What will people be loyal to?
While people’s commitment to brands has changed, human nature hasn’t. People will commit to your church for the same two reasons they’ve always committed to anything.
1. Something worth committing to.
Loyalty to a worship style, a building, a denomination or a pastor is a poor substitute for being committed to Jesus. But, too often, one has been mistaken for the other.
We need to stop asking people to commit to things they don’t care about—and probably shouldn’t care about—and give them something and someone they want to care about.
People want to be challenged. Believers want to be discipled. Everyone wants a cause worth living for and a person worth dying for.
Jesus is worth committing to. Anything less and you might as well stay in bed.
Doing church better isn’t about serving people’s every whim and reinforcing the unbiblical, consumer-oriented church paradigm. That’s a big part of the old-school model that is dying out.
It’s also not about adding an additional burden to my already overworked peers in pastoral ministry.
Quite the opposite. Doing this won’t add an additional burden, it will relieve and re-energize us.
There’s nothing harder on a pastor than a church half-filled with half-awake, half-committed people.
And nothing will encourage and energize us more than a church full of passionate, worshipful, ministry-oriented Jesus-followers.