Where Is Your Focus?
Why Is Focusing on Who You Want to Reach So Difficult?
It’s easy to focus on people you want to keep. It takes much more resolve to focus on those you want to reach.
Here’s why. You have to focus on people you haven’t even met. It’s easier and more natural to focus on people whose stories you know, who are paying your bills, and who are going to vote in the next congregational meeting. It’s much more difficult and requires significantly more intentionality to focus on people who are not yet a part of your church. Unchurched people never fill up your inboxes with messages telling you they would come if you changed this one thing. They don’t show up to meetings with petitions begging you to be more relevant. They’ve never taken you out for lunch to explain how “everyone” they know would come to your church if you did family ministry better. They don’t call saying they’d love to have you share the Gospel while feeding them, clothing them, or visiting them. They don’t send emails saying, “Please come help the kids who live in our subsidized housing unit.”
Most of the people in the community you are trying to reach are unaware of or indifferent to the fact that you exist. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to keep them front of mind. (One of the best ways of doing that, by the way, is to make sure you have lots of unchurched friends in your social circle that you pray for regularly.)
But What If We Lose People?
The number one question people ask me when I talk about change is this: What if we lose people? The truth is, our church lost people in all the transition. You probably will too. There is no way I know to engineer significant change and keep everyone you’ve currently got. People tend to like things the way they are. In fact, everyone in your church likes your church the way it is; otherwise, they wouldn’t be there. It’s just that the rest of your community may not. Otherwise, they might be there.
If you change, some who like the status quo more than they like change may leave.
How many? Enough. Some of the 10% opposed to change will go. Maybe less, maybe more. And if you make radical changes, you might lose 10% again next year. There may be cumulative losses because the kind of community you’re forming will start looking radically different from others. But while the losses may be cumulative, the gains are potentially exponential.
In our case, there were only two seasons in 15 years when we stopped growing: when we eliminated hymns entirely from our service, and when we left a nearly paid-for building to start over again as a brand-new church. I’m not saying either of these is something congregations should do. We did them because we believed they would help us reach more people. Despite experiencing slight declines in the moment, we bounced back to reach even more people than we had prior to the change, people who were not going to church at all. I was reminded again and again that if you focus on complaints, you lose sight of the plan. We just couldn’t afford to do that. So we shouldered some painful seasons.
Before you get too anxious (or too excited) about losing people, in the next chapter we’ll develop some questions that will help you assess if you are losing the right people. (Yes, there may be people you should lose and there are people you should keep.) But until then, let’s keep moving through this concept.
