Have we lost the vision for reaching our community?

Thom Rainer May 30, 2018

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The man sitting before me had ministry responsibility for calling on 250 churches. He knew most of them well. 

I knew in his position he had figuratively seen and done it all, and of late the anecdotal evidence was not good. Still, his statement shocked me.

The comment that still rings out in my mind: “Almost none of the 250 churches I serve have an ongoing outreach ministry in the communities they are supposed to serve. A few of them think they do, but they are really just following up with guests who visit.”

Wow. No ongoing intentional outreach. At best, follow-up with guests.

And we wonder why our churches are struggling. We aren’t reaching people because, well, we aren’t trying to reach people.

The death of outreach

What has happened? How can we explain the death of ongoing outreach by our churches? I’ve worked with thousands of churches, so I have a few ideas.

We became so enamored with the worship service as the front door, we concluded that it was our outreach.  But cool and dynamic worship services are not outreach into our communities. They are attractions to attend.

We don’t know how to get into our communities. I agree that cold-call visitation is difficult. But if you have killed that in your church, with what did you replace it? What is your church doing every week to connect with people in the community?

We rejected programs because we think programs aren’t cool or relevant.  Let me give you a clear example. Vacation Bible School is the  number one evangelistic tool in America.  But many churches have given up on VBS because it’s a program, or because it’s traditional, or because it’s not cool.

We call everything outreach and evangelism.  If everything is outreach and evangelism, nothing is outreach and evangelism.

We have become so busy doing good things in our church that we neglect the best.  True story: the most hours devoted to “ministry” in one church I know is the flower ministry. OK, if you are working in a flower ministry, that’s fine. But if that’s the number one ministry of the church, it’s not fine. (And flowers in the worship center make me sneeze.)

We decided to do away with intentional outreach because of a lack of participation. I almost did exactly that very thing in a church I served because we only had an average of 12 members per week doing any kind of outreach in the community. Then I did the math. Those 12 typically had three types of meaningful outreach contacts a week. That’s a total of 36 contacts a week and 1,872 a year. That’s huge. 

We have become so comfortable and complacent with the way we do church that we don’t want any outsiders to “mess it up.” In other words, we will fight for the precise worship style or carpet color we want, but yawn at the thought of our neighbors going to hell.

Headed toward demise

I am performing several autopsies of deceased outreach ministries in churches. Soon I will be performing autopsies on those same churches themselves.

Reach out to your community and live. Or, neglect it and die.

It’s really that simple.

Photo source: istock 

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Thom S. Rainer is the founder and CEO of Church Answers, and online community and resource for church leaders. Prior to founding Church Answers, Rainer served as president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources. Before coming to LifeWay, he served at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for twelve years where he was the founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism. He is a 1977 graduate of the University of Alabama and earned his Master of Divinity and Ph.D. degrees from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Learn More »

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