Restoring Kingdom Builders

Five years ago, my daughter Sarah and I went to the 11:30 am Sunday service at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland.  The great Scottish Reformer John Knox preached there and is buried underneath Parking Space 23 behind the church.

St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland

                     

When we arrived that morning, rain was pouring down.  We settled into seats next to the heater on the right side – only it wasn’t working.  (After a few moments, a large puddle of water formed beneath my chair.)  Because I was a mess, I chose to visit the men’s room, which was down the back stairs – only I had to walk through the choir to get there.  (When I came out, I had to walk through them again.)

The service began with a choir anthem – in Latin.  After some festivities, it was time for the message.  The speaker was one of the chaplains for the Queen of England, and this was his regular gig.

I’ll never forget his message.  He lambasted the congregation for the decline in attendance over the years – from 1,400 to 600, as I recall.  He spoke all of 10 minutes.

I can tell you why people weren’t coming: busted heater, poor access to the restrooms, singing in a dead language, and a preacher who blamed the people who showed up for the church’s decline!

The topic of church attendance is touchy, isn’t it?

Let me make four brief points about numbers in churches:

First, numbers require context.  Jesus talked about rocky ground and good soil in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3-8).  Some communities are fertile ground for the gospel, like Phoenix (where there are large churches everywhere) and Orange County (where spiritual and political values match).  Other communities represent stony ground, like New England (with its old buildings and liberal theology) and the San Francisco Bay Area (full of hostile atheists and agnostics).

In Phoenix, it’s common for a church to own a 5-acre campus with 500 people attending.  In the Bay Area, that’s uncommon.

Every church is unique.  There is no one-size-fits-all pastor or church.  What works in one place doesn’t work in another.  So it’s hard to compare churches – and often difficult to compare their statistics as well.

Please remember that.

Second, numbers can become idols.  Ask some pastors how their church is doing and they’ll say, “Our numbers are up 22% over last year at this time – and our giving is keeping pace.  We’re doing great!”

But how did their churches grow?  Through a renewed emphasis on evangelism?  Through an expansion of small groups for seekers?  Or was it by injecting secular methods into the church?  Or by receiving a flood of new people from the church that split down the road?

Pastors feel tremendous pressure to keep numbers going north.  And in the process, stats can become way too important.  If someone’s life was changed but attendance was down 15% from the previous Sunday, does that mean the pastor is a failure?  Or if God didn’t show up in the service but the giving was 31% better than two weeks ago, is that all that matters?

If a pastor thinks he’s a success when the stats are up, and a failure when the stats are down, it may be that numbers have become an idol.  Most pastors continually struggle with this issue.

Third, numbers are impossible to control.  My wife and I once held a small group in our home.  15 people signed up.  The topic was interesting.  We always had refreshments.  There was great chemistry among group members.

And we always contacted people in advance to remind them about our next gathering.

One night, we had 14.  Another night, we had 3.  Think I could control the attendance?

As a pastor, sometimes I’d go to church on Sunday morning and think, “This topic may seem irrelevant, so I’m not expecting a big crowd.”  And the place would be packed.  Other times, I’d think, “I can’t wait to get to church today because I anticipate great attendance.”  And I’d get up to preach and stare at empty chairs.

I delude myself – and even play God – when I think I make things grow.

I take comfort in Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 3:6: “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.”  Only secularists believe that man makes things grow.  Jesus’ followers know that only the Father produces growth.

Finally, numbers alone cannot measure success.  I believe that success for a believer – including a pastor – is defined not by numbers, but by attempting and completing divine assignments.

When Jesus told the multitudes that they needed to “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood” (John 6:53), we’re told that “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (John 6:66).  By today’s standards, Jesus was a failure.

And yet the night before He died, He told His Father, “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4).  If numbers are everything, why didn’t Jesus submit His stats at that moment?  Instead, He measured success by doing God’s will.

He may have looked like a failure in secular eyes, but was a total success in His Father’s eyes.

I wish Christians could set aside the success measurements of the business world (bodies, bucks, and bricks) and return to biblical standards – but the business model has become so ingrained in us that I don’t know if we can.

Think we can do it?  Do we want to?

In Mark 4:26, Jesus told His disciples:

“This is what the kingdom of God is like.  A man scatters seed on the ground.  Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.”

Did you catch that?  “He does not know how” the seed grew.  While it’s our job to scatter seed, it’s God’s job to make things grow.

Let us resolve never to reverse those roles.

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Nearly 20 years ago, I was invited to meet with a group of pastors for an all-day meeting at a mountain cabin.  I felt privileged to be included and was looking forward to our time with great anticipation … until the group leader asked this question:

“How did Easter go at your church?”

One by one, the pastors talked about the number of people who came out for Easter services.  We didn’t hear much about the biblical passages the pastors used, or the music that was sung, or the way the Spirit moved.

No, every pastor present talked about the number of people who showed up for Easter services.

All except one, that is.  Out of the dozen or so men gathered around a table, nobody asked me how many people showed up for our Easter service – and I didn’t volunteer the number.

I’ve never told anyone – until now.  It was 70.

Years later, I’d be the pastor of a church that had ten times that amount on Easter Sunday, but so what?

While numbers at a church do tell a story, they never tell the whole story.

Why are evangelical Christians so obsessed with numbers?

For starters, numbers are a way to measure a church’s progress.  If your church had 225 people in attendance a year ago, and you have 270 today, you’re reaching more people for Jesus.  And on the surface, that’s good.

Conversely, if you have 270 today, but 183 a year from now, that doesn’t look so great.

Ten years ago, Dr. Archibald Hart told our “Pastor’s Personal Life” class at Fuller Seminary that the church growth movement was dead.  That was a surprising statement to hear coming from a Fuller leader because the church growth movement originated there.  Dr. Hart told our class that the emphasis now was on church health, not church growth.

And that seems like a healthier emphasis to me.  The New Testament epistles never mention specific attendance numbers.  Paul doesn’t commend the church at Philippi for growing 23% in the past year.  John doesn’t applaud his readers for growing their church from 100 to 150 over the previous six months.  And in Revelation 2-3, when Jesus addresses the seven churches of Asia Minor, He never once mentions numbers.  The emphasis of the New Testament is on spiritual qualities like faith, hope, and love.  (Read the first few verses of Paul’s epistles and notice how many times he mentions those terms.)

The biblical implication is that a healthy church is doing its job and will have some impact on the surrounding culture.

Thank God, we sometimes hear people say, “That’s a really loving church” or “Those people exercise great faith.”  But it’s easier to measure cold hard numbers than spiritual intangibles, isn’t it?

Next, numbers are a way to measure a pastor’s worth.  Is this a good line for a major league baseball outfielder (.227, 3, 14)?  No, it’s not.  It means his batting average is .227, he’s only hit 3 home runs, and he’s knocked in a mere 14 runs.  He may be a great outfielder with speed, but unless he can raise his offensive stats, he won’t be in the majors very long.

In our day, pastors are often measured by a single line as well, like this one: (17, 847, 23).  This pastor has 17 staff members, an average weekly attendance of 847, and an average weekly offering of $23,000.  In some areas, those are fantastic numbers.  In others, they’re average.

The pastor could be a godly man and a great husband and father.  He could be a phenomenal preacher and raise the dead with his prayers.  Doesn’t matter.  In the Christian world, those statistics summarize his worth.  Every pastor knows this, and most find they cannot fight the system.  So every week, they live and die by their stats.

When summer hits, the numbers go down, especially in more affluent communities.  Sometime during the fall, they go back up.  In December, the numbers trend downward as people stay home due to illness or travel for the holidays.  In the spring, the numbers rise again because people feel better and are not traveling.

You can track a pastor’s moods by the seasons.

Pastors are aware they cannot fully control these numbers, but that doesn’t keep them from trying.  On Monday mornings, they are eager to know “how many we had yesterday” and “what the offering was.”  If the attendance and offering were above average, the pastor feels good.  But if the attendance and offering are poor for a few weeks in a row, the pastor wonders if his tenure in that church is over.

I fought the “numbers game” for years, believing they are just one way to measure a pastor’s worth, but not the only way – but evangelicals continue to live and die by them.  Every year, denominations request various numbers from their churches.  They don’t ask who got saved – they want to know how many were baptized (it’s more easily quantifiable).  They don’t ask if God did any miracles – they want to know how much the church gave to missions.

If you want to know how a particular pastor or church is doing, you just open up the denominational annual and look.  It’s all there on one line in black and white.  And for many, those numbers define that pastor’s true worth.

In addition, numbers are a way to gain credibility with the culture.  If I’m telling a co-worker about Jesus, and I attend a church of 50 people, I might feel embarrassed to invite her to my church.  But if I attend a church of 5,000, I feel a sense of pride.  Poor stats seem to reflect poorly on the gospel, while large ones seem to give it more weight.

This is one reason why large churches are growing and smaller churches are shrinking.

For years, I assumed that everybody in the churches I pastored viewed numbers the way I did.  If we had a poor Sunday statistically, I believed it was a frontal lobe issue for others as well.

But it wasn’t.  People didn’t come to pad the stats.

Instead, they came to meet God.  They came to learn Scripture.  They came to fellowship with friends.

In fact, their value systems were often more spiritually-oriented than those of their pastor!

I’ll have more to say about the “numbers game” next time.

How do you feel about church statistics?

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When I was at Fuller Seminary a few years ago, I sat under a well-known professor who is also a prolific author.  My guess is that he was in his late sixties when I took the class.

This Christian leader did not attend a traditional church, even though he’s been identified with a specific denomination nearly his whole life.

Instead, he attended a house church of about 35 people on Sunday evenings.

When I first heard him mention this, I thought he was being a bit rebellious.  Weren’t there scores of already-existing churches within a few minutes’ drive of his home?  Couldn’t they benefit from his worldwide teaching ministry?

At the time, I was probably at the apex of my own pastoral ministry.  In fact, our church was ready to start construction on a new worship center.

Fast forward ahead a few years and matters are very different.

In my last article, I wondered if my wife and I have outgrown the local church.  I certainly hope not.  We need to continue to grow spiritually.  We need to hear the Word of God preached.  We need to use our spiritual gifts.  We need to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

As Joanna Hogg of the Irish group Iona sings in their song “Dancing on the Wall”: “I am part of something that is going to change things for the better.”

We’ll always be a part of the kingdom of God.  And we’ll always be members of the Church Universal.  But what about the local church?

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that my wife and I have entered that season in our lives when some Christians decide to become part-time churchgoers rather than full-time ones.

Let me share two more concerns about the churches I’ve been visiting (the first three were presented in my last post):

Fourth, there are fewer invitations to receive Christ.  I grew up in churches where the pastor gave an altar call at every service.  He invited unbelievers to receive Christ by asking them to leave their seat and walk to the front of the worship center.  Too many pastors back then used manipulative tactics to force people to “walk the aisle” and implied they couldn’t be saved unless they did.  Although this practice is never mentioned in the New Testament, it was a third sacrament in many churches until baby boomers became pastors.  I was so alarmed at what I saw in some churches that I wrote my thesis in seminary on this practice.

But now the pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction.  I honestly cannot remember the last time I was in a church service and a pastor invited unbelievers to pray and receive Christ.

In the church we’ve been attending, many people are being converted, and although we haven’t gone to the membership class, my guess is that that’s the place where people are being won to Christ.

But what about those who choose not to attend the class?

Pastors have differing views on this issue.  A decreasing number of pastors invite unbelievers to receive Christ after every message.  Some rarely if ever do.  In my case, I did so if (a) the passage called for it, or (b) the Holy Spirit prompted me to do so.

Decades after my own conversion, I’m still thrilled when I hear the gospel preached in a biblical and relevant way.  But I’m hearing it preached less and less.

What have you been noticing along this line?

Finally, too many churches act like they constitute the kingdom of God.  Six months after arriving in the Valley of the Sun (it’s only 104 degrees here today), I visited with a denominational executive.  I asked him if there was any kind of annual convention or larger meeting of Christians in the greater Phoenix area, and he told me he didn’t know of any.  (When I was a pastor in Silicon Valley, for example, the National Association of Evangelicals sponsored a monthly luncheon for pastors.)  This leader told me that Phoenix has a Wild West mentality about it and that it tends to be “every man for himself” here.

And maybe “every church for itself” as well.

I’m a local Christian but a global Christian, too.  I like knowing that there are churches and Christians in Western Europe and Eastern Africa as well as in California and Texas.

But it seems to me that more and more church leaders aren’t promoting much about Jesus’ worldwide kingdom outside the four walls of their own buildings.  In the process, it’s easy for a church to give off the impression that “we are the kingdom of God” rather than “we are just a part of the kingdom of God.”

There are exceptions to this, of course, but this is the trend I’ve been seeing.

My favorite verse about the church is Ephesians 5:25 where Paul tells us that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her …”  If Jesus loves the church, then I need to love her as well.  And if Jesus gave His life for His people, I need to do the same.

But Paul is talking in context about the Church Universal, not necessarily a local church.

I agree with Bill Hybels that “the Church is the hope of the world.”

But how does that play out in the 21st century?  Must we all attend services in a church building in our community?  If not, is a house church a legitimate biblical expression of the church in our culture?

And what if we choose not to participate in a local church at all?  (Yes, I know about Hebrews 10:24-25!)

I’m not trying to be a heretic, but I am trying to be provocative.

What do you think about the future of the local church where you live?

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When I was a young man in my twenties and thirties, I met a fair number of professing Christians who regularly missed worship services – either at our church or at the one they attended.  They seemed to have a cavalier attitude about being absent, an attitude that I as a pastor could not relate to.

After all, church was my life.

While I knew that attending church services could not gain salvation for anyone, I believed that it was essential for spiritual growth – and I still do.

But lately, I’ve been wondering.

I’ve attended services at about 25 different churches over the past 18 months, so my observations aren’t based upon going to a mere handful.  I’ve been to small, medium-sized, and large churches, as well as a few mega-churches.

Since growing, cutting-edge churches tend to follow trends, there’s a lot of sameness in our churches today, even though evangelical churches don’t use a common liturgy.

But attending worship is starting to become less meaningful for me, and I’m wondering if I’m all alone on this one.

Let me make some observations about my experiences:

First, the music has been uniformly good.  Most of the churches I’ve attended have bands, and they know what they’re doing.  Some play soft, others play loud.  They all play contemporary praise music, and most mix in a hymn or two.  And I don’t think any band has played longer than 15 minutes, or 4 songs.  In addition, the state of musicianship in our churches has vastly improved over the past decade.

However … too many of the lyrics contain Christian cliches.  What if we declared a moratorium on using words like “praise” and “worship” and “bow” and “adore” and insisted that Christian songwriters quit cranking out songs like they were working for Tin Pan Alley?

Back in the early 1970s, Lovesong, the original Christian rock group, put these lyrics on its pioneer album:

Sing unto the heavens with a brand new song

The one that we’ve been hearing’s been a hit too long

The lyrics sound confused as if they don’t belong

So sing unto the Lord and sing with feeling

I’m starting to get to the point where I’m content to miss the first few minutes of the worship time, and I’ve never felt that way before.  Is it just me, or is there an increasing sameness about worship music today?

Second, the prayers are so short they’re practically meaningless.  In my humble opinion, they sound perfunctory.  To quote Keith Green out of context, “no one hurts, no one aches, no one even sheds one tear.”  I’m non-charismatic in my approach to worship, but the prayers I’ve been hearing lately have one thing in common: let’s get through this prayer quickly so we can say we prayed … and move on to the good stuff.

But in the process, we don’t really touch heaven, and heaven doesn’t really touch us.

Many pastors operate by the philosophy, “When in doubt, pray.”  At one church my wife and I attended recently, the pastor prayed six or seven times during the service – and it seemed a bit much.  But I’m longing for one meaningful time of prayer during the service so we can know we touched the face of God.

Sometimes, the pastor will offer that prayer – and I love to hear a pastor’s heart poured out for his congregation.  Other times, someone else might encourage people to pray silently right where they’re seated.

But let’s do some planning so that prayers aren’t just whizzing by us during a service.

We can pray a little longer, a little more intensely, and much, much better.

Amen?

Third, I long to hear a pastor teach from one passage of Scripture.  I’ve heard messages from Genesis 1, Exodus 1, Joshua 4, Nehemiah 13, Song of Solomon, Luke 22, John 10, Acts 1, and Acts 28 (among other passages) – but I’ve mostly heard topical messages.  (And I can’t recall one message from any of the epistles.)  While I like topical messages – and usually preached a high percentage of them myself – I’m concerned about the lack of biblical ignorance among Christians today.

We don’t seem to know our Bibles anymore.

Let me use the church we’ve been attending as an example.  The pastor does very little exposition of Scripture.  Instead, he preaches topically, referring to and quoting key verses.  There’s a place for that, and he does a great job.  But if you want to study a biblical passage or book, where in the church can you do that anymore?

Can you do it in small groups?  The groups at our church are designed around discussing the pastor’s message from the week before.

Can you do it in Bible classes?  The only Bible classes that exist are unadvertised.

The church encourages us to read our Bibles through in a year – a very good thing to do – but where in the church can people learn how to interpret and study Scripture for themselves?

Instead, it’s done for us by a professional.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems as if Protestant churches are starting to go Roman Catholic: only the priest is qualified to interpret the Bible.

What do you think about what I’ve shared?

I’ll share my final few observations next time.

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