How to Be a Church For Unchurched People

8 Shifts the Church Needs to Make:

  1. From Presentation to Experience: 
  1. From invitation to relationship
  • Sharing examples of what it looks like to interact with a non-Christian
  • Holding the Christians hand through the process
  • The average Christian doesn’t have any non-Christian friends
  1. From Physical Barriers to digital barriers
  • What barriers exist digitally?
  • Once you remove a digital barrier you need to think through a digital front door…
  • The average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds to get them interested
  1. From a Physical Front door to digital front doors
  • The first front door someone enters is digital
  • Who is website designed to serve? How about Facebook page? Instagram? Twitter?
  • Think everything through digitally…
  1. Need to move from evidence to explanation
  • As if there are people who never read the bible or heard the gospel
  1. From Attraction to Penetration
  • Contemporary music, casual dress, coffee is no longer an appeal but an expectation.
  • Attractional model was designed for those who were turned off to church
  • Its not about making it more user friendly
  • Keep attractional because it is assumed
  • Penetration is going where people are
    • Use social media to create pop up events where people are
    • Craft breweries
    • Arts and craft fairs are at craft breweries
    • Pop up food truck rallies and more as a shift in strategy from come and see to go and connect
    • The real frontier is this pop up
  1. From reflective to relevant culture
  • Real relevance has to deal with engaging the issues and challenges of the day
    • Racial tension
    • Porn
    • Divorce
    • Parenting in age of social media
    • LGBT
  • Relevance is more about what you speak about than your style
  • Must allow for spiritual commentary
  • The vast majority of churches focus on how hipster we can be
  • Quit worrying about alienating people, the world needs a Christian response to these issues
  1. From Welcoming to Accepting
  • People walking through our doors didn’t test how accepting we were in the past
  • Your church has to be truly accepting of racial diversity
  • Embracing it
  • Acceptance does not mean affirmation
  • Were they welcomed the same as everyone else?

1 dynamic present in all churches beyond these 8 shifts:

  • The method of achieving the mission must be ruthlessly evaluated. Continually prune away what is ineffective at reaching the unchurched.
  • Killed fall festival because we weren’t about reaching Christians but unchurched
  • There can be no sacred cows
  • You’re not in the small group business but the one-another business
  • Your business is to evangelize the lost, assimilate the evangelized, disciple the assimilated, unleash the disciple
  • Missionally you are in the church for the unchurched business…
  • Its not about you, its about the people who aren’t here yet
  • Remind them that lost people matter to God and help individual members remember their need for it
  • Jesus said to do both, make disciples and teach them to obey everything
  • Its not evangelism or discipleship it is both

You are discipled for the mission!