Your church shouldn’t be too easy to join.
This is probably counter-intuitive to many, we spend such a lot of time trying to remove barriers to welcome people into church and often in really helpful ways, but let me try and show you my thinking.
Nor is this a bait-and-switch where I’ll end by saying the point is that you have to die to join the church (in repentance) and then rise again with Jesus (in baptism); though that’s true too.
My point is one I’ve made a few times: welcome requires walls.
You cannot welcome people without a threshold for them to come over. If joining your church doesn’t mean anything—if there are no duties to being part of it—then it’s not possible to be part of it. As a result, it’s very difficult to welcome people, because you have nothing to welcome people into.
Some churches are a little like a bunch of people in the park who say, “welcome to our park!” and you shrug and listen to their singing for a bit and then wonder off because it isn’t their park at all. Welcoming people to public shared spaces doesn’t make sense, there’s no threshold to cross. Welcoming people to my home makes sense, there’s a threshold to cross to enter a different demesne: my household has a set of rules to it. To be welcomed is to come into this different geography with its unique culture and be told you can be here too.
Welcome doesn’t require that you adopt my culture, just that you enter into it while you’re in my home. Even then, most hosts don’t insist you do as they do, but that itself is an element of the culture that says that guests are given honour.
We all know this intrinsically. You got to someone’s home and however much they tell you to ‘make yourself at home’ you are unlikely to start sticking your feet up on the table and belching (I assume that’s how we all behave at home). It’s natural to stay slightly watchful while you try and figure out the rules of this place and largely follow them. Often we just ask (that’s much easier), or we try and pick them up by observation. It’s what induces that fish-out-of-water feeling when their home is very different to yours rather than a little. I’ve had that experience in Nigerian friends’ homes, the culture is starkly different and I’m scrambling to keep up (asking is a good idea). They tell me they’ve had the same experience in my home. I imagine if you went to someone’s house for dinner and there was too much cutlery, you’d feel the same (start on the outside, I’m told).
Welcome doesn’t require that you adopt my culture, but joining my household would. If you came to live with us there would be a greater sense that in this house we do things like this. I’m sure many would be similar to others and I imagine some would be quirky (I have no idea what they are, you’ll have to ask anyone who’s lodged with us).
The church is the household of faith, God’s house. We don’t read from household to church because that’s backwards, we should learn how to structure our own households in God’s house, but we can apply the thinking I just described. People can be welcomed without adopting the church’s culture—and I don’t mean just what churches call culture but also their actual culture: like singing and eating a piece of bread and calling it Jesus. But, to join they must adopt it wholesale.
That’s what joining a church is, saying ‘this is how we do things here,’ and then expecting people to learn to behave the same way. They can challenge the culture of course, and often it will be that outside challenge that causes a church to sit up and realise that they’re swallowed a camel while straining gnats (Matthew 23).
So don’t be too easy to join. What do I mean? I’ve seen churches, up close and further away, where that culture isn’t communicated; they don’t even try and communicate it. The same goes for doctrine, there isn’t really much to speak of, so they don’t try and communicate ‘this is what we believe in this house.’ It can be under the guise of helping people to join.
It has an impact, perhaps unintended. If you don’t teach a culture, then a culture will still be taught and it may be a culture that you didn’t want taught. The strange behaviours that seem to be the most important thing that people start to ape because no one has thought through what it means to join here.
More importantly though: you’ll gather a crowd quickly if you’re easy to join. That’s rarely helpful. That crowd will believe 11 different things for every 10 people in it. Some of those people will start teaching what they believe as though the church does. They aren’t malicious, no one told them the church doesn’t think that. People start to get confused as preaching and other formative settings pull in multiple different directions. There are beliefs that are difficult to co-exist in the same church, and you’ll probably have them. Eventually this will cause an explosion that could have been avoided by clarity, as everyone involved thinks that they are following the church’s teaching (since we all assume the church agrees with us until told otherwise, why wouldn’t it? We’re very reasonable people).
They will also be all over the map culturally too, importing whatever they’ve brought with them from elsewhere. They’ll be hard to lead.
To clarify slightly, I’m not suggesting that none of these people should come to your church and if you made it really clear what they were getting into they’d go elsewhere. A pure church doesn’t exist. Some wouldn’t join you if you were clear. Many probably would still join because they joined because you have good kids work, but they’d know where the church stood. They wouldn’t teach against it. They might even be persuaded over time, though some won’t be. They’ll be much easier to lead, and you won’t have the inevitable blow-up some years down the line.
Welcome requires walls, so don’t make your walls so invisible that people think they’re inside when they’re outside; and don’t build a house without walls, there will be nothing to put the roof on.
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
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