Church Practices

Church should be the most exciting, engaging, purposeful community on the planet!

I invest considerable time after workplace Bible studies, and while providing pastoral counseling, in conversation with people who have left church while still embracing varying levels of faith. As a pastor, I also invest considerable time with church leaders discussing why people have left church, and how we might encourage them to return. It’s rare that the reasons church leaders think people have left church are anywhere close to the reasons people tell me they have left church.

Church leaders usually attribute apathy, distraction, unwillingness to repent of sin, laziness, personal conflicts, lack of faith or spiritual maturity, or overall busyness as reasons people have left church. Yet people most often tell me that they have left church because they feel bored, disengaged, and purposeless in church.

Read that again – people “feel bored, disengaged, and purposeless in church.”

Wow! Church should be the most exciting, engaging, and purposeful community on the planet!

While church leaders are assuming people have left because they are apathetic, distracted, unrepentant, lazy, conflicted, spiritually immature, or busy, people are leaving because they are bored.

Some church leaders have rightly assessed this boredom. Yet, while they may be ahead of the curve in recognizing the challenge, most of their responses – adding lights, newer music, live drama, videos…, while appealing to some, are simply not addressing the inevitable boredom that comes when people longing for purpose and engagement are only offered the opportunity to spectate or simply sing along.

Then many churches get caught in endless discussion between what I’ll call traditionalists and innovators, with the so-called traditionalists staunchly defending “the way we’ve always done things,” and the eye-rolling innovators too quickly dismissing the anxiety of the traditionalists. This leaves the actual concerns of people who have left church far behind the rolling emotional conflict over the personal preferences of those left behind.

Perhaps we’re addressing the wrong church practices. If we’re simply changing the architecture, décor, digital aids, on-stage performances, and styles of music & preaching, yet still asking people to put their phones and drinks away, sit in rows and be quiet except when singing, have we done our best to address the issue of people feeling bored, disengaged, and purposeless?

As a small church preacher, I have a unique vantage point from which to watch people during each worship service. While everyone who has been in our little church community for years, knows the unspoken rules of worship, I love to watch visitors and those newer folks who don’t yet know proper church etiquette, especially those under 40. While some members may find their behavior wholly disrespectful, I love watching them discreetly video short clips of the service, take photos of the stained glass, post on social media, lean over to their friends with questions or comments during the sermon, or even raise their hands and ask a question during the sermon. They want to engage!

We don’t have to rebuke them or even give them disapproving looks to shut that down. We do so by never joining them. They are not socially unaware. As they stay, they become more attuned to the social norms, stop engaging, and drift into the tedious practice of church created in a social context that is continually shrinking. Then they, like droves before them, and even more to come, eventually leave feeling bored, disengaged, and purposeless.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

I can’t find anywhere in the Gospels that Jesus asked his followers to sit quietly in rows, pews or theatre seats, without food and drink, sing a prescribed number of songs, with or without drums, and listen to preaching without the opportunity to comment or question. They discussed, questioned, engaged, served, and spoke for and with one another. I don’t think any New Testament Church even had a building for the first 300 years. But that’s another conversation. I’m not suggesting that we sell the buildings and sit on the grass.

However, I find myself wondering if it’s time to replace or at least enhance some of the core church practices that we consider traditional with much older Biblical practices. We tend to delegate specific parts of our Sunday morning worship services to music, prayer, preaching, and communion. Then we relegate fellowship, discipleship, and serving to other times of the day and/or week.

In these well-defined silos:

·      Fellowship can become more social activity that life-sharing.

·      Discipleship can become more informational then relational.

·      Preaching can become more didactic than interactive.

·      Serving can become more like work without the engagement of others and connectedness to clear purpose.

·      Music can become more programmed and less expressive.

·      Prayer & communion risk becoming more ritual than personal.

But I don’t see such division of church practices in the New Testament. In fact, the New Testament models tend to continuously intertwine the church practices of preaching, fellowship, music, serving, discipleship, prayer, and communion in the same settings.

What if we could consistently follow that model? Perhaps it would be extraordinarily difficult for a big church of thousands of people, but what if replacing spectating with engagement could reverse the trend of current church practices appealing to an ever-shrinking percentage of our communities? What if we could humble ourselves, step outside our comfort zones and beyond our personal preferences, stop debating the practices that ultimately leave people feeling disconnected, and engage everyone with God, His Word, AND one another every week.

A few weeks ago, our church had our Sunday morning worship service in our fellowship hall. The A/C was not broken, and we were not recarpeting the sanctuary. We served one another breakfast, sat at round tables, sang, shared discussion questions, drank coffee and OJ as we interacted with the preacher during the sermon, and left the pews and pulpit empty. I know, heresy, right?  

It was awesome! I did not hear one complaint. People loved the engagement with the preacher and one another. We laughed together as we served. Eggs and waffles were dropped on the floor. Others jumped to contribute with paper towels and cleaner in hand.

As great as it was, we could have improved the experience. What if each table shared their own prayers and prayed together as a table, rather than one person in the room praying? Certainly, repetition would encourage more discussion and questions. Maybe we don’t serve breakfast every week, maybe we do. What if the responsibilities for preparations were shared by more people? Certainly, we can improve the sound system, and online experience…

I don’t know that we’ve found the solution. But I do know that identifying the problem is a big step toward a solution. If we will just listen to people who have left the church, it’s obvious that it’s not Jesus or his bride who is coming up short, but our church practices are leaving people feeling bored, disengaged, and purposeless. We can’t keep doing the same things and expecting different results.

Meet me in the fellowship hall this Sunday Grace Pointe!