TWWADI: Church Killer

OK, What is TWWADI?

It’s “The Way We’ve Always Done It” Another word for this is “Tradition.” I think I’d rather use TWWADI because I’ve learned that as soon as I say tradition, I have a fight on my hands…

Let’s get this out-of-the-way right at the beginning: I’m not saying that all traditions are bad, but I am saying that all traditions can be dangerous, just like matches aren’t bad, but they can be dangerous.  Here’s what I’ve observed over the years: People within a given local church develop over a period of time a certain way of doing things.  These things are safe, regular, routine, predictable and comforting.  After a while, people attend worship and look forward to their traditions, in fact when they visit another church while out-of-town, they can almost feel like it wasn’t really “church” because that church had slightly different traditions and ways of doing things.

For example, I’ve had people tell me that if the music in worship wasn’t from a hymnal, it just didn’t feel like worship to them.  This is TWWADI.  The next thing I’ve noticed is that once a local group has TWWADI in sufficient quantity, their spiritual growth comes to a grinding halt.  There is a very good reason for this, for you see, TWWADI happens in a setting in which our personal preferences take a priority position, and what is the manifestation of personal preference called in Bible terms?  SELF, yes that thing we were supposed to have put to death.  A church that is all about TWWADI is almost always also all about self.  If you don’t believe me, try tweaking the TWWADI and see what happens…

Here is a trustworthy saying: A person who is mature in Christ, who is a selfless servant of the Lord, fully understands that his or her personal preferences regarding worship and church, are utterly irrelevant.  To be clear, I am not talking about aspects of worship that are Biblical, I am talking about things that are not Biblical, such as the style of music or preaching.

We know that worship in the New Testament contained singing spiritual songs, fellowship, the “apostles’ teaching” the breaking of bread and of prayer.  It is safe to say that nearly all scholars would say that in modern terms this would be music, fellowship, Communion, a sermon (or lesson) from Scripture and prayer.  The style of the music, the way Communion is served, the time and style of prayer, the way the lesson is given and the manner and nature of the fellowship are all TWWADI. When you reach the point where the people can go through the motions without really giving much of a thought to anything, they will grow no further spiritually.

Most traditional churches in America, and by that I mean most churches that do things the way they’ve always done them, are following customs and practices that would have been reasonably familiar in the 19th Century; certainly they would have been familiar in the 1930′s and 1960′s.  In the late 19th Century, the church in general was very influential in the culture, and non-believers who would have come in to hear the message would have felt reasonably comfortable; the same is true of the 1930′s.  By the 1960′s, however, the culture had shifted quite a bit.  Music had changed, language had changed and expectations had changed… and large numbers of people were no longer attending church.  After 50 years, most of a generation quit attending church, and the influence of the church in general in the culture was pretty much lost.  What do you think America will look like if this trend continues for another 50 years?

A significant reason that the church began to shrink over this time was that its TWWADI didn’t change when the culture did, at least not to any significant degree.  At the same time, congregations held on to TWWADI ever more strongly as a bulwark against the crazy culture around them and they didn’t grow spiritually in Christ so their outreach stagnated and became less and less effective, resulting in a gospel that was seldom spread.  Oh, I know there were very hard-working people during this time.  There were evangelists like Billy Graham who did wonderful work, for instance, but their efforts didn’t reverse this tidal shift to darkness within the culture in general, nor did they stem the flow of people out of their local churches.

Some church groups did try to change their TWWADI, but in a large measure, they did the wrong things, and rather than change the way they presented the message, they compromised the message itself, and God will not bless such things.  Some tried becoming more “socially relevant” but this too was not the kind of “making disciples” that the church is called to do, and their efforts have largely been in vain.

Yes, TWWADI is a potential church-killer, both on an individual basis and on a larger level.  In the next post on this topic, let’s take a look at specific things that make up TWWADI and see if there can be change within local churches that can stem this tide.

Hint: Yes, there are, and without ever compromising the message of the gospel or the purity of Scripture!

Pausing to Take Stock

So far, we’ve looked at how we got started in our church, turning it around so that it could grow.  In this little narrative, our point of beginning was a church that had little chance of surviving for very long, and we’ve gone up to a point where it was just about ready to come alive.  This is a good point to pause and take stock of where we had been and see where we would go…

When I first visited this church in 2005, being new to the area and looking for a “home” we came in one Sunday morning and discovered that nobody would talk to us; they stared at us.  After the service was over, the preacher and youth minister did say good-bye at the door.  On the way, my wife asked me where I thought we should visit the next week, and I told her that I thought we should return, and she was shocked. “That is the coldest church I’ve ever been in,” was her reply, but we did return the following week and and two people did actually speak.  After saying ‘hello’ both asked us why were had come back… Several weeks later, more people would speak, and they always asked us why we were “coming here?”

Interesting, don’t you think?

This was a church that was completely turned inward, a place where the people believed that the church was there fore the sole purpose of meeting their needs. “Seeking and saving the lost” would be accomplished by the church writing a check for a hundred bucks and sending it to a mission organization.  Of course, in a congregation with such a self-centered notion of Christianity, nobody would really want to take the gospel to the community.  Within that group, everything was wonderful, everyone was kind to the other, so that was good enough.  The Bible was taught, and most people had a good handle on systematic theology, but no clue about applied theology.  I would imagine that they could have had a great team at the “Bible Bowl” trivia contest!  And, as a result, when the last one died, you could put the lock on the door. As we continue, I’ll tell you more about how things were along the way…

At the point where we left off yesterday, all of this had changed.  This was still an early time, but our people began to have a point of view that was Biblical rather than strictly selfish.  They wanted to serve Jesus Christ selflessly, rather than complain that they weren’t being served.  People who had never been willing to do anything for someone else were now asking what they could do to help others…

Of course, there was still much work to do, for only about a quarter had come to this point, while the rest were complaining that we weren’t “taking care” of their needs.  For the record, these “needs” most of the time were the needs of being told that they needn’t worry about serving anyone else, that they were most important, and that their children need not worrying about ever not being the center of everyone’s attention at all times.  Yes, maybe this is a harsh thing to say, but I’m only reporting here… I was told these things!

If you were to peek in at us, you would have noticed that our average age was still in the 50-70 range, you would have noticed that we had a high percentage of families in which the husband almost never came to church and that our music was very poor, and our preaching was frequently lame, and always very traditional.  You would also have noticed that people tended to arrive late, services didn’t start on time, and that afterwards, people left very quickly… but this was about to change.

Vision Rollout: Phase Two

The first phase of our introduction of our church’s Vision Statement was in our last post, and it included a little bit of showmanship to get the people to focus on something that had never before happened in our church: Leadership.  We got their attention by producing immediate results they could see and touch by redecorating and repairing the church building.  This was a good thing to do, and it succeeded, but it was a minor thing because it was lacking in eternal results.  Phase 2 was the important part, for this phase was designed to begin the process of spiritual growth in the people by teaching them the Word of God in a way that they had not experienced previously.

Before I get into those particulars, it might be helpful to mention that while our phase 1 portion wasn’t something that contained eternal significance directly, it did contain a vital element that no Christian leader should overlook in our culture: It resulted in the people giving the leaders “permission” to take them to the next step.  This was not by vote or referendum, it’s much more subtle than that.  People will follow your leadership to the extent that you have some kind of a “position”.  If you are the pastor, they will respect your position as pastor for a time.  If you produce, they will allow to to lead them some more; if you don’t then sooner or later they will stop following you and you will become irrelevant, or worse, a joke.  The leadership of our church had not produced in their capacity as pastor or elder for a very long time; the place was more like a social club than a real church; sorry, but it’s true.  To run out and announce a vision statement and tell everybody that starting now we mean business might have amused people, but it wouldn/t inspire them to take us seriously.  By simply fixing the place up and giving it a whole new look, the people allowed themselves to give the next and much more significant part a chance, thus I say we gained “permission” to lead.  It wasn’t in a literal sense, but it was real.

The plan was to change the way our preaching was done so that it would be paired with our Adult Sunday School and driven by the class content.  Our class would center on books of the New Testament that have a lot to say about discipleship, the church and living as a follower of Christ: In short, we were teaching discipleship.

We ran into a problem.  Our Sr. Minister was an old school preacher who was going to do things his way; and he was preaching sermons that were essentially the same ones he preached in the early 1970′s.  The way that I like to describe this is that they were so filled with grace that it was hard to discern truth.  With that said, the gentleman is a wonderful guy and has an awesome heart for the Lord, but this wasn’t enough.  In class, however, we were pretty much on fire! Of course, you can guess what resulted.  The third of our adults who attended class were saying things like, “Wow, I never saw that before” and “this is amazing, I didn’t ever get it before” and so on.  I was teaching it, and I focused the lessons from Colossians, Philippians, 1 Peter, and 1 Timothy on self, traditions, service, and the church and took it to a high school level instead of the typical Sunday school 8th grade level.  During this time, as a change of pace, I also worked in topical studies on Messianic prophecy, the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24-25) and Biblical Covenant.  We also did a special weekend workshop on Antichrist. Note, that Messianic prophecy, Olivet Discourse and Antichrist increased the number of people who attended because of the fascination people seem to have on these kinds of topics, so you can say that we increased the number of people who attended class, and increased therefore the number of people who might be challenged to seriously follow Christ. Again, this was by deliberate strategy. This went from the fall of 2009 through the first part of 2011.

At the same time, we introduced something entirely different.  We called it Bible “U”.  Bible “U” was a class taught on Sunday night that was at an undergraduate college level.  You had to buy a textbook, there were homework assignments and midterm and final.  We ran Bible “U” for a year and a half and it was a great success, but maybe not in quite the way you’d expect.  You see, the purposes of Bible “U” were twofold.  First, our entire leadership team attended.  This was a chance to train them to be leaders.  Second, it was to identify who the next generation of leaders would be, and our of this has come an awesome group of leaders!

Going to Bible “U” was something that required spending money, being inconvenienced and a commitment to finish what you start… and in the process, you could also learn some “big boy” applied theology.  This was incredibly important to us because we were a church of little Bible scholars who could quote chapter and verse on most anything, but who had no concept of application of chapter and verse.  Learning Bible facts is all well and good for a Bible trivia game, but the Word of God is not trivia!  Application into real life is what changes lives for Christ.

I hope you are still with me in this post, because the end game in all of this education, growing up and training was relational small groups.  Bible “U” gave us our small group leaders.

Relational Learning

Everything I mentioned for phase 2 has been classroom learning.  Now, let’s be clear, there is nothing wrong with classroom learning, but it isn’t really effective “discipleship” either.

Consider how Jesus interacted with His disciples.  They had relationships on a personal level.  They ate together, travelled together, talked together, sat around the campfire together and Jesus taught them in a relational way; they could see Him putting His teachings into practice. They built relationships of trust together, they built relationships of accountability to gether…

This is quite difficult to do in a classroom where people don’t want to speak up or talk about private things.  How do you hold people personally accountable in a classroom without humiliation or embarrassment?  You really don’t, but in a small group setting like Jesus had with His disciples, these things begin to happen naturally as the people get to know one another on a personal level.

This was the real goal.

The Vision Rollout

We’ve been going through some ides on how to turn a church around so that it can grow both spiritually and numerically and begin to prosper for Christ.  Yesterday, we left off at the point where our leadership adopted a vision statement for the church which set out the elements contained in the “Great Commission” given by our Lord in Matthew 28:18-20.  Today, let’s pick up where we left off and I’ll tell you how we announced it to our people.

Since the vision our leadership adopted for our church was so very important to our future, we decided to make a really big splash to impress upon our people how important this was going to be in the life of our church. We set a date which was something like September 6, 2009 as the “official” roll out date.  In the four or five weeks leading up to that time, we advertised this special date and set about sprucing up the building.  This may sound strange to you, but it was a deliberate strategy to grab the attention of our congregation.  For one thing, the building needed a whole lot of “sprucing up.”  For another, it gave us an opportunity to win some of our very long-time members over to our way of thinking, for we were aware that if we try to do anything differently, there were some really wonderful people who would oppose us.  In one particular case, I recruited one of the most influential and intelligent ladies in our church to take charge of the redecoration of the church, a lady who really loved the place and wanted to make improvements that were long overdue.

By bringing her into the project, she became an ally to it rather than a potential critic, and since she was very influential with the ‘long-timers’ (the church had been founded in her living room) our new-fangled notions gained a hearing; very important!

We painted, we cleaned, we got new furniture… we gained immediate results that everybody could see and touch: we gained credibility for a leadership that badly needed it.  We also had a six-week sermon series leading up to the big day; two sermons from the Sr. Minister, two from the assistant minister and two from me, each dealing with an aspect of the purpose of the church.  You can guess which of us got to deliver the two “tough” ones!

This all came off with incredible success.  People joined in the work who seldom did much of anything, and the facilities got a whole new look to them which would help us as time went on; more about the “look” later in this series.

In the next post, I’ll tell you what we did for “phase 2″ of our rollout, which was all about spiritual growth…

Vision

Where there is no vision, the people perish

Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)

Of all of the things that I have seen, the one that is most destructive for any local church body is a lack of a vision.  Gossip can be dealt with, divisions can happen but they can be dealt with; how can you deal with a lack of vision?  This results in a church that goes nowhere.  It might amble on for a while, but then someone comes up with a really great idea, and there is no way to tell if that idea will move the church forward or sideways because nobody has any thought about where to go.

Sometimes Christians feel that churches should exist to meet the needs of those less fortunate, so they push for programs to meet those needs… and the church dies, but nobody can figure out why.  Didn’t Jesus urge His followers to help the poor and sick?  Yes, He did, but that wasn’t why He established His church!

We know exactly why Jesus established His church, it’s in the church’s Commission found in Matthew 28:18-20:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,  and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

If this is what we, as the Body of Christ are commanded to do, doesn’t it stand to reason that we should have a vision in our local churches that encompasses this imperative?  I would say so!

I found myself in a church that utterly lacked direction and vision, and had been so blinded for a quarter of a century with predictable results.  For reasons that I’ve never quite been able to comprehend, I was asked to join the leadership of the church after I had been there for a couple of years.  As the “new kid” in the group, I decided that early on I would mostly just listen, and boy did I hear a lot of nothing.  Now, to be fair, I wasn’t new to church leadership by any means, but I was new in town and new in that church; in fact after being there over two years, I was still the newest member of the congregation!  Seldom did I ever hear anyone mention God’s purpose for the church when something was discussed; it was usually all about what would be fun and what would be popular with the “old people.”  At first I thought they meant elderly people, but I came to realize that they meant the ones who had been in that church the longest: Yikes!

I convinced the other leaders that we should adopt a vision for the church that we would apply to everything we did, and they agreed that I could develop and present a proposal.  My proposal took the form of a 12 page document that contained the Biblical imperatives for the church, discussed the various aspects of the application of these principles, drafted a ‘Vision Statement’ and outlined a method of implementation of the Vision Statement so as to impress upon the congregation its importance to the life of the church… and shock of all shocks, they agreed!  This was the beginning of the complete transformation of our church.

The Vision Statement that I came up with was nothing more than a re-statement of Matthew 28:18-20 in a form that showed the two aspects of the passage: GO and TEACH TO OBEY. Most Christians have a handle on the GO part, but once the person comes to Christ they seem to think that the job is done, when in fact it has only just begun: That kills churches!

Here’s what I came up with:

The Vision of Milan Christian Church is to take the Gospel of Christ to those who need to hear it, to bring them into relationship with Christ through the waters of Christian Baptism, to teach them to become disciples of Christ, and to equip and encourage all Christians to live their lives as Christ would live.

You may well wish to criticize this for one reason or another, and that’s fine by me.  I am not suggesting that these are divinely inspired words.  Some might say that it’s too long, but as I see it, a vision statement is not a slogan, nor is it a mission statement for a company or other secular organization.  I have seen some churches that have a similar statement that says something like “Our vision is to bring about the Great Commission” or something along those lines, and that might be easier to remember, but most people aren’t sure what that is, so I spelled it our as applied theology. (Oh, sorry, I wasn’t going to be ‘academic’ in this)

This post is getting kind of long and I want to be respectful of your time, so tomorrow let’s pick it up from here.  I would like to pique your curiosity by leaving you with one little point…

From the day that our leadership decided to implement this vision statement, each and every ministry activity that goes on in our church must explain how that activity will accomplish our vision, even if it is obvious.  It always amazes me how many people want to lead a ministry, but have never given any thought to how it fits into God’s purpose for the church… but these days, we have solved that problem by forcing them to think about it, and our ministries all have God’s priority as their priority, and the people no longer perish!

Quick Focus: “Growth”

I’ve received comments from a couple of people for whom I have a great respect, reminding me that a church can appear to grow numerically without ever growing spiritually, and this is true!  Please, let’s understand that for the purpose of these posts on church growth, I am using the term “church growth” to mean BOTH spiritual and numerical growth TOGETHER, not separately.

To address the issue of simple increases in attendance without spiritual growth, yes this can be done in much the same way a sports team might increase attendance; by providing a more entertaining product.  This is NOT what I am talking about!  A huge church that is a mile wide and an inch deep is NOT growing for the purposes of this discussion, because it lacks the attribute that must be present for their numerical results to qualify, at least in my mind, as building the Body of Christ.  That attribute (result, really) is lives that are changed for Jesus Christ.

In the same way, a church that claims that its people are growing spiritually, but where numbers never increase is also not growing for the purposes of this discussion, because they bear no fruit, and we know that branches that do not bear fruit are cut off from the vine.  In short, they might just be mistaken about the growth of their people.

Don

OK, How do you Know all this?

Before I go much further into church growth, I should show you the respect of answering this simple question:  How do you know this?

I could tell you that I have been in church leadership for about 25 years, that I’m ordained as a minister and as a Bible College Professor and have the experience you might expect upon hearing this.  While the foregoing is true, the answer I would prefer to give, which is also true, is that I have been in the front lines of turning a church around that had basically been written off as dead; and turn it around we did! Of course, I also need to point out that the Holy Spirit had a little something to do with it also.  I can also tell you truthfully that I have undertaken quite a bit of study and research on the subject and I have discovered a number of very interesting facts that I will be sharing with anyone who cares to read it, right here in this series of posts… at no extra charge I might add…

The truth is, none of this is rocket science.  I will tell you how you can do your own research and you will see what I am talking about. As we go, I will also share with you exactly how we turned our church around, what we tried and what worked and what didn’t work… and why.  I will also share with you some applied theology to show where our priorities must lie if we are going to change lives for Jesus Christ in a real and practical way.  Finally, I will share all of this with you in a direct and simple way that will be very easy for anybody to understand.  I may at times be rather blunt, but better the point is made than having it hard to follow because it’s buried in too much “nice-nice.”

Fair enough?  OK, let’s clear the decks and get into it in tomorrow’s thrill-packed post!

So What is “Church Growth” Anyway?

I’d say that one of the most misunderstood terms these days is “Church Growth.”  I hadn’t even posted on the subject and I got the question about what I mean by the term:  Is it the number of people or the maturity of the people?

Plenty of Christians will say that the number of people who attend a particular church is irrelevant as long as they are growing in the faith.  I happen to think there is a point to be made there, but it also misses something very important: If the members of a given church are “mature” in their faith and in their walk with Christ, that should cause the number attending to increase…

How is that, you ask?  Simple!  To be a mature follower of Christ means that you will begin doing the things that Jesus did.  If you do the things Jesus did, and Jesus was bringing the Gospel to the world, then you should be too. If you are taking the Gospel to the world around your neighborhood, shouldn’t there be fruit?

It is my view that a church cannot grow numerically until it’s leaders and congregation grow enough spiritually to do the things that cause church growth.  Therefore, in these posts, I hope that we can understand the meaning of “church growth” to be both in the growth of the people there spiritually and resulting in a growth in numbers.

While we’re at it, I’ll give you what I mean by “spiritual growth” as well.  When I say “spiritual growth” or “grow spiritually” I mean the growth of the people in their understanding of the teachings and application of Scripture in their daily lives such that they bear Biblical fruit as a result.  To put it another way, I mean that the people are becoming true disciples of Jesus Christ, understanding that a “disciple” is someone who knows what the Master knows, as revealed in the Bible, and who does what the Master does.  Jesus, the Master, when He was on the earth took the truth of God’s Word to the people around Him to make disciples, who in turn would do the same, with the result of more and more people coming to a mature knowledge of Christ. When this is not happening in the church, you can easily tell because there is no numerical growth.

You  might think that this is an over simplification, and maybe it is, but is surely a significant indicator as you will see in future posts on this subject. One thing is certain; there are a lot of numbers mentoned in the book of Acts!

Blogging is kind of funny…

I’ve been doing this blog for quite some time now.  Maybe not as long as some of course, and certainly not as successfully as many, but I’ve been doing it long enough to realize a few things that I’d like to share now.

First, since I started this blog in October of 2011, I’ve found that my original intention for the blog has changed and the blog has become something quite different, and I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not.  Along the way, I’ve also noticed that when ever I write what I might call a “serious” post, my viewership that day crashes.  Lesson learned: Academic isn’t what people want to read here.

I’ve also noticed that when I do something that is short, inspirational and has a nice picture, viewership soars. Lesson learned: keep it short and hopeful.  Finally I’ve learned that if I keep a post short and hopeful, I can get away with a little bit of teaching by ending it with a thought-provoking question…

As I write this, thinking about these things, my mind is telling me that I’m about to get serious and kind of long, so I’ll come straight to my point before I lose you (hopefully):

There is something that I really need to share with you, which I believe to be very, very important, but it is serious.  Why should I bother to write about it when all I will do is crash my viewership and be speaking only to myself? Yes, I’m kind of thinking aloud here so please bear with me for a moment.  How can I present this topic in a series of short, hopeful and, maybe even inspiring to some, manner without watering down the importance of it?

I don’t know, but I’m going to try!

The subject is what causes a church to grow, and what causes a church to shrink and die.  Gee, in today’s world I’d say that is kind of important!

Wouldn’t you?

I’ll start my quest tomorrow and I guess we’ll just see how it goes.  I hope you’ll give it a try.  If I bore you, let me apologize in advance, and please don’t hesitate to tell me about it!

Quote of the Week

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say ‘thank you?’

William A. Ward