People Aren’t Looking for Friendly Churches

Once, while I was in the midst of planting a church, Doug McClintic (author of “Doug’s Law”) said to me, “People who come to new churches aren’t looking for friendliness; they are looking for friends.” That has always stuck with me. Obviously, that doesn’t mean we should be unfriendly to guests, but it suggests there is something more at play than most of us realize when we think about church. To me, it means we might be measuring the wrong thing.

Friendliness and good hospitality, along with clear lines of communication and enfolding, are really important for churches that want to welcome guests. We should thank the Seeker Sensitive model for helping us realize that newcomers don’t like attending someone else’s family reunion. But just measuring those “friendly” metrics will likely leave us short. In fact, it may leave us focusing on the wrong metrics altogether, keeping us enslaved to attendance as the primary marker of importance.

Smaller churches are often paralyzed by these metrics. I take call after call with churches asking for help to grow. Often, this is a “get-us-back-to-what-we-used-to-be” mindset or a plea for survival beyond the current generation. But underneath it echoes a belief: if we’re not large enough, we’re not good enough. Where did that belief come from? It’s not in the Bible. It wasn’t in the first expressions of the church, nor was it the point of the church for its first 300 years. And yet, in church after church, I’ll ask why they need to grow, and the answers continue to suggest that attendance, more than anything else, is the marker of a true church in most people’s minds.

Recently, I heard Jeff Dunn-Rankin say to a small church in Pennsylvania, “Churches that focus on growth often don’t find it, but churches that focus on mission often do.” When I think about growth, the go-to metrics usually include giving, worship attendance, or both. Those are longstanding markers of health, but I’m starting to see a change in the church indicating this may no longer be true, particularly in smaller congregations.

Recently, I spent a couple of days assessing six churches ranging in size from ten worshippers to about 100. Though 100 worshippers may sound small, it’s actually above the national average in the United States, where the average church attendance is about 70 people per week. Interestingly, the anxieties between the smallest and largest churches in that group were markedly different.

The larger churches were very anxious about their attendance. They recognized they were aging and wanted to see more young people join their Sunday experience but didn’t know how. In fact, over and over again, they would say things like, “We’re a really welcoming church, and we keep asking them to come. If they would just show up on a Sunday morning, they would find something amazing.”

The smallest of these churches, however, were anxious about their neighborhoods. They often had food pantries, clothing closets, diaper ministries, or afterschool programs for the local community. Usually, these barely-above-double-digit congregations were spending most of their time managing the kind of impact that churches 20 times their size often don't have. When they looked at their aging faith community, they were worried about who would continue the ministry to the local underserved population.

It was almost as if those 100+ congregations were still on a mission of “getting more people here,” while the dozen-or-less churches had shifted that focus long ago to the relationships they were building by meeting their community’s needs.

Perhaps that’s a better metric of health.

If people today are more interested in relationships (and plenty of research shows how starved we all are for them), and meeting local needs helps us build those relationships, why wouldn’t we measure our effectiveness there?

• How many new relationships did we make this month in our church?

• How many needs did we meet around us?

• How many invitations to dinner did we give?

• How many friends did we make?

These are all very different metrics than simple Sunday attendance. I’m starting to wonder what the future of the Church would look like if we changed the metrics entirely.

There’s a church I visited in New Orleans that doesn’t worry about its numbers. They measure themselves by how they help their neighborhood. One of their deacons spends every Monday night at the docks, hanging out under the pier and bringing communion to homeless friends who live there. They bus in kids from all over the city for a safe afterschool music program. I sat with them for a couple of days of strategic planning. As we met in their building to talk about values and goals, we were interrupted by a knock on the street-facing door. Someone answered it and returned, saying, “There are a couple of people here who want to be baptized.” The minister left her working group and said with a smile, “Hold on, I’ve gotta go be a pastor for a bit.”

I’ve been playing with the idea that the church is heading into familiar landscapes but will find new frontiers. “Systems of Ministry” is a landscape the church knows well, and we are already exploring frontiers like rethinking building usage. But I wonder what might happen if we change the way we measure success. Perhaps the invitation for the next chapter of the church is simply to experiment with what we measure and see how that transforms our congregations.

I’m a big believer that we need all kinds of churches. Small churches are great. Microchurches are great. Mega-churches are also great. We need every arrow in our quiver to navigate the changes coming to the church over the next 50 years. But, if you have 45 people in your church, and you try to act like a Mega-Church, you are a failing Mega-Church.

But if you have 45 people, and those 45 people sit down for dinner with 2 neighbors a month, your church is personally pastoring 90 unchurched people in your city. A 2,000-person mega-church cannot touch that ratio with a ten-foot pole.

Changing the metrics of success might help you avoid being a bad version of something you’re not, and help you become the best version of who you’re called to be. 

Take a look here to download a resource on 15 new metrics you can use and how you can implement them in your congregation.