Nice is not enough
Taking the pulse of your congregation’s Christ-centeredness By David Daubert
A
cross the ELCA, congregations are wondering how to better connect with people and find
renewal and avenues to growth. But when asked, “What is the best thing about this place that you’d want new people to know?” members in almost every congregation say the same thing: “Te people. Tese people are really nice people.” With a significant majority of our
congregations having weekly wor- ship attendance of well under 100 people (and declining), this senti- ment is understandable. In many of our settings, most of the people know most of the other people. It can easily feel like a family. We are a church grounded in
the gospel of a God who has come into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. Tis God has lived, suffered and died with a costly love. Tat same God has been raised from the dead and returns with a persistent love. We are joined to Christ with a baptism that offers an abiding presence and promises we will never be apart from the God we meet in Jesus. But when we’re asked the best
thing about what it means to be part of our ministry, sadly the answer too oſten begins “We are .…” Tere are two reasons why this is
causing us trouble. First, it isn’t true. Whenever we
descend to being a social club, no matter how religious the veneer, we have ceased to live out of our identity as the church. Te focus of
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life, especially as Lutherans under- stand it, is that God always goes first and initiates with love that creates, redeems and gives new life. While we might respond with
faith and life or with sin and death, the God of Jesus persists in the direction of life anyway. If the first thing we say about our church life isn’t God, we are already in the dog- house. Whenever we have become the point, however unintentionally, we have big issues to deal with. Second, in our overloaded and
busy lives, most people aren’t look- ing to spend more time with nice people anyway. Many people are inundated with relationships from work, caring for aging parents, their kids’ activities and other demands on their lives. If that isn’t enough, many have
hundreds of friends on social media—oſten including dozens they haven’t really met yet, and prob- ably never will, or don’t remember “friending” in the first place. Depending on social skills and
abilities, online “friends” may be less problematic than actual face-to-face time with a living person whose body is present and eyes are actually looking at you. Te last thing many people are looking for is the chance to not sleep in on Sundays in order to have a few more nice people in their lives.
So what’s the point? If nice isn’t enough, or even the point, then what is? Recent indicators from multiple
sources point to the fact that people are less interested in church life than in previous eras, but their interest in their spiritual lives (God, meaning, purpose, etc.) remains quite high. It isn’t that people have stopped
believing that God might exist or that life might have meaning. Rather, because so many churches are filled with people being “nice” but who seem to not be all that interested in God when they get together, people have stopped look- ing to the church as a place to search
DAVE DRUMM
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