When we were growing up, the church had a strategy, and it worked for a season. We believed in the church version of Field of Dreams - if we build it, they will come. We built bigger buildings and provided more and better programming. We attracted people to our churches, and many of them came.
This strategy worked when people in our nation identified with church. After all, we were founded as one nation under God. For us, a clearer understanding of our missional context has motivated us to abandon this regional megachurch strategy. According to Gallup poll research, one-third of all Americans now consider themselves non-religious, saying that, “Religion is not an important part of their daily life and that they seldom or never attend religious services.”
Couple this with the fact that Americans are no longer motivated to go out of their way for many things, including church. We can access everything we want electronically from the comfort of our own homes. If you don’t believe us, just consider the fate of the American shopping mall. No new enclosed malls have been built since 2006, and Robin Lewis, author of The New Rules of Retail, predicts fully half of all our malls will close in the next ten years.
If we’re going to reach the millions who have yet to hear the gospel, we need to rethink our current invite strategy. Since we aren’t going to get them to “come and see” what we’re doing, we need to figure out ways to take the good news to the places they live, work, and play.
We need to figure out ways to take the good news to the places they live, work, and play.
When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Have you ever walked through the food court of a mall and been offered a free food sample? The restaurant giving out the free samples is hoping that one taste of their product will convince you to buy your own entree. Imagine if instead of giving you the free sample, they gave you an invite card to come to a taste sampling four or five days away in another location. How many people would go to that trouble?
Yet this is the invite strategy many churches have adopted. In fact, we have often taken it further than that. If we can’t motivate our people to hand out invite cards, we go ahead and do a direct-mail piece. We think that people will want to come and see what we have to offer.
The ever-shrinking Christian population and changing U.S. trends demand that we reconsider this strategy. No clever social-media push, pithy sermons series, trendy worship style, or relevant programming is going to draw them in. Honestly, they could care less about all our bells and whistles, and most of them just aren’t going to come.
The task before us is massive. If we want to turn back lostness in North America, we need to stop talking about faster addition and start considering strategies for multiplication.
Our Family Church Strategy is this: abandon the regional megachurch model and create a network of neighborhood churches. Our method is to mobilize disciples to make disciples who make disciples.
"Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved" (Acts 2:46-47).
In the book of Acts, we see that the movement of the Holy Spirit spread like a wildfire in the ancient world. Jesus commissioned the apostles, and within weeks there were already more than eight thousand new believers! Everybody was telling everybody. Churches were being planted left and right.
The apostles didn’t have years of seminary or formal training under their belts, but the did have the power of the Holy Spirit and the things they had seen and heard. Our challenge is to take what we have seen and heard about Jesus and tell everybody - to multiply disciples by the thousands and millions.
Excerpted from Turning Everyday Conversations in Gospel Conversations by Jimmy Scroggins and Steve Wright. © 2016 Family Church. Used by permission.