January 20, 1999

To tell the truth,
most churches 'miss the point'
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___FORT WORTH--Most church people believe a lie, according to Round Rock pastor Roddy Clyde.
___That lie, he said, is that their churches are doing what God has commissioned them to do: Reach unchurched people with the gospel.
___Even many churches experiencing strong growth aren't effectively reaching non-believers, said Clyde, pastor of the Fellowship at Forest Creek, formerly known as Trinity Baptist Church. Often, those churches are successful because they have created a climate attractive to people who already are believers, thus experiencing "transfer growth."
___To back up his claim, Clyde cites research he and his colleagues have done in Texas and elsewhere. A survey of all the Baptist churches in his association, for example, found that only 2.8 percent of all the people who regularly attend services were brought into the churches from unchurched backgrounds. The rest--more than 97 percent--already were in church somewhere.
___A similar survey has been made in five other areas, Clyde said, with the results always coming in about the same, ranging from 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent.
___The modern church, he said, is "missing the point. The point is to reach people for Christ and help them grow to be like him. We are missing the point by trying to keep people for Christ and helping them grow to be like us. We have become increasingly focused on maintaining the kingdom instead of growing it.
___"We do not see the United States as a mission field," he asserted. Yet the U.S. increasingly is a mission field that should be approached just as missionaries would approach people in Afghanistan, Clyde said during a breakout session in the Innovative Church Ministries seminar of the Texas Baptist Evangelism Conference last week.
___His session, titled "Between a Rock and Hard Place," focused on why this disconnect has occurred between the church and those who most need the message of the church.
___The rock, he said, is Jesus Christ and his desire that the church be effective in bringing people from no faith to a growing faith. But the hard place, he added, is the membership and leadership of traditional churches that refuse to change to be more effective.
___The primary problem is that most churches "do church in a way that is culturally irrelevant to the unchurched," Clyde explained.
___He acknowledged that advocates for change like him often are accused of compromising the gospel for the sake of cultural relevance. Yet he has no desire to alter the basic truth of Scripture, he said.
___The reason such accusations are made, Clyde suggested, is because too many church people have confused Baptist tradition with biblical truth. For example, Baptist tradition says Sunday school has to operate a certain way while the Bible presents no such demands. Or Baptist tradition says a certain order of worship or music style is required, while those ideas are not mandated in the Bible.
___The importance of becoming relevant to the culture would be obvious if people simply would think of their hometowns as mission fields, Clyde said. "Nobody in this room would finance a mission trip to Afghanistan without making sure the missionaries were prepared for the culture."
___To fulfill God's primary desire for the church, many more congregations should "prayerfully and purposely" transition themselves to be more culturally relevant, he asserted.
___To begin that process, he suggested these steps:
___ Know the unchurched audience in your community.
___ Adapt your methods to match that audience without altering the truth of the message.
___He also suggested three focus questions developed through a five-year transition process at his church. Asking these questions of everything will provide a quick evaluation of where energies ought to be focused:
___ Does it help?
___ Does it hurt?
___ Does it matter?
___If it helps achieve the primary goal of reaching the unchurched, keep doing it and emphasize it, he said. But if it hurts the primary goal, stop doing it or adapt it.
___Advocating the kind of change required to turn most traditional churches into culturally relevant churches is not easy, Clyde confessed. "There is no such thing as painless transition."
___He recounted some of the pains his own congregation went through during its transition from a traditional church to an innovative church. However, he also said the church now regularly brings in two to four times as many new members each year as it previously had in total attendance.
___Such gains are possible only when people and churches are pushed beyond their comfort zones, Clyde said. "We cannot consistently continue to reach people for Christ within our comfort zone."

Additional tips:
___ If adding an innovative service while keeping a traditional one, place the new service at 11 a.m. on Sundays. "Even lost people, if you ask them what time people go to church, they'll say 11 on Sundays."
___ Not every church should transition to an innovative format. "Some churches shouldn't transition because the cost would be too great. But those churches ought to get involved in planting effective churches."
___ Change makes people uncomfortable, and existing church members when pushed too far will blame the pastor. "The best defense against the comfort problem is leading people to refocus on the point."
___ "The truth is many churches and church people are driven by a desire to maintain power and control. ... You can't worry about power and control if you're focused on reaching people for Christ."
___ "Deacons have become powerbrokers because pastors have not been pastors." Too many pastors have placed themselves on career tracks rather than investing themselves fully where they currently serve.
___ "Don't ask people to change unless you plan to stay."
___ "You cannot rush change. Don't think of it in terms of days or weeks; think in terms of years."

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