Against The Flow

Burger King asks the question (whopperfreakout.com) churches should be asking of their communities…

If your Church closed the doors overnight, would anyone really notice? Would they be as upset as these folks over missing a hamburger? The sad fact is that most of the churches in your community would only be missed by their members and hardly missed by the community.

From a recent post:

A walled garden is a site or company that offers content only to its subscribers, who have to “come inside the wall” to get the content they want. The old AOL was like that — you had to subscribe to get access to their content. But information wants to be free, and those walled gardens that charged for access were quickly bypassed for the open internet.

Churches face a similar transition. The old church model was the walled garden. People were invited to come inside [join] to get access to all the stuff inside — pastoral care, committee participation, right to vote, name on a membership list, or whatever the
“inside” stuff was. The ministry of the church was what happened inside the wall – Bible studies, small groups, worship, fellowship, decision-making, and so on. Success was measured by how many people were inside the walls at any one time.

But all that is changing. Today churches that are walled gardens are being bypassed. Open access, decentralized leadership, participation, collaboration, bridges, and networking are the new order of the day. Walled gardens struggle for survival while new, more open forms of church are emerging. Many of us are trying to at least open the garden gate, if not tear down the garden walls altogether. What’s your church doing?

I’ve been saying the same thing for years. As the church we have got to get outside of our walls. We need to quit reinventing the wheel and partner with other churches, groups, and organizations to spread the message. Our community throws a great “Halloween” festival, yet most of the community churches do their own thing for their own people without attracting a single outsider. Recently I heard of a church that was starting a cycling group. I question why the church group doesn’t join the local cycling club? The examples could go on forever. If the chruch is going to impact the kingdom and bring life change to our communities, we have to get outside our walls and connect with our communities. What is your church doing by itself that it could partner with the community and get close to those far from God?

We encourage people at New Journey Church to invest and invite. Invest in relationships with people disconnected from God and church and then take opportunity to invite them to a New Journey service. We even provide “Invite Cards” with all the details about the church: time, website, place, etc. Anyway, last week my youngest, Myles, who is 4 had picked up some of the invite cards that had fallen in the floor of my car and put them in his book bag. When I picked him up at daycare, his teacher informed me that he had given her one of the card and asked her to come to church with him. He also had used the cards to invite some of his friends. If a 4 year old can do it, why can’t you? People are waiting for you to invite them to Church!