Tuesday, March 05, 2013

If Something's Not Working...

What I'm about to share might infuriate some people. It makes certain pastors and church leaders really angry when you equate the church to a business. It makes them even angrier when you suggest that the church might benefit from adopting a few business 'best practices'. In my experience, however, business succeeds when they have three things:

  • Something people need (or want) that can't be found elsewhere
  • An engaging story to tell about what they offer
  • An effective way to deliver their product to the largest number of people
This is rather simplistic, but this post is not about the complexities of accomplishing those three things. It's actually about challenging the church to get serious about point number three. We have an engaging story to tell about something the whole world is desperately searching for. Spiritual searching has only intensified around the world over the years. People are on a quest for meaning, purpose and being connected to something larger than themselves. With such a hungry audience searching diligently and the incredible message of Jesus Christ that can satisfy that hunger it might be baffling as to why the church is in decline.

That is unless you're willing to look at point number three. Some deep statistical research will tell you that on any given Sunday less than 18% of the U.S. population is in church. And while church attendance as a raw number has remained fairly steady the general population grows year to year at a pace the church is not keeping up with resulting in a declining percentage of the population going to church. Simply put, our delivery system is failing to reach an audience. If this were a business the delivery system would've changed long ago. Instead, even new churches that experience initial growth offer only slight variations of the same delivery system and attract a fair number of Christians who are prone to moving from church to church, but aren't attracting truly new 'customers'.

With our churches, our charities and all our ministries we who follow Christ must begin taking an objective, searching and fearless look at how we share Jesus with our communities and the world. It's time to admit to ourselves that we have made our delivery systems as sacred, if not more so, than God Himself. Until we can get to a point of acknowledging that only God is sacred and every aspect of our delivery system is subject to change we should prepare ourselves for the continuing decline of the church as we know it.

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