That creates this strange dynamic where you try to get everyone who attends your church to do everything. And if you left them out, they got mad because their program didn’t grow. The people who led each group were also convinced that their group was the best thing for people, so it deserved a prime spot. We had about 400 or 500 people attending, and we were a program-based church at the time.Įvery group was fighting for new members, so the pressure was on to get people to join.
I remember when our church was at this stage. Trying To Get Everyone To Do EverythingĪll of this leads us to the second issue insider-focused churches struggle with within their bulletin and announcements: Trying to get everyone to do everything. The purpose of a welcome in church is to welcome people, not announce 18 things. You’re likely just catering to the needs and wants of insiders. If you don’t know what that one thing is, you’re not geared to outsiders. You want to meet Jesus, or at least learn more about him.Īnd if the welcome isn’t geared toward that, you’ve missed the opportunity to connect your first-time guest with their most important objective: Taking the next step in their journey.Īnd the answer to taking the next step is not to do 18 things. If you’re coming to church for the first time, the last thing you want to hear is a long laundry list of things you’re not interested in. Leaders feel torn, trying to please everyone, and so they cave to the ‘one more announcement’ syndrome because they fear the wrath of whoever they left out.īut think about it. Why is this such a trap for smaller and mid-sized churches? Here’s why. What about really big churches, you ask? Well, you’ll likely never get to 3,000 if you don’t solve this problem first. But if you’re a church of 300, you feel the pressure of everyone trying to get their message across. If you have a church of 30, there’s probably not much going on.
The purpose of a welcome is to welcome people, not announce 18 things.Ĭhurches often feel the tension of announcements as their church grows. If they’re longer than three minutes, you’re probably geared toward insiders more than you realize. I know this is a weird one to start with, but really, how long are your announcements? There's a gravitational pull to sacrifice the church's mission by catering to the church's members.
With that in mind, here are five tell-tale signs your church isn’t welcoming to your outsiders, no matter your best intentions. They’ve given in to the subtle but relentless pull of the needs of insiders. Worse, others think they’re geared to outsiders when in reality, they’re not. Some church leaders drown in the sinkhole of trying to satisfy the escalating demands of their unappeasable members while they watch the real mission go up in flames. The truth is there’s a gravitational pull inside almost every church to sacrifice the church’s mission by catering to the church’s members.Īnd while you can’t ignore the needs of your members, there’s a strange paradox that’s true about spiritual maturity: the best way to become spiritually mature is to stop focusing on your needs and begin focusing on Christ and others. So, they scratch their heads and wonder why outsiders don’t flock toward their church. And most leaders simply miss the signs that this is the case. There’s a strange tension to which leaders are often blind: As much as they say they want to reach outsiders, their services and the entire organization are frequently geared toward insiders.Īs a result, when someone they’re trying to reach shows up, it’s easy for them to feel like they don’t fit in or believe church isn’t for them. But are our churches as outsider-friendly as we’d like to believe? After all, the church is one of the only missions on the planet that exists for the sake of its non-members. Pretty much every church leader I talk to says they long to reach their community.
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