Maybe you have some folks you want to drive from your church, but that’s not the focus of this post. My concern here is what churches do that inadvertently drives attenders toward other churches. Here are some ways to drive attenders from you:
- Preach something other than the Word of God. It’s true that preaching the Word also sometimes confronts and offends in a healthy way, but here’s the point: people who come looking for a Word from God won’t stay if you give them something other than the Bible.
- Have a boring, disorganized, irrelevant worship service. Right or wrong, the people we’re trying to reach have little patience for anything that lacks excellence or relevance. Enough churches are offering solid worship that folks don’t linger long where it’s not done well.
- Provide nothing for kids and teens. I’m not arguing here for always separating families in all we do as a church, but I am arguing for providing equipping and teaching that are life-stage specific. Even in COVID days, we can offer something to next generations.
- Let ministry needs fall through the cracks. If you want to drive people away from your church, have nothing in place to hold them up when life is hard. Let them face difficulties alone, and they’ll look for a more caring congregation.
- Ignore people. Perhaps this wording sounds harsh, but that’s what it feels like when no one pays attention to a guest or member of a church. If folks can slide out the back door without our noticing, something’s wrong in the church.
- Provide no growth process. It seems that some churches believe people will grow significantly in their faith simply by attending regularly. When attenders realize their growth is minimal, those who want to mature will look elsewhere.
- Judge people, and offer no redemption. The Bible is itself confrontational. A call to repent is not an optional part of our message. If we judge and never get to redemption and hope, however, we’ll likely lose some struggling attenders.
- Talk about, rather than do, ministry. If you want to drive away young folks, make sure you provide no hands-on, experiential ministry opportunities. Require the staff to do all the ministry so that no one else can get involved.
- Don’t keep your word. Integrity among believers matters. Few people want to walk alongside leaders they can’t trust.
- Fall in sin. This is where this post gets really personal. Somebody’s watching you, and it’s possible somebody will leave your church if you fall into sin. Your failure can be as influential as your faithfulness.
What would you add to this list?
This has become something of a hobbyhorse for me lately and you yourself have touch on it in several articles—people who go to church but otherwise they are indistinguishable from their non-Christian friends, neighbors, and colleagues. They do not live their lives in accordance with Jesus’ teaching or model their lives upon his example. They have not been discipled, not been adequately discipled, or have no taken to heart what discipling that they did receive. Their church’s preachers do not sufficiently emphasize the importance of living a life consistent with Jesus’ teaching and example.
Along with the members of a church being too judgmental, one of the main reasons that university students and other young adults that I know (and a number of older adults too) have given for dropping out of a church is that the members of the church do not talk or act like disciples of Jesus. They frequently tell the same story—believing in Jesus was presented to them as “fire insurance,” their get-out-of-hell-free card.
I have gone on Facebook and other social media websites and I have encountered pastors and others who identifying themselves as Christians lashing out at people who hold a different opinion form them on one issue or another, portraying them as wicked and threatening, and ascribing evil motives to them. In at least one case I personally knew a number of parties on the other side of the issue and knew or a fact that they were not in any way like how they were described. They were Christians who took their faith seriously and were doing their best to live their faith. Since the pastor in question was supplying my church I had second thoughts about staying at the church, recalling that when Jesus’ love commandments or the Golden Rule appears in the lessons appointed for the day, he consistently skips over this teaching and preaches on something else.
Other people that I know have left a church because they came to realize that a church is toxic and is not a spiritually healthy place for themselves and their children. My older brother and his wife decided to go back to church when they had children. But the church that they attended consisted largely of older people and they objected to the presence of children in the service. My brother and his wife concluded that if their children were not welcome at the church, they were not welcome.
They next allowed one of my sister-in-law’s younger sisters to take the girls to her church. The oldest girl came back from church one Sunday and told her parents that the children’s ministry volunteer who taught her Sunday school class cut off the head of a doll and told the class that God would cut off their heads if they were bad. She was quite upset. After that incident my mother and I agreed to take the girls to my mother’s church which I had attended as a teenager. God also used that incident to prompt me to take an interest in my own spiritual well-being as well as my nieces’.
Changing Rooms and only announcing to a select few the new room number instead of announcing to the church and all the people in the ministry.
This happened in a Church of 8000 a ministry advertised the wrong room number on a sign as you walk into the church and the leadership of the ministry reasoning was that the ones who need to know, will know the right room to go to,
If we judge and never get to redemption and hope, however, we’ll likely lose some struggling attenders.
You will lose more than struggling attenders, you will lose entire generations including me. I was condemned to hell more times in an Evangelical church than I care to remember. That is not what Christianity is supposed to be.