I’ll buy a cup of a coffee for the readers who noticed that I missed #67 last week and published #68 first. Just let me know next time you see me.
Roughing It
In mid-March, our church Trustee Board began a long-discussed renovation project in my study. The project extends beyond my study to include the church office, which is separated from mine by a doorway. But relative to size and scope, the bulk of the attention has been given to my study.
Members had often remarked through the years that my study was a blast from the past, with its 60s/70s-style wood-paneling, worn carpet, and other tell-tale signs of age. It isn’t that I didn’t notice these features also, but I had felt that our energies and resources would be better devoted to more high-traffic areas of the building that needed updating.
Nearly 12 years in, a collective sense of duty overcame a few Trustees, so they decided to move forward. I didn’t resist. I too was tired of seeing books in stacks here and there. I wasn’t going to stop anyone from ripping out the old, dilapidated bookcase, and building a new one. Some new carpet and lighting wouldn’t hurt either.
Now my mentioning the project in a newsletter—along with the fact that it’s still not complete—will appear to some readers as if I’m using this Substack newsletter to vent or gripe. Far from it. I’m incredibly grateful for the project happening. It’s progress has been slowed by several factors inherent to doing the work mostly in-house. Any volunteer-led effort is subject to many outside forces that inevitably slow things down.
As an aside, one of the reasons I’ve even chosen to comment on the project here is to remind the younger church leaders that they will be served well by recalibrating their expectations about how much administration and facility-related work they may have to think through. On the one hand, they’ll have to be disciplined, having established firm boundaries between what God has tasked them with and what situations they might be tempted to insert themselves into. On the other hand, they will need to be prepared to provide an example of patience, wisdom, and vision for those tasks which concern facilities and grounds.
As the project enters its final phase, I have two matters especially on my mind: the challenge of patience and the challenge of focus.
I am both bearing with the circumstance of seeing a project completed, as well as enduring in my own day-to-day work. Patience carries both senses—the idea of bearing with and bearing through. It’s a mixture of both.
The challenge of patience is also bound up with the problem of focus. I’m reminded almost every fifteen minutes of how easy it is to get distracted by everything else under the sun. Some of this owes to my temperament, some to my current workspace. I’m located in a conference room with my essential study materials (and a bit more) set up on a long table. I hear almost every sound in the building, from the air conditioner kicking on and off, to people entering the side, front, or downstairs entrances. It’s quite a different experience from being locked away in a study that is mostly designed for study.
What has intensified both challenges is a problem I am entirely responsible for: the problem of being a packrat. (One of these days I’m going to write about “packrat theology.” It’s the notion of how you can rationalize keeping almost anything in a pile or file somewhere on the grounds that it may prove useful to a future article, seminar, or book.)
When I vacated my office, not only did I have to find a temporary home for over 1000 books. I had to move boxes, stacks, piles, and desk drawers elsewhere. Not only will I have to move them back later, but I have to cull much of this mess, lest I reintroduce primordial chaos back into the renewed Eden that is my study.
Tough Choices
Go ahead, tell me what 20-25 books you’d get rid of first if you downsized your library. How long do you imagine it would take?
And how does one sort through a dozen years’ worth of meeting notes, financials, articles, personal notes, clergy records, and miscellaneous ministry resources? I’m making my best stab at it, but somehow it feels inadequate. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ll still be working on this long after the study is ready.
On a brighter note, I’ve been reminded of many personal and professional lessons through this process, chiefly, resource management. But I’ve also been confronted with the paradox of being both a sentimental person and a person who likes change. I’ve always enjoyed moving around furniture, reorganizing books, even tweaking my schedule. But I struggle to throw things away.
This strikes me as especially relevant to the dynamic we often encounter in the church: people who respond well once they see something around them freshened up, but who themselves struggle to let go of things they are in physical proximity to.
If I’m going to have a different experience in that study going forward, I can’t go back in the way I came out. I’m going to have to purge my possessions. Perhaps this is true in other areas of life also. We cannot enjoy the new until we part with the old. Moreover, we have to reorient how we think about change, memories, and priorities. Otherwise, you’re back with the stacks and piles again in six months.
How Just How Interested Are They?
Warning: skeptic alert.
Sam Rainer and the folks at Church Answers recently published an article that has garnered some attention: “Is Gen Z More Likely to Attend Church Than Millennials? The Surprising Answer.” In reality, the article doesn’t really claim much, nor does it really say much. Seriously, it’s only three paragraphs and a chart. But this is sufficient to get people thinking about the preliminary research conducted by Ryan Burge (who has generally done some interesting work, in my view).
His data thus far suggests that those belonging to Gen Z are more likely to attend church than Millennials and Gen Xers. It’s not especially conclusive. The data set is incomplete. Rainer acknowledges that this finding could be an aberration, that a trend doesn’t necessarily prove anything on a larger scale. (Such acknowledgments make one wonder why they even publish such things.)
Before one rolls their eyes at what they perceive as me being snarky, Rainer also acknowledges that overall Gen Z religious attendance has been trending down. In other words, he’s telling the reader not to start doing victory laps after Prayer Meeting.
This article caught my eye for a different reason. It reminded me of some church growth literature from about 15-20 years ago. I seem to think it was some of Thom Rainer’s research, but I cannot verify that. Essentially, more than one “church growth expert” had claimed that surveys consistently showed that approximately eighty percent of respondents said they would attend a church service if asked by a friend.
I know I read this in more than one source. I know I used it, more than once, as an illustration in exhortations to laymen about inviting people to church. Like many, I used to believe it.
I now think it’s completely false. However, it’s hard to falsify the claim.
One could go out and invite 10 friends to church. If eight didn’t show up in a week (well, let’s give them at least a month or two to show up), then one could say, “Okay, I’ve proved that data wrong.” Of course, this would be insufficient. Eighty percent is dealing with more than isolated incidents or individuals, but a broader scale of persons and situations. I’m not a statistician, and I don’t care enough to learn the lingo. But let’s just say that you’d have to survey the experiences of a larger pool of people inviting people to church services and assessing the outcomes to be able to cast doubt on this long-used statistic.
Yet even this still misses the point. The survey I cite (which unfortunately I am unable to locate) doesn’t say that “eighty percent of all unbelievers who were invited to a church service eventually attended.” It simply says that eighty percent of those polled said they would attend if asked by a friend.
I’m old enough to remember the 2016 election. Does anyone recall all of those people who said they’d never vote for Donald Trump? Remember how Hillary Clinton was ahead in the polls on Election Day? She did win the popular vote, and by a lot. But let’s just say that a lot of well-paid pollsters were wrong.
The 2016 election isn’t an isolated incident either. We could adduce other examples, whether from politics or other spheres of life. People tell pollsters all kinds of things which may or may not correlate to actual lived behavior. Such surveys/polls might measure intentions and sentiments pretty well, but they’re not necessarily predictive of future behavior. Human beings are frustrating like that.
I would welcome any church leader reading this to respond if they have found an eighty-percent response rate from members who invite their friends. In fact, I’ll publish the responses in a future newsletter. Yet I don’t think it’ll be necessary.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I don’t want to conclude on a discouraging note. I do want to caution about the use of data, especially data that goes against every single bit of experience that 99% of us have had during the Christian life and ministry, to prop up wrong ideas about human nature and church growth. Outreach and evangelism are terribly hard work. It’s why most of us aren’t doing them. But our Master has called us to this. We desperately need His Spirit to move powerfully upon the hearts of those we’re seeking to influence with the Word.
Probably part of our problem stems from our over-dependence on church invitations to the exclusion of one-on-one, personal evangelism. The equation of church invitations with evangelism has deceived more than one Christian into thinking, “I’m evangelistic.”
Another problem may be that we lack the influence with our unsaved friends that we thought we had.
I’m not sure how we got here, but going forward prayer, fasting, and more intentional evangelism will have to be privileged in our ministry approach. No longer can we lean on incomplete, dated, and outright misleading conclusions to figure out how to reach the world.
Follow-Up:
Last week I reflected on a recent film about war and the larger message about war that one might garner from war films. Along these lines—and in tandem with recent Sunday School lessons about Daniel and Esther—I recalled some of C.S. Lewis’s eloquent insights into cowardice and courage in The Screwtape Letters. From Uncle Screwtape’s perspective: “We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame…courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.” (Letter 29).
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Quote of the Week:
Ours is a moment of palpable fear in America, and no one is more unsettled than those of us who have come to depend, through long years of higher education, on stable cultural values for a sense of identity and purpose. Academics and intellectuals—book people—tend to come from the cosmopolitan middle class. This means we are not rich enough to be indifferent to the fate of our society and not rooted enough to be immovable. We aspire to openness, but more fundamentally what we require is continuity and order, F.R. Leavis’s “great tradition” or Lionel Trilling’s “sense of the past.” History, in all its folly and contingency, is just what the revolutionary resents. The notion that so many generations should have come before him, ignorant of his impending birth and living therefore according to their own benighted values, affronts his ego. Robespierre guillotined nobles and clergy. The Khmer Rouge expressed the revolutionary ideal even more pithily by executing anyone wearing eyeglasses. Anti-intellectualism took root early in America. Tocqueville thought it was the handmaiden of the democratic spirit. But rarely has it seemed quite so menacing as it does now.