This approach, said Nieuwhof, will work for small churches and megachurches, on weekends and throughout the week. “Right now, if you think about church, the dominant model is we’re a group of randomly assembled individuals,” he explained. “You don’t know who’s sitting next to you.”
“I can see the church moving into a place where, I don’t think our weekend service is going away, but the goal isn’t just to get people to listen to a message,” said Nieuwhof. “It’s to connect with each other.”
“I think [we’ve] got to do a quarter turn on our model where, yes, preach the Word, preach it in and out of season, and people will gather to hear the Word preached. But what if there’s greater connection?” Nieuwhof asked. “What if we really move so that…the box ticked isn’t, ‘Hey, we had 2,000 seats filled and everybody watched the message.’ The goal is: We connected this percentage of people this week and this percentage next week.”
One church in Nashville, Tennessee, leaning into this idea is Way Church, which Nieuwhof said is prioritizing connecting people with one another over getting people to attend church services. “They’re like, relationship first,” he said, “because we know if people get connected to people, they will get connected with Jesus. If we connect them with Jesus and they don’t get connected, they could drift in their faith.”
“So [they] want to connect them in community first,” said Nieuwhof, “and they want more people to be saved in living rooms than in their weekend services. So it’s a different model. I love churches that are experimenting with that.”
Nieuwhof encouraged pastors that “God is in control. And so we don’t have to worry about the future…But God is also not controlling. We have some agency in this, and we also have responsibility in this.”
“I think this could be the church’s finest hour if we really focus,” Nieuwhof said, “not just on better programming and better preaching—and I’m a big fan of better programming and better preaching and better bands and better production—but…really focus on connecting people with God and with each other.”
Disclosure: ChurchLeaders is owned by Outreach Inc., which is owned by Gloo. Dr. Ed Stetzer is editor-in-chief of Outreach Magazine and provides general editorial input for ChurchLeaders.
