Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church

1948 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126

     This time of year I get a ton of those catalogs from church marketing companies wanting to sell me glossy posters, mailers and door hangers that will entice the “unchurched” to break down our doors during the holidays. Two things come to mind: 1) Nobody in my church looks like the smiling models on the mailer and, 2) I’m really tired of using the term “unchurched” to describe secular people.

     The word “unchurched” always underlines in red in my spellchecker. Maybe that’s because the word itself is too “churchy” (a word which, incidentally, doesn’t get underlined). Apparently, a big chunk of the world doesn’t care that it’s “unchurched.” That’s the problem, you say. But is it really? It’s true that churches express different beliefs and convictions from much of the rest of the culture, but in practice there seems to be little difference in behavior between the churched and unchurched. The rates of premarital sex and divorce, for example, are almost identical on both sides of the steeple. Rather than changing the culture, the churched are often more adept at adapting to it. The old adage is apparently true — “Being in church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than being in a garage makes you a car.”

     I may be branded a heretic, but if the goal of “reaching the unchurched” is to make them “churched” I’m not sure that’s a good thing. If your church is typical you probably have a small but solid core of folks who are committed to Christ and understand the church to be a missional community, but then there are others:

• De-churched people who populate the rolls but who don’t attend anymore. While some people leave for personal reasons, many de-churched people leave in a huff over something the pastor did. I had a guy leave the church once because we didn’t sing “The First Noel” on Christmas Eve. Hey, no one in seminary told me that one’s salvation depends on singing particular Christmas carols. My bad.
• Re-churched people who became de-churched during the last pastoral administration and come back now that things are “better” under your leadership. “Better,” that is, until you preach any sermon that references tithing or sex. They’ll recycle to the de-churched list.
• Roto-churched folks who drift from church to church in the community depending on whose youth/children/music program is “hot”.
• Mis-churched people who will send you notes telling you how much better it was at their “old” church in another town.
• Mega-churched people who can only engage in “true worship” with a praise band, screens and Starbucks in the narthex.
• Casual-churched folks who drop by when they have nothing else to do or if the weather is lousy on Sunday morning.
• Hyper-churched people who spend all their time worrying about stuff at church. These are the people who write you anonymous notes, saying things like, “Pastor, I was lying awake last night worrying about your new haircut and whether it’s spiritual enough.”
• Late-churched people always arrive 15 minutes into the service and sit on the front row.
• Extra-churched people (usually men) who tell you that they worshiped God on the golf course Sunday morning. They see yelling “Jesus!” at a shanked five-iron as an act of praise.
• Mal-churched — that one person who never misses church and sits in the same pew but never, ever smiles.
• H2O-churched — that’s “Holidays, 2 Only.”

     Truth be told, most of us clergy types are over-churched trying to figure out and deal with the “churched” people in our congregations, let alone thinking about adding more. But maybe that means we need our own attitudes adjusted. I know I’ve been guilty at times of seeing people in my church as “human resources” for getting churchy things done like populating committees instead of challenging them and myself to get out and do the work of the kingdom.

     Somewhere along the line we forgot that Jesus never called us to make people “churched” but to make them “disciples” — followers who embodied the person and work of Christ. It’s a radical idea, but I think that being a disciple of Christ means being “unchurched” ourselves, moving outside our buildings and institutions in order to do the radically hard work of loving people wherever we find them. Rather than get people to come to church, we should be spending our homiletical energy to get the church to go outside and be with people.

     Don’t get me wrong; I think we ought to invite as many people as possible to be part of our communities of faith. The question is whether we’re inviting them to become “members” of an institution or challenging them to become part of a movement that once changed the world and could do it again.

     If we recaptured that passion, my guess is that being “churched” would mean something very different to us and the rest of the world.

Bob Kaylor

Reprinted by Permission (Homiletics—Volume 19, Number 6)