Worship Changes

My in-laws forwarded a prospectus from their pastor about his vision for their church during the next ten years. I can agree with almost everything he has to say. He showed a great desire to reach the lost and made a personal commitment for witnessing to the lost.

The one main area that I disagreed with him was his statement about worship being a primary tool for reaching the lost and unchurched. Worship is not for the lost, it is an act of love by believers directed to God. When we gear worship for the lost, we are not worshipping, we are performing. The lost rarely accept Christ because of a worship service. That mentality is a holdover from when many lost people accepted Christ at tent revival meetings. Church members who look to those “glory days” fail to understand that most of the work in witnessing to the lost was done by evangelical teams prior to and during the revival. Try getting these same church members to join you in visiting a lost persons home and they most likely will say, “Preacher, I’ll get them to church, you just preach about Jesus.”

Worship has never been intended for the lost. Worship is for God and God alone. The New Testament churches did not invite the lost to their worship times which was usually held in a home under secret to prevent being stoned by the Jews or crucified by the Emperor. Churches in China (and other countries without freedom of religion) do not invite the lost to attend their worship times for the same reason.

Some people point to the “lost sheep” or “lost coin” parables as reasons to bring the lost to church, but these parables dealt with a sheep that already belonged to the flock and a coin that already belonged to the woman. These referred to Christians who have strayed. Some people point to the passage where the ruler tells his servant to compel people to come into the feast, but this is referring to the bridal feast in heaven meaning we are to compel people to accept Christ—not attend worship. A lost person cannot worship God for they do not serve Him. We need to reach the lost, but not change our worship to entertain them.

Very few non-Christians will ever feel compelled to attend a worship service unless they are "seekers" who have already formed an opinion about God. These "seeker" services are very successful in large Metropolitan areas where churches have much larger numbers of seekers to attract. These are excellent tools for reaching a people group who is very interested in spiritual things, but not interested in traditional church. That does not mean that seeker services do not have traditional worship elements. Some seeker services include more rituals than the average traditional church.

The unchurched (code for saved people who are not attending any church) may be reachable through a different form of worship, but the church needs to be ready for the reason these people are currently unchurched. Typically it is because they have been disillusioned with traditional churches, they are skeptical because they believe church members to be as bad or worse than most non-church members, they left church because they disagreed with the theology of the church (more times than not it was over tithing which this people group hates to hear about), or they have been living a life of sin and felt convicted when attending church so they left to be around others who would make them feel good about themselves.

If the church begins a service targeting lost, the church should be prepared for nothing but evangelistic sermons and music for that service. The lost do not need to hear how to become stronger in Christ when they have not met Him yet. The church also must commit to a full-scale evangelistic push in the community to find and bring in the lost. Many of the ministries will need to realign themselves for this evangelistic outreach. Church members will need to expect many more people attending in jeans and shorts, long-haired men with earrings, bikers with naked women tattooed on their bodies, teens who cuss in front of church members, couples who live together even though not married, etc. Until they except Christ, they will not change. It is a great goal, but many church members will fight it because it pushes them way out of their comfort zone. That is the reason that the fastest growing churches are new church starts because the churches are willing to except anyone and everyone just as they are.

If the church begins a service targeted at the unchurched, the church should be prepared for a service that does not include anything which might offend weak Christians. It will be a long road to assimilate these skeptics into regular church ministries and many of the Traditional church members will resent these sponges who will not tithe as freely, will make little commitment to serving and will disappear at the drop of a hat if they are offended by anything (especially a Traditional church member complaining about how little they add to the ministries and budget of the church. This is another great goal, but brings many struggles that the traditional church member is usually not willing to face. That is why most of the successful "seeker" churches started from scratch with little to no traditional church attenders.