3. People Need to Talk Back
Ed Stetzer points out that 86 percent of unchurched people say they can have a good relationship with God without belonging to a church.
Before you have a defensive knee-jerk reaction to that, I want you to think of why they’re saying it.
They can watch the show online.
That’s why church planters tend to ensure that church isn’t a show.
As long as the church is set up as an audience on a Sunday morning, all we’ve asked them to use are ears, eyeballs and butts. We never ask them to use their mouths.
And they’ve got so much to say.
When this media generation grew up, the Internet was already there from day one, while most in ministry can remember the technological revolution as it happened. Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Everybody has something to say, and they don’t care if it’s important, polished or relevant. They just want an opportunity to be heard.
Then they walk through the doors of a church, and we tell them to sit down and shut up. Listen to us! Quietly! As usual, the church will be decades behind the cultural revolution for fear that it might be compromising, but missionaries study a culture and find the “in” for the gospel. There’s never been a way more conducive to the gospel than giving the lost an opportunity to feed back into what they’ve heard. The most unchurched generation during my lifetime, the blog generation, has unwittingly provided the church with the tools to reach them, and this is where the church, if it were willing to sit and listen quietly, could learn a lot. This generation not only will give us the keys to unlocking dialogue with them, but they may teach us how to be more like the first century church.
I get the impression from reading the New Testament that church was a participatory sport, and this generation doesn’t want to be spectators. As a master missionary, Paul’s customs, routines and personal preferences changed so he could bring the gospel to the Gentile world. You can actually trace this in Acts. When Paul went to Athens, he used the Greek means of communication: proclamation. But when he went into the synagogue in Corinth, he sat down rabbinical style and blended teaching with discussion as he reasoned with Jews and sympathetic Greeks (Acts 18:4).