3 Dangerous Things Your Church Might Love More Than Its Mission

All churches love certain things. Some love fellowship, worship, or prayer—these are good and vital. Others love their building, their history, or their strategy. While these can be positive, they can also become a hindrance depending on how much we value them.

In my work with thousands of churches, I’ve observed three specific “loves” that frequently hurt a church’s mission and hinder their divine call.

1. Loving Past Culture More Than Current Context

It is a remarkable trend: If the 1950s suddenly returned, many churches would be perfectly prepared. Whether it is the ’50s, the 1600s, or the 1980s, there is nothing inherently wrong with those eras—except for the fact that we don’t live there anymore.

To be on mission, we must:

• Love the people who live here now, rather than yearning for “the way things used to be”.

• Prioritize contextualization, speaking to those around us in a meaningful way, much like the Apostle Paul did in Acts 17.

• Engage the current culture while remaining biblically faithful.

If your church loves a past era more than its current mission, it loves the wrong thing.

2. Loving Comfort More Than Mission

It is easy for a church to subtly shift its focus toward what makes the congregation happy rather than what pleases Jesus. Many churches have worked hard to satisfy their “congregational customers,” but the church is not called to cater to customers—it is called to equip co-laborers.

Settling down with people who are just like us is easier than reaching the “foreigner or alien among us.” However, the Bible repeatedly commands us to provoke one another to good deeds and bear each other’s burdens. A church does not exist for the comfort of its people; it exists for the mission.

3. Loving Traditions More Than Children

Tradition can be “the living faith of the dead,” but traditionalism is “the dead faith of the living”. You can tell a church loves tradition more than its children when it persists in using methods that are no longer relevant to the next generation.

Too often, churches:

• Draw lines in the sand over nonessential issues.

• Allow tradition to hinder a humble assessment of missional effectiveness.

• Resist the necessary changes required to reach a changing demographic.

While we must always defend essential doctrines, we must reject a cultural elitism that prevents us from passing the torch to new leaders.

A Time for Evaluation

Loving the wrong things leads you the wrong way. To move in the right direction, a church must be “always reforming,” humbly assessing its ability to reach people with the Good News.

Ask yourself these hard questions:

• Are we primarily reaching people who are already believers?

• Are we reaching those who don’t understand Christian subculture or taboos?

• Are we reaching people who have no church background at all?

  To say we cannot reach the lost because of our personal preferences or traditions is antithetical to the mission of God.

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Ed Stetzer holds the Billy Graham distinguished chair of church, mission and evangelism at Wheaton College and the Wheaton Grad School, where he also oversees the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.