One of the most common signs of a church in crisis is an obsession with who’s leaving, why they left, how to get them back, and how to keep the ones we have. In other words, the church’s back door.
In this guest article, Shawn Keener challenges this defensive posture of staying obsessed with who’s leaving. He shows us why we should, instead, concentrate on the outward-looking mission of who’s outside our front door.
— Karl Vaters
“Pastor,” we heard the conference speaker say, “your front door is the most important, but you can’t forget to pay attention to the back door.”
That sounds like good advice, doesn’t it? Growth comes through the front door, but growth is retained by means of the back door.
The conference speaker was citing a commonly held maxim of church leadership. That we need to keep the church’s back door closely guarded so we don’t lose people. (In case these terms are unfamiliar, the front door refers to people coming to your church for the first time while the back door refers to people quitting your church).
Why Church?
Scripture names two main purposes for the church.
In Matthew 28 they are known as “go” and “make disciples,” in James 1 they are stated a little differently as “look after widows and orphans” and “keep from being polluted by the world.” In 2 Peter 3 they are “speed his coming” and “live holy and godly lives.”
Regardless of how it’s stated throughout the Word, it always boils down to what we might call “outward” and “inward.” And while both purposes of the church are crucial, one is always primary and the other is always secondary.
What’s holding the bridegroom back is not the readiness of the bride (Revelation 19:7-8), but the number of the lost (2Peter 3:7-9, Matthew 24:14). Outward has priority over inward, though both are important.
So, was the conference speaker right?
Keeping A Front-Door Focus
In The Forgotten Ways, Alan Hirsch uses the analogy from the vast interior ranches of Australia which contain their cattle, not with an impossible length of fences around a ridiculous expanse of acreage, but with a strong, centrally located well of refreshing water.
In the open, arid landscape, the well contains the ranch’s cattle far more effectively than steely barbed wire ever could. If we have something with a super powerful draw, we no longer need to worry about containment.
Imagine for a moment, pastor or church leader, what your life and daily work would be like if you had no reason to worry much at all over your back door.
You wouldn’t have that constant, nagging, back-of-the-brain fear that if you don’t work hard enough to meet everyone’s expectations, key people will exit the back door and your church will fall apart. You would no longer feel vulnerable to unChristlike power plays or big-giver ploys. You’d feel much freer to appropriate the gobs of time required each week to executive-level praying, planning, dreaming, team building, communicating, and networking.
What a rewarding, invigorating delight that is … for the pastor who chooses to focus almost exclusively on the front door.
The front door is where it’s at. The front door is the “outward,” the priority of the church. A determined, intentionally myopic focus on the front door keeps your people in the game, because there’s nothing even remotely so motivating and magnetic as a white-hot mission, like the one Jesus is calling us on. To reach the perishing and dying.
Ironically, (especially if you are reading this post and arguing that inward should have priority over outward), it turns out that the most effective and organic method of making mature disciples is by going outward. In other words, a secondary inward focus is best achieved in the pursuit of the primary outward focus.
Start With A Clarified Mission
If your internal church culture is obsessed with reaching those who are far from God in your community, and you’re experimenting like crazy, prayerfully risking it all to build patient relational bridges with them, you have no need to watch your back door.
Yes, some will leave. You’ll contribute to transfer growth (church-hopping), yet you may not be a recipient of any transfer growth yourself. But those who stay will be aligned and on fire.
Want to get there? Start with a clarified mission.
(This article originally appeared in the Baptist Churches of New England blog. It has been re-used here with the author’s permission.)
(Photo by Jannis Andrija Schnitzer | Flickr)
