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Biblical and cultural reasons why our seasonal church events must be a link to further involvement in the church and not simply as an end in themselves
Jesus expects effective communication from his church. Introducing people to him, growing converts into disciples, building up our church and his Church, is what the Great Commission is all about.
One way we can begin to fully fulfill the Great Commission, to get people started on the journey of discovery to mature discipleship is through seasonal communications that bring people to special events.
Click here to go to the section of this website that has videos and other material that shows how to create the communications themselves. This article gives an in-depth biblical and cultural explanation on why we need to not only hold a special event, but provide a links to on-going information about and involvement in the church.
Why we need in-depth and continuing communication with people new to the church—the post-modern effect on church communications
We have to do this because you can’t assume people coming to your church have the same mindset today that people had thirty to forty years ago. During this time there has been a radical shift from a primarily Christian mindset (stores closed on Sunday, profanity frowned upon, prayer in schools, etc.) to a post-Christian mindset. As part of this, for people raised a generation ago you could count on most of them having a basic understanding of what was in the Bible; today you can count on most of the people under 30 not having any idea about anything in it if they did not grow up in a Christian home. This is not the time or place to discuss the changes in detail, but most everyone is aware they’ve happened.
Here is the challenge: though the world at large has changed so radically, many of the baby boomer church leaders seem unaware of what has happened.
This change from a Christian society to a post-Christian one, at least in America, has happened primarily within the life-time of the American baby boomers, those now in their 50s and 60s. This is the age group that still makes up the leadership of many churches and many sadly, don’t have a clue of what is going on. They know what worked in the past to reach people outside the church doesn’t work as well today, but they often don’t know why.
There is nothing intrinsically obstructionist this group nor anything about their age that keeps them from creating successful, contemporary, cutting edge communications. I’m one of them; born 1949. The problem is that many of my fellow Boomers have lived in a church ministry bubble while the changes were going on and many of them continue to communicate as if it were 1975. Even if their church tacks on a website and multimedia screen; adds a praise band to the organ music, the fundamental communication approach is the same. Churches think they are changing with the times and updating their communications by the adaptation of currently popular forms. It isn’t just the forms that need to change, even though that’s what most Christian multi-media advertising tells you.
Technological excellence is a useful tool, not the end goal.
The style and media used can and should be contemporary and appealing, but you can’t expect people to make eternity-altering decision on the basis of sound bytes.
No matter what the style, our content needs to be more complete, much more structured, much more basic and detailed than it was when baby boomer leaders entered the ministry because our audience has so totally changed in the spiritual mindset with which they interact with your church. They honestly have no idea what you are talking about.
This challenge of understanding the mindset of your audience and responding appropriately is nothing new. In the New Testament, Peter and Paul were called to very different audiences and they communicated with them in different ways. The challenge for many Boomer communicators is that they started out with Peter’s audience and are not aware that in the course of the last few decades it was replaced by Paul’s.
The evangelism of Peter vs. the evangelism of Paul
When Peter preached his sermon in Acts he was preaching to a group of Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, a group gathered in Jerusalem for religious reasons. These were people who had studied the scriptures and participated in the rituals of the Jewish religion all their lives. They understood sin, judgment, sacrifice, and the promise of a Messiah. In many ways, Peter’s sermon content at Pentecost was nothing new to them. The only thing that was new was his declaration that Jesus was the promised Messiah. The only decision they had to make was whether to accept him as that or not. With their deep reservoir of Biblical knowledge about and expectation of the Messiah, many did respond immediately.
In contrast with Peter’s fairly brief message and the overwhelming response, consider the radically different approach of the Apostle Paul. When he would go into a city composed primarily of Gentiles, though he often first tried to speak at the local synagogue, more times than not, he was kicked out of it. Even when he wasn’t, he rarely accomplished very much with one sermon. Most often his evangelistic efforts did not consist of one message to a prepared audience. Instead notice the extent, repetition and progression of his method of evangelism in the passages that follow (emphasis mine):
Acts 17:2-4 As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Christ,” he said. Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and not a few prominent women.
Acts 17:11 Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
Acts 18:5 When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ. ….7 Then Paul left the synagogue and went next door to the house of Titius Justus, a worshiper of God.11…So Paul stayed for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God.
Acts 19:8-10 Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God. But some of them became obstinate; they refused to believe and publicly maligned the Way. So Paul left them. He took the disciples with him and had discussions daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. This went on for two years, so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.
Following these initial encounters with potential converts (similar to when you have people come to a special event at church today) he then spent, days, weeks, years in discussion and teaching as he presented the gospel message. We see parts of this continuing discussion in the many letters that make up our New Testament. In these letters, the truth of the Christian faith is explained logically, in great depth and detail in both theological and practical terms.
How this applies to current church communications today
Many current church leaders grew up in a Christian world that was permeated with Bible knowledge. Many methods of evangelism, such as Billy Graham Crusades, the Four Spiritual Laws, and alter calls were not really evangelism messages (sharing the gospel with someone who had never heard it) but calls to decision. People grew up knowing the gospel story. They simply had to make a decision as to how they would respond.
The older Billy Graham Crusades are on television—watch some of them from the 60s and you’ll see what I mean. Most of the people attending bring their Bibles. Graham often makes the statement “the Bible says….” and you can see the audience takes that as a statement of authority. Nothing that he says is new to his audience—what is new is that he challenges them to make what they know about God personal in their lives. They are challenged to accept Jesus as Savior and follow him as Lord. Altar calls, the challenges to “come forward”, were effective because people knew ahead of time all about the decision they were being asked to make. Going forward was a public way of saying a decision had been made to background teaching they had heard all of their lives.
Many of us in church ministry have similar backgrounds. In college (over 30 years ago) I was involved with the Navigator ministry and we did “cold-turkey evangelism,” where we knocked on dormitory doors to share the gospel with fellow college students. Everyone I shared with knew what the Bible was about and on some level acknowledged it as God’s word. They knew the basic story. They may not have ever been challenged that they needed to make a personal decision, but I didn’t ever have to explain that the Bible was God’s word or that Jesus was a real person. They may not have believed these statements, but they had heard them and the reasons for them many times before.
In that sense the world I, and many current church leaders and pastors, grew up in was very much like the audience to whom Peter preached at Pentecost. Of course not everybody believed in God, but the Bible and Christian culture had permeated our society ahead of our communication.
It is an entirely different world today
The Christian culture of boomer youth, “Father Knows Best, “ coming home from school to homemade cookies, and mothers who dressed up for father’s return from work is the stuff of nostalgia. Life isn’t like that anymore for families or for congregations.
The world today is far more like the world of the Apostle Paul. Yes, there are houses of worship and attendees that look and act the same, but your guests, especially those who might come to a special event, have no idea even when you talk about Jesus who you are talking about.
Is this the Jesus who (according to some), inhabits every kind person and who is the divine spark within all of us? Or is he an avatar, an incarnation of the divine? Or a good man, who may or may not have lived, but who gave left us with a good example and who died a tragic death? Is he a genie that promises to give good things if I give lots of money? What happens if I give the money and the good things don’t happen? What does that say about Jesus?
What about the Bible?
In the past the Bible was a part of the culture and was read in schools, referred to reverently in public discourse, and deferred to by the media. Today, it’s fair game for distortion. Today, many church goers have no idea of the content of the Bible or that it has moral authority over life.
The demands to take up one’s cross, to die to self, to live for others are seldom preached. The doctrines of Christianity that set it apart from the cults: the Trinity, future judgment and reward, the scope of salvation and sanctification, the demands of discipleship—many of these topics are completely foreign concepts to those who visit our churches.
The bottom line is that many churches are preaching to Paul’s audience (folks ignorant of the truth of the Bible, Jesus and of the measure of truth itself) using Peter’s methods (assuming the audience has a biblical background), perhaps preaching with passion, but expecting the audience to listen with a Biblical worldview they know nothing about. Some in the audience may appear to respond, but what or who are they responding to?
One more note about Paul—he had other options to promote this new religion
Our contemporary world did not invent multi-media and Paul did not focus primarily on content-based communication because he was unimaginative or without examples of alternative ways of doing church.
The ancient world routinely linked spectacle, music, and entertainment with religion. Greek drama and the Roman games both had their origin in the religions of the day. The many religions of world at that time all had elaborate rituals, music, pageant. For example, the Cult of Cybele was an extremely popular religion throughout the Roman empire and the poet, Catullus who was writing during the same time Paul was preaching, described it this way:
“Together come and follow to the Phrygian home of Cybele, to the Phrygian forests of the goddess, where the clash of cymbals ring, where tambourines resound, where the Phrygian flute-player blows deeply on his curved reed, where ivy-crowned maenads toss their heads.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybele)
We don’t ever hear of Paul or any other Christian leader of the early days of of the faith proposing public festivals, music, dance, and games to draw a crowd. They certainly could have—that’s what most religions at the time did.
Paul could have “baptized” these practices and used them to support the Christian message. He had that opportunity when in Lystra, he healed a man and the crowds, responding from their life-long spiritual viewpoint:
When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them. Acts 14: 11-14
How did Paul respond? Did he accept the methods, but try to turn it into a Christian purpose?
But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting: “Men, why are you doing this? We too are only men, human like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God. Acts 14:14-15
Things did not go well after that. Paul was stoned and left the city. But he wasn’t finished. A few verses later we learn;
. . .they returned to Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith. “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” they said. Paul and Barnabas appointed elders[a] for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord, in whom they had put their trust. Acts 14:22-23.
Paul used a content-centric method of communication because Christian discipleship is a way of life, not just participation in a celebration
It takes more than a celebration, a ritual, or an offering to grow a disciple. It begins with a relationship with Jesus as Savior, but that relationship grows to mature discipleship in the context of the church family and through knowledge of the God’s Word.
In the ancient world, you could be follower of Cybele or Mithras or Dionysus or Isis (or all of them combined) by participating in their rituals. Once the ritual was completed you could live as you wanted.
Christian discipleship was unique. As Jesus himself said in his inaugural sermon:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” Matt. 7: 21-27
Doing the will of the Father in heaven, putting the words of Jesus into practice, this is what defines a disciple. It takes a lot of communication work to get people to that destination, much more than simply hosting a big successful event. Your event may be the start, but it remember to make it a connecting point, not the end result.
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