Captive Audience
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Imagine: you are sitting at church, listening to the speaker when you hear them say something you don’t just disagree with, you feel like you’re listening to an ideological enemy. This is painful and surprising, as normally you have enjoyed the sermons you’ve heard thus far, and possibly you respect what you know of the preacher. And it’s also painful because you are tired of hearing this kind of BS outside of church, church is the last place you want to be exposed to it, and short of standing up and walking out in the middle of the service, what are you going to do? You’re stuck with nowhere to go, and you can’t change the channel.
Sound familiar?
I think this begs a question: why have we set up our worship in this way, where one comment can derail everything? I promise you one thing: the answer is not ideological conformity. We’ve tried that already. Eventually you will find a fault line, and the split will happen again.
What is the alternative? Well, let’s start with how we have limited ourselves already: anytime you put a bunch of chairs in a room all facing the same way you’ve done two things. First, you’ve created a really efficient and effective environment for the sharing of information. That’s why this has been the predominant mode of teaching for centuries if not millennia. Second, you’ve also created a fairly terrible environment for apprenticeship and practice. For discipleship.
Did Jesus talk to crowds? Of course. But what about the other 23 hours in the day? The predominant mode of his teaching and leading came in smaller groups, so called “life on life”. As a parent, we understand this well: kids don’t learn the most from what we tell them, especially when we sit them down and make them listen to us for an hour while we talk at them. They learn the most in our actions, in our stories, in trying things out themselves and getting their own hands dirty.
So again, what’s the alternative to the big room with all of us facing one way? I don’t know if we need to throw it out altogether, but I do think we’ve mixed up how important it is to the identity of a church. Unidirectional instruction and passive should be limited. Instead, the focus should be on doing life and discipleship together in smaller groups, where not everyone agrees with each other, where people say things that others don’t agree with, but no one is silenced, no one has to choose between just listening to something they have a visceral reaction to or standing up and walking out. And when something hurtful is said, the group will be small enough that the body can come together quickly to clarify misunderstandings and, when necessary, correct one another.
There’s no doubt that large groups, when gathered altogether, are easiest to work with when most participants are passive (think choir/orchestra style). And truly amazing things are possible in this sort of format. But life change, learning to walk the Way of Jesus, is not best served by passive listening.
A few ideas to try:
Reduce the number of services where everyone listens to a sermon passively (for example: if there’s currently a sermon every week, try something else on a monthly basis)
Don’t have a regular sermon on Communion Sunday, but instead substitute something more interactive
If the church is too big to meet in a home, once a month break up into smaller groups and have worship in homes
Take a second look at the budget: how much is the church investing in the life of the church outside of large group gatherings such as Sunday worship?
Invest in college/young adult ministries
I think this last idea is a really important one: recently I heard about a campus church that had really taken off in the last 5-10 years, to the point that other churches in the area were struggling to retain their college students and young adults. And it reminded me that there are aspects of life at that age that are really conducive to deep, transformational life change and receptivity to trying to follow Jesus. These aspects are, among other things, flexibility, proximity to community and mentorship, and few responsibilities outside of school/work. What if churches and congregations invested deeply in helping to mentor young adults and college students, and made it a priority to train them not to “serve the church”, but to build their own discipleship communities where they are?