Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend PDF
Preview Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend
Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend DEEP & WIDE ANDY STANLEY 2 Deep and Wide is dedicated to the 708 charter members of North Point Community Church (see Appendix E for names). Who would have thought? Thank you! Andy 3 Contents Cover Title Page Introduction SECTION ONE: MY STORY Starting Up and Starting Over 1. Not All That Deep 2. Family Matters SECTION TWO: OUR STORY Walking Toward the Messes 3. Words Matter 4. Just As I Ain’t 5. Defying Gravity SECTION THREE: GOING DEEP Rethinking Spiritual Formation 6. My Big Discovery 7. Playing My Part 8. From Out of Nowhere SECTION FOUR: GOING WIDE Why They Love to Attend 9. Creating Irresistible Environments 10. Rules of Engagement 11. Double-Barrel Preaching SECTION FIVE: BECOMING DEEP AND WIDE Transitioning a Local Church 12. Coming to Blows with the Status Quo 13. Mission and Model 14. Led to Lead Notes Appendix A: North Point Survey Cards 4 and Results Sample Appendix B: Starting Point Ministry Description Appendix C: Measurable Ministry Wins Appendix D: North Point’s Mission, Strategy, and Beliefs Appendix E: North Point Community Church Charter Members Acknowledgments About the Author Praise Conclusion: What If? Other Books by Andy Stanley Copyright About the Publisher Share Your Thoughts 5 I NTRODUCTION Blessed is the man who gets the opportunity to devote his life to something bigger than himself and who (cid:633)nds himself surrounded by friends who share his passion. In this way, I have been disproportionately blessed. This is a book about creating churches that unchurched men, women, and children love to attend. Speci(cid:633)cally, this is a book about how some friends and I have gone about creating those kinds of churches. This isn’t all there is to know on the subject. This is just all we know. As leaders, we are never responsible for (cid:633)lling anyone else’s cup. Our responsibility is to empty ours. So for the next three hundredplus pages, I’m going to pour out every drop on the subject of creating churches unchurched people love to attend. Before we dive into the content, however, there is something you should know about me. I’m not enamored with big. I’ve always attended and worked in big churches. In elementary school our family attended a large church in Miami, Florida. During middle school and high school, I attended the largest church in Atlanta. During graduate school, I interned at one of the largest churches in Texas. Texas! Besides that, I’m a preacher’s kid (PK). It takes a lot to impress us preachers’ kids. If you are a PK, you know exactly what I mean. Preachers’ kids who gravitate toward ministry are commodities. I hire all I can. We see church di(cid:643)erently than everybody else. We see it all from the inside out. We know that when people say they “felt the Spirit moving,” it probably means the room was full and the music was good. We know that what goes on at home is the litmus test of a man or woman’s walk with God, not how well he or she does once a microphone is strapped on. We know the di(cid:643)erence between giftedness and godliness. We know the two can be mutually exclusive. We know that the best performers usually build the biggest churches but not necessarily the healthiest ones. We aren’t impressed with moving lights, slick presentations, “God told me,” “the Spirit led me,” or long prayers. Heck, all the men I’ve known who impressed everybody with their long, animated, public prayers had moral problems. That’s why I pray short prayers. I’m afraid there might be a correlation. Actually, I think Jesus said something about that. So this isn’t a book about how to make your church bigger. You don’t need me for that. If bigger is your goal, just start promising things in Jesus’ name. Religious people love that stuff. This is a book about how to make your church more appealing to the people who are put o(cid:643) by all the shenanigans that give church, big churches in particular, a bad name — people who know there’s more to life than this life but who can’t imagine that the church holds any clues. And in case you are wondering, yes, I think every church should be a church irreligious people love to attend. Why? Because the church is the local expression of the presence of Jesus. We are his body. And since people who were 6 nothing like Jesus liked Jesus, people who are nothing like Jesus should like us as well. There should be something about us that causes them to gather at the periphery and stare. I’m often asked if I’m surprised at how big North Point has grown. When it’s church leaders who ask, I assure them I’m not. Here’s why. When we launched North Point, every other church in Atlanta was competing for the churched people market. We decided to get into the unchurched people market. That’s a much larger market and we didn’t have any competition at the time. If somebody liked our brand, we were the only option. If somebody wanted to bring an unchurched friend or family member to church, we were the logical destination. We weren’t any better than the other churches in town. We were just the only church designed from the ground up to capture the imaginations of unchurched people. Let’s face it, if you have the only hot dog stand in town, your hot dogs don’t have to be that good. As I will discuss in detail later, our ongoing challenge is to make sure we stay in the unchurched people market. That’s not easy. Now that we’re so big, it’s not even necessary. Who would know? Who would care? Truth is, only our core would know. But we would all quit if we thought that staying meant spending the rest of our productive lives running a big church rather than making a big difference. 7 FACT FINDING As you will discover, we are a bit paranoid about the prospect of unintentionally becoming a church for churched people. So we are constantly looking for ways to discover who’s coming, who invited them, who’s sticking, and who’s not. Like you, we love stories. But anecdotal evidence is hardly evidence. You’ve been around the local church long enough to know that you can (cid:633)nd a story to support just about any idea. Even bad ideas. Especially bad ideas. So while we celebrate stories of life change, we continue to look for ways to gather hard data on whether we really are a church unchurched people in our various communities love to attend. Fortunately for us, there is a gentleman in our church, Brian Kaznova, who has helped us tremendously in this area. For the past several years, Brian has invested in our organization by designing surveys and then providing objective analysis and recommendations based on the (cid:633)ndings. Brian has extensive experience with private corporations consulting on performance and organizational excellence. Several of the companies he’s worked with were winners of the Malcolm Baldrige Award.1 One of the tools Brian created for us is a survey we distribute two or three times a year in our weekend services. Appendix A contains the actual survey card we use as well as a sampling of how the results are tallied. The magic of this particular tool is that it allows us to capture information from both regular attendees and those who have attended (cid:633)ve times or less. According to our survey, 40 percent of the regular attendees in our adult worship environments describe themselves as unchurched before they began attending our church (we de(cid:633)ne unchurched as not having attended a church for (cid:633)ve years or longer). On any given weekend, 10 percent of our adult audiences identify themselves as guests (a guest being someone who has attended (cid:633)ve times or less). Over 40 percent of that group identify themselves as unchurched as well. One of the things we are most interested in is how easy we are making it for our attendees to invite guests. Over 83 percent of our regular attendees marked that they have invited at least one person to church in the past twelve months. The satisfaction level always hovers around the 97 percent range with both regular attendees and guests. According to Brian, our responses are three to four times the numbers necessary to get an accurate read. Why am I telling you this? Well, I told my publisher that the introduction would include at least two thousand words and I needed some (cid:633)ller. No, I’m telling you this because I want you to know our energy really isn’t around big. We genuinely want to be a network of churches that unchurched people (cid:633)nd irresistible. We don’t grade ourselves on size. We grade ourselves on how attractive we are to our target audience. Now, before you go getting all theological on me and writing us o(cid:643) as a dog-and-pony show, take note: 8 We are a church. Our goal isn’t to create an event unchurched people love to attend. We are creating churches. One last thing about me: I don’t consider myself a church planter. As I will describe in chapter two, North Point Community Church launched in the wake of a high-pro(cid:633)le divorce and a church split. Not a very scalable model and certainly not something I would recommend. But that’s how it all began. Apart from being shoved out of my comfort zone, I’m not sure I would have ever fully engaged in what my heart was telling me I needed to do. Because of that, I have never been tempted to take credit for what we have achieved. I’m often asked how I stay humble. That’s a curious question. If in fact I’m humble, it is due in large part to the fact that none of this was my idea. As you are about to discover, most of what has happened, happened in spite of me, not because of me. 9 BITS AND PIECES Deep and Wide is organized into (cid:633)ve sections. Feel free to skip around. However, if you’ve ever considered hiring one of your kids, Section One is a must read. There I describe growing up as a PK, working for my dad for ten years, and then quitting at the most inopportune time imaginable. This section contains a good bit of detail about my family and my relationship to my dad in particular. So much so, I knew I would have to get his permission to publish it. Instead of sending it to him to read, I drove over to his house, sat at the kitchen table, and read it to him. We laughed. We cried. Then we cried some more. As you will see, the fact that he would even allow me to tell our story makes him the hero. In Section Two I give the biblical justi(cid:633)cation for our approach to church. From day one, I’ve had critics. I’m (cid:633)ne with that. All my critics are religious people. (It may be the only thing I have in common with Jesus.) We are unapologetically attractional. In our search for common ground with unchurched people, we’ve discovered that, like us, they are consumers. So we leverage their consumer instincts. By the way, if your church has heating and air conditioning, you do too. When you read the Gospels, it’s hard to overlook the fact that Jesus attracted large crowds everywhere he went. He was constantly playing to the consumer instincts of his crowds. Let’s face it: It wasn’t the content of his messages that appealed to the masses. Most of the time they didn’t even understand what he was talking about. Heck, we’re not always sure what he was talking about. People (cid:635)ocked to Jesus because he fed them, healed them, comforted them, and promised them things. Besides, what’s the opposite of attractional? Missional? I don’t think so. Section Three is the deep part. In this section I reveal our secret sauce. And it has nothing to do with stage sets and jump backs. I explain and illustrate our spiritual formation model. In the old days we would call it a discipleship model. Everything we do programmatically points people to or engages people with (cid:633)ve faith-building dynamics. We program with the assumption that growing faith, which translates into obedience, is the catalyst for personal growth. And personal growth will eventually result in personal maturity. From day one we’ve rejected the classroom model as well as the sequential-curriculum approach to spiritual development. While we value learning as a component of spiritual maturity, we believe there are four other components that are equally necessary. If you are involved with service programming for any age group in your church, Section Four, the wide part, was written with you in mind. Here I outline the three essential ingredients for irresistible environments. In addition, I explain in detail what we refer to as our “Rules of Engagement.” This is the (cid:633)rst time we’ve put these in print. This is the template we adhere to whenever we create environments where unchurched people will be present. Then, for the communicators out there, I’ve written an entire 10
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