Why Effective Outreach Feels Impossible: A Parable

Here’s a parable. Let’s say you love swimming. You love swimming so much that you are part of a swim club. You believe that swimming is the healthiest thing a person could do. You feel stronger and more vibrant when you are actively swimming. Every week, you meet with your swim club to do laps together and then go out for drinks. It’s one of the most important parts of your life, and you wish everyone had a swim club like you do.*

You and I are good friends, in this parable at least. As an advocate for swimming’s role as part of a healthy life, you keep inviting me to the swim club. You use various enticements to get me to go. You even introduce me to other swim club members in the hopes it will push me over the edge. Do you know where this parable is going? Read on for the ending.

Most American churches face major problems today. The first of these is that churches are stuck. Not just stuck numerically. I mean that churches are in decline and lack any imagination about how to address this problem. Oh sure, we have ideas. Most of these ideas, however, are about either (a) going back to a more glorious past, or (b) borrowing from a seemingly successful church down the road. These kinds of ideas are worse than placebos. They are deadly because they tend to accelerate decline, not fix it. Explaining that requires more space than I have in this post, but the short answer is that, in these situations, vision is no longer in the driver’s seat.

The second major problem is that most churches don’t know ways to reach out to the truly unchurched. Most “church growth strategies” are in fact marketing ploys aimed at recycling the saints. Even church plants tend to drift into attracting disaffected church folks rather than making a measurable impact on the unchurched. On top of this, typical church plants are expensive and require uncommon levels of expertise.

The reality is that churches tend to recycle the same strategies and ideas, despite the percentage of people with no interest in church growing each year. Into this void of ineffective outreach, people keep saying: “You just have to show how much you care.” “Your church just needs to preach better, worship better, and serve better before people will come.” “It’s all about leadership. You just need healthy leaders and then people will come.” “Narrow is the way that leads to salvation.” While all of these statements are true, they will not fix the most basic problem: the church’s inability to reach the lost.

Why do I believe this? For starters, our traditional worship gatherings are exclusive, not inclusive. Every choice made by a church closes the door on someone who might want to participate, such as the meeting time. Or the building location. The style of worship. The preacher’s personality. The denominational ties. Choices about gender equity. Whether to welcome and affirm LGBT folks. Or dozens of other more or less obscure items. Every single choice excludes someone.

Jesus’s church is supposed to welcome, not exclude. Knowing this, churches often make changes to their worship assemblies in the hopes of welcoming new people. Yet, instead of attracting new people, these modifications often end up producing only one undesired effect: they drive away some existing members in the pursuit of unchurched folks who never come.

Why are churches stuck with so little imagination about their predicaments? And why do these changes to our worship gatherings fail to attract new people?

Back to our parable. Your swim club is the best thing in your life. As my friend, you want me to experience it, too.

Here is the problem. I hate swimming. Don’t like it. I know how to swim but don’t enjoy it. Don’t like the smell of chlorine. Don’t enjoy going back and forth in a big pool. It’s not for me.

Because of this, there is nothing you could do to get me to join a swim club with you. It’s possible that you might entice me to meet your clubmates for drinks one time after your weekly swim, but that would be very awkward for me and might even damage our friendship. Swimming isn’t for me. Period. End of story.

This is the challenge we face with “inviting people to church” with us. A growing majority of people have simply decided that church is not for them. They may have their facts wrong. They may not know what they’re missing. Any number of things. But for many people, you are not going to get them to show up on a Sunday for your church service, no matter how long or how hard you try. Worship gatherings just aren’t for them. Period. End of story.

Simply put, we need new ways of thinking about church and outreach. We need a new imagination for what it means to be God’s people. As long as all our efforts focus on the Sunday morning gathering, we are like diehard swimmers trying to get non-swimmers interested in our swim club. Things won’t change until our vision for the future grows into something more than what we currently think and see.
*I first read about swimming as a metaphor for outreach efforts in a book by Michael Moynagh, Church for Every Context. I have significantly expanded upon his idea.