Christians are tired of the usual church experience

For the past 40 years I’ve been doing in-person church the same way. A welcome, followed by a great band leading us in worship, a sermon, and maybe a closing song. That church model changed my life, but according to the latest data from the Barna Research group, people are looking for a change. Half of Christians are tired of the usual church experience.

The good news is that covid has given us the perfect excuse to try something new. We’ve been experimenting and had some success and I think you can to.  What is up guys, welcome to the blog. If your new here thanks for checking this out. I really do believe that together we can figure out the church of the future.

So for the past 8 months my church has been experimenting with changing up our weekend service to explore a better way of doing church. One that will keep people engaged, that is more interactive than just sitting and watching. We’ve had a little bit of success and want to share 3 things that seem to be working for us that might work for you. Here they are:

Number 1: Create community inside the service. One of the things that Covid has made us realize is the importance of friendships. We were starved of community for almost two years and making friends is one of the main reasons why people come to church. But currently the only way to make a friend at an in-person service is if they hang out before or afterwards. So, we’ve been experimenting with creating opportunities in the service itself for someone to make a friend. For example, we’ve been shortening our sermon time and using the time we saved to break up into groups and have conversations around the sermon. This does two things for our people. It allows them time to digest the message and it creates opportunities for someone to possibly make a friend. Another thing we have been trying is taking that time after the sermon, breaking up into groups and having a prayer time. The closeness that you feel with someone who is praying for you. It’s genuine, it’s vulnerable and I think people are looking for that these days. People want real friends, and we are trying to find opportunities for God to create some providential relationships.

Number 2: A Worship Circle. One of the things we have been trying out is a new way to do worship. Now this is a little strange and it’s not for every church out there just because of the logistics of everything, but this is where we take the band off the stage and put them in the center of the room for an extended period of worship time, where we normally include some prayer and a time of communion. This is an experience, there’s something special that happens when we as the church worship God together. And by bringing the band off the stage and putting them in the center of the room it makes people feel like we are doing this together, rather than that normal separation of the band up on the stage and us on the floor. There’s a feeling that it creates, and it’s a feeling that you can’t get online, you have to come in-person to experience it. The church of the future must create more had to be there experiences. In-person and online services are different. As churches we need to figure out what in-person services do better than online then create our services around those ideas.

Number 3: Create more interaction and participation within the service. For years I help create a come and see type of church, now I want to create a come and experience type of church. I want people to leave my church and feel that they experienced God. I don’t want my attenders to leave with just more information or inspiration, I want them to feel something. Laughter or fun is not something we normally associate with in-person church services, but research shows that laughter brings people closer together. So, we’ve been experimenting with creating quizzes or games that we play in our services. We printed out the letters ABCD and placed them on each chair in the room. And for our recent Christmas series we had some multiple choice trivia questions around the Christmas story from the Bible. People were shocked to realize how little they knew about the actual Christmas story from the Bible. We had some good laughs together, and when you laugh together you grow closer and you build community.

Well for the past 40 years most church services have been about delivering content or information from someone standing on a stage while others listen. These days we consume content at our own convenience whenever and wherever we want. We can listen to the best preachers in the world 24/7. We have got to find more ways of creating had to be there experiences that you can’t get unless you show up in the room if we want to attract more people to our churches in the future. I hope some of these ideas have been helpful and hopefully you will come up with even better ideas. I would love to hear them so if you made it all the way to the end of this blog, why don’t you type a comment with some of the things you are trying. God Bless