Our Thoughts

During my travels serving churches, I’ve noticed that very few churches have a balanced response to what is a core facet of a healthy church: exposure. Exposure is critical to understanding who you are as a church and finding your way. And while I know that there are some church "hermits" out there, there are just as many church "followers" to ensure that there are large crowds on each side of “the exposure ditch.”

Let's start with the underexposed church. These are churches that rarely expose themselves to the world outside their walls, or have limited knowledge as to what’s out there in their own community. Their leaders tend to rely only on their denomination or a few "model" churches to provide insight into how church is done. By not being exposed to other churches in their community and what they are doing, these leaders probably don’t fully understand who they are in the context of the community—leaving them without a sense of how the community perceives them.

In order to fully understand God’s will for your church, it helps to be exposed to what He’s doing in other congregations. This helps each church see the role it can more effectively play in the bigger picture of what God is doing.

If under-exposure is your default, make a point to visit churches that do not match your flavor. Visit growing churches and struggling ones. Do not judge them. Ask yourself, "Why do these church-goers like this? Why is this church successful (or not)? Who is not attending this church and why?" In order to get away from your own church on a Sunday, some pastors might have to commit hard to taking a break. It is difficult to take a break if you and your church are not in the habit. Let me challenge you that every church leader needs an exposure break—an opportunity to see others fighting the same "good fight" they are fighting. Stepping out of the pulpit and stepping into someone else's back row will enhance your perspective in so many ways.

The other side of the ditch is the church that is overexposed. This church tends to chase whoever they feel is the most exciting at the moment. They follow trailblazing churches and often change what they do to match what they think the most innovative churches are doing. The end result is that these overexposed churches never really gain a sense of who "they" are and don’t fully understand that God's calling cannot be borrowed or imitated from someone else. They often read tons of blogs and listen to tons of podcasts.

Overexposed churches are often unconsciously looking for the "silver-bullet" that’s going to take their success to another level. They can end up becoming puppets to church fads—and while they can spout out a who's who list of popular Christianity, they less frequently take a hard, inward look at who they are and let God show them how to commit to who they are supposed to be for their community.

It is critical that we as church leaders get exposure to what God’s doing in other churches. But it’s also critical after seeing what God’s doing in other churches to come back and ask the question, “who are we and how can we learn from this exposure to execute better on who God has uniquely called us to be?” As a result we can use exposure to understand ourselves better, communicate our DNA more effectively, and become more deliberate—instead of constantly reinventing ourselves.

Perhaps an approach that might work best is to pre-define seasons of exposure—moving inbetween months or years where you are pursuing exposure deliberately, followed by extended periods of head-down execution of what God is showing you. 

As you think back on whether you have been over or underexposed, what next season do you need to step into? 

We often run into a church that is in transition, looking for decisiveness on tender topics... "Should we have multiple worship styles?" "Do we go more acoustic?" "More Hillsong?" "What about the hymns?" "Why are we not attracting certain groups of people?"

These are the issues I tend to love the most. The reason I love them, is because I like to dig into the heart of the issue. I love to go beyond the surface "love for old hymns" and ask, "why do 'these' people like 'these' songs?" I am convinced that the answer is almost always deeper than we expect. 

As we have dug into this time and time again, one clear trend appears...

People gravitate to the worship style in which they experienced their high-water-mark with God.

I do not care if it was banjo-led worship. If that is what you experienced your closest connection to God with, you will long to hear the banjo played like this yet again.

Our love for our favorite genre of music is a heart's attempt to reach back to these special times. For example, older folks like older songs, but not simply because the songs are older. To these people, to any people, the worship style they like the most tends to be the style in which they felt closest to God (I am partial to some Rich Mullins myself). 

We were working with a church recently that was struggling with this change. By listening, we picked up on some interesting undertones. It led us to propose that if someone wants the songs sung today like they were thirty years ago, this person is more than likely struggling with two things when someone tries to bring about change:

1) Their greatest moments with God were in their past (instead of looking to find fresh times with God in their future). This is an area where we, as leaders, have a responsibility to guide them to search out their future close moments with God.

2) Their inability to learn all the words to all the new songs that we do in our A.D.D. song rotations (and small "very cool" overhead text) just makes them want to give up.

With this in mind, we worked with the leadership to cast vision for fresh experiences with God and to teach them a short list of new songs over several months. When we arrived back at the church 7 months later, the over 70 crowd were as much or more engaged in modern worship than the twenty-somethings were.

It would have been easy to write the older crowd off or to give them their own service with their own style. It took courageous leadership to look past their initial complaints and take them to a new place in worship. But isn't that what leadership is all about? Leadership is about taking people to a place they should go in spite of where they want to go.

What it created in this church's older crowd was a longing for new places with God, instead of just a pursuit of past places. That is a beautiful thing. As leaders, what are we pursuing and where are we taking those we lead? Are we allowing them to camp out in their past, or are we challenging them to pursue God afresh today.

Where is your congregation? Maybe it is time to... "Sing to the Lord a new song." Psalms 96:1A