How to Be a Church For Unchurched People
8 Shifts the Church Needs to Make:
- From Presentation to Experience:
- 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
- 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
- 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…
- Need to move from evidence to explanation
- As if there are people who never read the bible or heard the gospel
- 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
- 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
- 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!