What Do Your People Say?

I took a trip out West by myself once and was embarrassingly efficient at living cheap on the road. Two things that were certain were that in any given city in the United States, there was a McDonalds with a dollar menu and a Motel 6 with a $40 room. The interactions at these establishments (no matter where I was) were all the same; the taste of a McDouble, the passive attitude of workers, the stale air and smell of a cheap hotel room that says, “I’m used but cared for.” Ryan Bingham says it well of the universality of places like airports: “It’s these kinds of systemized friendly touches that keep [our] world in orbit.”

I had a conversation with a friend once concerning something I wrote about our mutual church home. To be truthful, it was more of a parody of the church universal than a critique of anything serious, but when the type of church you serve at becomes an entity of comfort that you can find in just about every city in the world, it starts to be sort of alarming. My friend said (of Northstar), “We’ve always been this church of tattooed, barefooted rebels,” and he expressed his hope that we never become a place that draws only upper-class people because of the expected, comfortable transaction they’ll take part in.

I did my best in that conversation to assure him I didn’t think that was what we had become, but that we had inevitably adopted some of those characteristics familiar to so many formula mega churches. The least concerning of these have to do with how we all brand things with catchy names that say nothing and fancy Photoshop work that drinks dry the well of Dafont.com. The more serious issues include how and why we attract and handle visitors. If you’re not careful, you can easily decide in your head that all churches with like methods are seeking to accomplish the same thing. It’s a mistake made in isolation.

I was reminded of this recently when visiting a church that, in every regard, seemed extremely familiar to me. In fact, if I were to have a strictly non-visual sensory experience there, I would assume I were attending a normal Sunday evening at Northstar. The differences became apparent as I studied my surroundings more carefully. Among the first things I identified was their mission statement. While Northstar is primarily aimed at seeking un-churched individuals, this particular body’s implied purpose was that of developing current believers and families. They were exceedingly efficient at it.

During their worship time, I seldom noticed a hand that wasn’t lifted in the auditorium. People were excitedly jumping and singing along to four songs I pretended to know. It vaguely reminded me of my time at Passion 2012. Both experiences left me wondering why sometimes during our own worship services at Northstar, it feels like we couldn’t pay the congregation enough money to respond. But then, as if I’d been ignoring the basest of all revelations for years and years, I suddenly understood: saints worship; the lost observe carefully (and skeptically) from safe distances.

In a moment when a lot of us are focused on numbers within our churches, this may be one of the most comforting things we can hear from God. Despite the fact that many of our churches subscribe to the same issues of Fabulous Foyers, Grandiose Graphics and Visitor Verbiage, and even though differences can rarely be drawn between us, a lot is defined in our convictions. What do our people say about our motivations? Not “what do they literally say?” but what do they say for us? All I can hope is that when our churches are still, it’s because we’re worshiping with the lost. That makes me feel different enough.