The Empty Restaurant

When people talk about church growth, they tend to imagine their role is to spread the Gospel to people who haven’t heard it yet. Their goal is to practice Evangelism in the most literal of senses, spreading the Good News as news. Where I live, we have a lot of churches that are taking on the work of evangelism while intentionally trying not to seem too “churchy” – congregations built in warehouses with names like Paradox or Encounter, hoping they might reach those they imagine as unreached by the Gospel.

But to get to those warehouses, those “unreached” people have to drive past a dozen First Something Churches, and more than a few billboards announcing salvation in Christ, telling people they can have hope because God is at work, even asking where they plan to spend eternity. It has me considering if the underlying assumption of these efforts, that there are large groups of people in the United States, in the “bible belt” nonetheless, who are unaware of the basic tenets of the gospel, is… unlikely. 

Last week, we started a series talking about the huge swath of non-church-goers who aren’t accurately “nones” or “dones,” who aren’t completely disconnected from faith, and who haven’t rejected religion wholeheartedly, but who just don’t go to church anymore. I think this is a group whose size tends to pretty underestimated. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 86% of religiously unaffiliated Americans were raised Christian (51% Protestant, 35% Catholic). 

I don’t doubt some people hear the Gospel for the first time as adults and that it has a transformative effect on their lives. But I do wonder why those unreached people are seen as a primary audience for those seeking church growth, when they represent such a small portion of the people who spend Sunday mornings anywhere other than church. I have a suspicion that it’s because the reality of their casual rejection of what we dedicate our lives to is uncomfortable to us: they aren’t missing out, they gave it a try, and often a pretty good one, and they were not impressed. 

If a restaurant sat empty, you might think it needs better marketing. It would be natural to give it a re-brand, make a pretty website, maybe even put up a billboard. If you then find out that 86% of the city had tried the restaurant and didn’t go back, then you might start to consider that the marketing isn’t the issue. 

If it was my restaurant, I would go look at the reviews. I would go ask my neighbors if they ate there and why they never went back. For a single restaurant, it might be a simple fix – an unfriendly hostess, better parking, different hours. Given that it’s not one restaurant, but tens of thousands of mainline churches, I think we need to start to wrestle with a more uncomfortable reality: it wasn’t one fixable thing, the food just wasn’t that good. 

Whatever experience people had may not have been awful, but it wasn’t good enough, powerful enough, important to them enough to keep going back. It might be a really cute restaurant, it might have a great logo, but if people don’t leave feeling full, if they don’t feel compelled to talk about how good it was, if they don’t invite their friends to meet them there, then no amount of marketing will make much of a difference. 

So that’s the bad news; there’s probably not a quick technical fix for lagging attendance or declining engagement with mainline churches. But here’s the good news: the door is still open, and the things that those Not Anymores say they miss about church, are things the church was made to offer. We have the ingredients, we have an incredible God, we have the recipes of thousands of years of Christian tradition, we just have to double down on our craft, on making sure that those people who come through our doors are truly nourished, and walk out every week planning on when they will come back again, and who they will bring with them. 

Next week, we are going to dig into what research says our Not Anymores miss about church life, and how the offerings of church can reflect, not the trends of the times, but the deep hunger that people in our communities face, for meaning, for belonging, and for the God that calls them home.