Institution's Sake??

I am a servant of Jesus.  I care more about people's relationship with him than with the church.  I've heard people talk about their relationship with the church and never mention Jesus.  As a pastor I have cared about people sitting in the pews and let up on people who aren't following Christ becoming followers.  Too many of us have been a part of churches that transferred sheep amongst themselves rather than making new sheep.  So I am squeamish about simply trying to preserve the institution.  It can be like preserving the body and not caring about health.  If, however, you care about health, you'll preserve the body.  Right?

I will try to overcome my squeamishness and wonder if we shouldn't focus on making members.  Public radio has pledge drives.  Other organizations have member drives.  A base of members makes possible the mission.

I ponder so many of our good outreach and mission projects.  We're not giving away the farm at all.  But we give a lot of efforts to that which will not garner us sustaining members.  A thrift shop, a clothes pantry, a hefty program for helping feed the hungry by gleaning ... all very good.  All take our time and money and energy.  Some may join us because we care about others.  Hurray!  May it be so.  Yet a 100 member congregation spends a lot of itself doing a pantry for the poor, and not that they shouldn't, but those poor are not recruited as members.  If they were, they probably are so different socio-economically that they wouldn't join.  Meanwhile, the 100 member church shrinks to 90 to 80 to ... and then there's no more food pantry period.

Somewhere along the line we have to ask supremely, "Are we making more disciples?"  Too many of us aren't.  Me included.  And more mundanely and more in the sense of (yucky?) institutional preservation we have to ask, "What are we doing to get new members??"

We're doing this committee, that event, this renovation, this teaching series, this pot luck ... and none of them with the ask, "How can we leverage this for getting new members?"  Or none with the ask, "How does spending ourselves on this occupy us so that we don't have to do the perhaps harder task of finding new members?"

Good luck to us all.  Me included.