards wrote a book describing the unusual work of God in his town that continued to spark revival across the world even after his own town had slumped into a deeply troubling malaise. How often do we hear of amazing revivals followed by extended periods of spiritual depression? It must be so hard to invest energy into discipleship and training when the evangelistic fruit seems to keep falling off the trees whenever we hint at doing more outreach. Nevertheless, we must learn from history and anticipate the struggles that can follow. How can we make sure people get established in a healthy relationship with Christ, rather than building everything on a foundation that cannot last – namely, faith in the experience of revival rather than in Christ and His Word?

5. Ask God to search your motives. Of course, your motives when praying for revival are pure and perfect, so are mine. But since we are all flesh-naturals at self-justification let us instead ask God to search our motives. Augustine identified the first, second and third precepts of Christianity to be humility. Pride is an insidious destroyer. Indeed, God does not want to fan into flame any hint of pride in you, so if pride were to feature in your prayer for revival, then it is fair to assume that not only would the devil oppose you, so would God (see 1Peter.5:5-7). So does it need to be in your region and not another? Does it need to be your denomination and not another? Does it have to be your church and not the other one down the road?

6. If revival includes an intensification of normal things, what are we waiting for? That is to say, if you dream of a season of revival when you would want to just read the Bible and not be endlessly entertained, if you dream of praying with a persevering intensity, and caring for others more passionately, and loving God more intently, and giving yourself to church ministry more wholeheartedly, then the question could be asked … why wait for revival? God is not excited by your hypothetical and conditional devotion (send revival, Lord, and watch me soar!) – life to the full is on offer now. Maybe your moments of longing are invitations to lean in to what God wants to do in your life.

7. Be a steward of the remarkable present. Maybe this is saying number 6 in a different way, but it is worth saying. Experiencing revival or renewal is a privilege, but also the Christian life is a privilege! Even if you are in a season of sowing, or growing, or preparing, or living by faith with nothing to see, whatever your situation, the normal Christian life is an incredible privilege! We can live today in fellowship with God our Father, in Christ, by the Spirit! We have God’s Word, we have immediate access to the throne room of heaven, we have the indwelling presence of the Spirit. Our salvation is secure whether we are in a time of revival or not, because the greatest revival of all is the new life that God has breathed into us.

May we live as the most grateful people of all, irrespective of whether we experience a heaven-sent revival during our years on earth or not.

The Challenge of Consistency

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

I tend to agree with the notion of there being a difference between small church and big church.  A small church, perhaps under 100 people, will tend to have strengths that can become weaknesses in a larger church, perhaps over 200 people.  For instance, in a small church, low standards of music and preaching will be smiled at since everyone knows the individual who is “trying their best.”  But once that church grows through the transitional stage and becomes bigger, such low standards become more counter productive.  Visitors (and there will probably be more now) don’t know the individual up front and the whole dynamic doesn’t work quite so well.  While fellowship is often a strength in smaller churches, it takes deliberate work to achieve that in a larger church.  The emphasis on “up-front” standards inevitably increases as a church grows.

This provides a challenge.  I suppose it is a challenge for all churches of all sizes.  It is especially a challenge for churches with some creative capacity (people, skills, people-hours, etc.).  When you have a guest service of a certain standard, then people will bring guests along.  If that service is done well, then some of those guests might return the next week.  There’s the problem.  If all the effort to be clear and relevant and engaging and effective in the music, the preaching, the presentation, etc., if all that effort is spent on one Sunday, what about the next?

The challenge is consistency.  If your church has a goal of bringing the unchurched to a particular service, then it is worth thinking through whether greater consistency could be achieved in that service 52 times each year.  At that point people would be much more inclined to risk their own relationships and bring people along to the guest events.

There has to be flexibility in this.  Different churches have different capacities for guest events.  The vast majority cannot live up to the standards seen in the small number of “megachurches.”  There also has to be balance in this.  The primary role of the church service may not be evangelism.  Nevertheless, taking into account the specific ethos of a church, it would be worth giving some thought to greater consistency between guest events and normal Sundays.

One Thing Worth Copying

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

There seems to be an epidemic of copycat mentality in church ministry today.  I’m not referring primarily to pulpit plagiarism, although that is a real issue (only exacerbated by the availability of online sermons from the very good to the very poor – all of which are readily copied by some).  I’m thinking more generally.  If a church is successful (measure that however you choose), then methodology is deemed worthy of mass representation for the benefit of others who in some way seek to reproduce something of that methodology or vision in their own local context.

By the way, please don’t think of this simply as a feature of one brand of Christianity.  I have heard the sneers and comments at the expense of Willow Creek or Saddleback, but some who sneer in that direction would affirm and delight in, for example, Redeemer Presbyterian’s Church Planting Center, just to cite one example.

While some are quick to mock some of this, it is certainly not bad.  Many churches have been helped and strengthened (not just in numbers) by learning from other church leaders in respect to methodology and ministry vision.  Some of the contemporary attacks on Christian consumerism have an element of irony about them inasmuch as there seems to be a band-wagon of consumerism-bashing.  Nevertheless, we should ask ourselves after the next seminar we attend, or “this-is-how-we-did-it” book we read . . . am I copying the right thing?

I’m not condemning all the seminars and books on methodology.  We can, if we are discerning and aware of our own context, learn from what others are doing in theirs.  We should certainly think carefully about that if we are inclined to use methodology as a short-cut, a cut and paste approach to doing church, a photocopied church program from another place, another culture, another context.  Learn from others, but recognize their context, and implement prayerfully in recognition of your own context.

But the greater focus, the one so often missing today, is the one Jethani points to at one point in his book, The Divine Commodity, an engagement with the pervasive consumerist distortion of Christianity.  “Rather than reproducing a leader’s ministry methodology, we ought to focus on reproducing his or her devotion to God.” (p98)

Why don’t we give more attention to that?  Why do we look at “successful” church leaders and copy their method, but not yearn to reproduce their spiritual devotion?  If they don’t have that, then what is the method really worth?  If they do have that, what is it about us that fails to be stirred by it?  Look around for a great Christian leader, one with a deep devotion to God.  Don’t cut and paste.  You can’t fake that, although you may be tempted to try.  Don’t fake.  Don’t ignore.  Don’t methodologize.  In the right sense: Copy.