This just hit me
There I was, in the middle of a Church Council meeting, trying to explain the difference between intentionally focusing on visitors and guests and intentionally focusing on ourselves. I was on a role (my wife says I was beating a dead horse) about how we need to enter into the mindset of a first-time visitor when, out of the blue, I asked the fateful question:
“Haven’t any of you ever been church shopping?”
And it hit me by the blank stares I was getting from so many of them:
They hadn’t.
As a matter of fact, several of the people in that meeting have never, ever been out looking for a church. They were born and raised in this church. And some of the others, when they did move to town from another location, simply went to this church because they were Methodist and this was a Methodist church. All of the discussion of what people look for in a church was lost on these people because they had absolutely no experience, knowledge or background in what I was saying.
And I wonder how many other churches there are out there who have leaders and members who have similar backgrounds of never searching for a church home, and new clergy come in trying to explain to them why we need to change certain things to make a church more visitor-friendly, and the pastor might as well be speaking ancient Greek because the people have no frame of reference for the comments. I wonder how many pastors can avoid frustration if they realized this aspect of some of our congregations.
I wonder how my Council will respond to this meeting…
Hi Steve,
I can understand your comments. When we get into a routine we can lose track of our discipleship responsibilities. You’ve taken a step to help others remember that we are called to spread the Word. We can all be more effective if we understand our past, present and ever-changing future.
Here in downtown Utah, we are undergoing some big changes after 103 years of operations and this has also come up in discussions and sermons. Our pastor just put a wonderful letter in the monthly bulletin that addresses the subject. It is “The Parable of the Lifesaving Station” in the June 2008 bulletin at http://firstmethodistslc.org/index/html There is also a link to the church site from my page.
I look forward to hearing more about how you and the rest of the council address the issues of discipleship.
Sincerely,
methodistchick
Hi again,
I also want to recommend a fun book for you to read. It’s called “Orbiting the Giant Hairball.” I just read it for studies in organizational change. It is fun and informative.
Methodistchick
Methodistchick,
I’ll check out the book…with a title like that, it has to be interesting.
I can definitely resonate with what you are going through in Utah. I would imagine it is especially difficult there, being so much in the minority, to get an established group of people motivated to reach out.