I’ve written on this before, but in my work with churches I continue to find one of the most overlooked questions church leaders ask: “What is the purpose of our weekend service?”
This goes beyond style and tradition.
Answering this one question will force you to reassess your key drivers, from mission to values to ministry philosophy to, well, everything. Because answering this will affect how you hire, your budget, how you manage resources, and how you assess your outcomes…or in biblical parlance, your fruitfulness.
I believe there are 3 primary approaches to Sunday mornings. Of course, hybrids of these are often the case, but they typically fall into three basic styles:
A Tool Rental
A Visitor Center
A Charging Station
A Tool Rental is where you go to get the equipment you need for a specific job. Suppose you’re building a patio with pavers in your backyard. Chances are you don’t have a heavy-duty compactor laying around to tamp down sand and gravel, so you go to the Tool Rental in order to get the job done. Same way with your church. You tend to see the primary role of Sunday services as equipping believers with the tools they need to disciple others around them.
The Problem: Are your people really doing that?
There must be some mechanism in place to measure whether outsiders are actually being discipled by your people and brought into the Body of Christ. You may not care where in the Body as long as they’re connecting with another group of believers somewhere in a meaningful, flourishing way. But without a process for measuring that, you really don’t know if your model is working.
A Visitor Center is the place you go to when visiting a town or new destination in order to learn what’s there and how to navigate the place. The church that views Sundays like this is often described as “user-friendly” or in decades past, “seeker sensitive,” meaning their language and style is hyper-cognizant of visitors…or tourists. They believe that weekend services are the best place for their regular attendees to bring new people in order to see what the “beloved community” is like…and to understand it in their vernacular and even respond to a call to action, or belonging.
The Problem: Are your people inviting outsiders to come?
If there is no increase in guests each weekend, either your people have not been educated and equipped to invite people, or what you’re serving up each weekend is not what they believe their friends, family, or coworkers could relate to or understand. In other words, they’re not buying—or selling—what you’re making.
A Charging Station is the place in the airport terminal where you recharge your digital devices. Or the spot at a Cracker Barrel to plug your EV in when you’re traveling. Charging Station Churches primarily see Sundays as a time to recharge believers after the spiritually draining and energy-sucking weekdays of life. This is often the case in persecuted cultures where the local church is a true refuge and sanctuary, a worshiping community that offers safety from the spiritual fatigue factors outside.
The Problem: Are your people losing compassion for outsiders?
Christians can circle the wagons faster than anybody. Without an outward focus toward those who are far from God, we quickly devolve into an inner “club-of-us-only” and have lost Jesus’ mandate to leave the ninety-nine to find the one. The sense of salvific mission has been replaced with personal emotional safety; interaction with those outside the faith has waned. Or as a friend of mine called it: you're just a box of puppies licking each other.
Sometimes we’ll see a blend of these three models, but often there’s an unspoken philosophy that drives one of these three categories. Notice that I’m not disparaging any particular model, but only pointing out that each one has a unique problem that must be addressed…or at least acknowledged.
Where would you see your church in these three models? And what do you think is the answer for your distinct problem?
Dave Workman | The Elemental Group
What if you could identify and remove growth barriers? Empower your volunteers? Build passionate people? Make a real difference in your community? And what if you had church-tested tools for team-building and leadership development? The Elemental Pathway is a comprehensive holistic 6-month program combining online assessments, coaching, and action-learning, gamified tools for highly engaging, team-based interaction. See how it can work for you here!
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