Month: October 2025

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The “Unchurched”

The Evangelical church has dedicated massive amounts of energy and resources to the unchurched. In fact there are many evangelical leaders who would say something like “our church (or organization) exists for the unchurched.” Books have been written, conferences held, buildings built etc. specifically for addressing the issue of the “unchurched.” By our conversation, it could be easily argued that the primary purpose of the church is to get the unchurched to become churched. We should talk about this.

Can I be brutally honest? Any real evangelical knows this is not really the case. “Churched” is half euphemism and half image management and if we are brutally honest with ourselves it is half cowardice but that is the half we don’t want to talk about so that half doesn’t count. The reality is that some of the harshest words Jesus ever had were for those in the church – those leading the church specifically. If that is the case, why would we make it our goal to bring people simply to be churched? We really don’t. But words we previously used sounded too harsh, too judgemental so we softened our language to something that people would be OK admitting to and to something that we would feel more comfortable with. Are we really doing anyone any favors? Worse yet, have we started to believe our own marketing?

Jesus never talked about the unchurched, Jesus talked about lost people people who were condemned. There is a difference. The difference is real and it is hugely important. If someone is unchurched, all I have to do is invite them to my thing. Hopefully they will like the music and the message and just like that, they are churched. That’s pretty easy. Of course, hopefully along the way at some point that person will hear the gospel of Jesus and will respond with an eternity altering commitment to Jesus. But, even by our language we have downplayed the importance of a saving faith in Jesus because by our language we simply are concerned whether they are “churched” or not.

Lost people on the other hand are a lot messier to deal with and they require a lot more commitment. There is an urgency with lost people because they are in a precarious situation, they are lost. Unchurched people on the other hand just have something else to do on Sunday morning. Lost people a lot of times don’t even know they are lost and we need to help them understand their predicament. That can be tricky. Lost people need to be loved by us, unchurched people just need an invitation to an event. There is a major life change required for lost people, unchurched people just need to alter their schedule one day a week once or twice a month. Lost people may require something of us, unchurched people, not so much.

The thing is that Jesus said He came to seek and to save the lost, not the unchurched. The reality is that by referring to lost people as “unchurched” there are some unintended consequences. First, we have minimized (to put it nicely) the sacrifice of Jesus. He did not go through brutal whipping, scourging and humiliation let alone death on a sadistic torture implement so people would go to church. No, He made an incomprehensible sacrifice to redeem lost and damned people to God. That is our message. How can we possibly cheapen the gospel so egregiously? Secondly we have lost sight of the importance of the urgency of the plight of those around us. If they only need to be churched then it is no big deal. However, if they are lost, condemned to an eternity apart from God in a place of eternal punishment then that changes everything. Thirdly, and maybe most perniciously, we have moved the focus of people’s need for God to their need for our church. If we carry this to its logical conclusion, we can meet their need, they don’t even need God. Now we would never say that but really aren’t we saying that just in another way? There are other important consequences all the way down to the level of creating a word that makes no sense on par with “Are you YMCA’d?” Seriously, do we really want to do this?! Even grammatically “unchurched” and “churched” are made up words that make no sense.

We use the “un” prefix here differently than anywhere else in our language. If a person is unhealthy, we want to see them become healthy. If someone is unfit for the job, we want someone who is fit. If something is unattractive, our goal is to make it attractive. and the list could go on. However, if someone is unchurched, we want them to be saved. In truth, someone who is churched could just as easily spend an eternity apart from God as someone who is unchurched. And if we are completely honest with ourselves, we may be luring them there with our language. After all, if we invite them to church and they come, they have now become churched which is what our language indicates is the goal.

Please indulge my cynicsm for a minute (as if you haven’t been already). There are really only 2 reasons for for the word “unchurched.” One is so church growth marketers can promote your local congregation and make it sound good to you to attract those in your community by whatever means necessary to your congregation. More importantly though, the reason we use this term is so we don’t have to boldly face the reality of our (and our neighbor’s) condition before God. It’s time to be real. This is not a game and the stakes could not be higher.

Can we be honest and authentic and rid ourselves of the word “unchurched” forever!? That is not the language of a gates of hell prevailing bride of Christ. But let’s not just get rid of the word. Let’s boldly confront the spiritual battle that is before us and lovingly come alongside those that God has put in our path who have been taken captive by the lies and deception of this world and the devil Himself. Let’s help them come home to the God who created them and made the ultimate sacrifice to reconcile them to Himself. Let’s help the lost find their way to a God who loves them. Let’s help the unbeliever know the joy and assurance of The God who makes truth claims that He has backed up over and over again. Let’s help those condemned to an eternal punishment apart from God find the mercy and grace that awaits them if they give their lives to Jesus. Let’s not let them simply be satisfied to be “churched.”

Prologue
Relevant?
Defining Church
The Purpose of the Church
The Radiant Bride
Worship
Worship in the Church
Holy Huddle
Unchurched
Myth of Church Growth
Our Focus

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Our Focus

I’ve heard heard church leaders say, “The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.” But that leads us to the essential question, “what IS the main thing?” I remember years ago talking with fellow students in the college dorm having conversations about church. We discussed merits of high church vs. low church, of music styles, of written prayers vs. extemporaneous prayer and a lot of different things but one foundational discussion was about the church being anthropocentric (people centered) or theocentric / Christocentric (God centered / Christ centered).

It seems like an easy Sunday SchooI answer. Of course church should be centered around God not people right? But the truth is that the modern Evangelical church is people centered. It is right there in our name. If you think about it, our budgets, our efforts, our music, our buildings, nearly everything we do is intended to attract people, keep people comfortable or engaged, satisfied, not offended and even to have them behave in a way that is beneficial. We craft sermons to speak to felt needs or “relevant” issues for people. People, both inside and outside the church, consume our efforts and our attention. As we do this, the natural and inevitable result is to drift away from fidelity and from the main thing. After all, we need to keep people engaged, attracted and not offended. If our primary focus is on pleasing people we will drift from truth, from purpose or anything that disrupts the sensibilities of those we are trying to please.

Some reading this may argue that they are certainly not people centered, they are a God centered church. That may be true of their local congregation but I challenge them to really honestly evaluate their church and ask some hard questions. Let’s consider the evangelical church and those things that we cater toward people. There are some necessities and some legitimate justifications but let’s do an honest evaluation.

  1. Are the services crafted more with reaching people in mind or with the intent of reaching God with our humble submission to and adoration of Him?
  2. Do we place more intention toward guest experience or God’s glory?
  3. Do our facilities say, “We want to welcome you and give you a good experience,” or “Even in our building, we want to reflect the nature and character of God.”?
  4. Is our music intended more to be relevant to people or to lead us to express adoration and submission to God in spirit and in truth?
  5. Are our production facilities intended to attract people or to be invisible driving our focus to God?
  6. What does our budget reflect? How many church dollars are spent chasing people and how many dollars are chasing the heart of God?
  7. How creative do we get to attract people or conversely how much do we limit ourselves in an effort not to upset or offend people?

The list can go much wider and much deeper but this gives us a starting place of self reflection and personal accountability. We can usually tell if our church is people focused or God focused just by the conversations in the atrium or hallway. Have we cultivated a body that is consumed with who God is or are they consumed with the mundane things of this world. Of course, even as I write this I am personally convicted because all this begins in our personal relationship with God. We can’t have it corporately if we don’t have it personally. But at the same time, our congregation will struggle to have this personally if they don’t have it corporately. We are designed to encourage one another in our Christian walk. We can try to attract people with sermons on felt needs but those tend to become more like a game of whack-a-mole whereas if we are simply true to the character and nature of God, the water level raises all ships.

The truth is, in our very designation, “evangelical”, we identify our focus as reaching other people. The evangelical church has been focused primarily on one thing, evangelism. It’s in our name and it is a defining characteristic. It is how we “do” church. There is good there. Jesus commands us to preach the gospel, to share the good news. That is good. But there is another side that is reflected in how the world sees the church. By focusing on evangelism we are essentially focusing on another person. There is not only a concern of misplaced attention here but there are a couple dangers as well. I say this as a life-long evangelical myself. The first problem is that as evangelicals we focus on those outside of Christ. This is similar to when couples run into marriage difficulties. Any marriage counselor will tell you that you will never succeed in trying to change the other person, you need to work on yourself for beneficial change to happen and for the relationship to work.

This other-focus, self-blindess is clearly evident in the reputation evangelicals have in the world. We are seen as judgemental and critical. We of course should share the love of Jesus with those around us, however if we focus on them rather than on Him we not only shift our focus from what is most important, we can easily objectify people by trying to “win” them and we become willfully blind to our own short comings. Also by focusing on evangelism we get to avoid seeing our own failures, our need for change, our responsibility our sanctification. We take our eyes off our Lord and Savior and we focus on fixing others. Jesus doesn’t model this way of thinking or behavior. We see Jesus always with His Father in full focus and responding accordingly to those around Him, keeping his actions in line with His Father’s will regardless of those around Him. His focus was on the Father. By focusing on people we lack the internal fortitude to help others and we lack the intimate knowledge of God to overflow to those around us. Here is the key objective: if we keep our focus aligned properly we accomplish all our purposes. If we misalign our focus we miss every one.

The second danger often in our evangelical mindset is a misplaced goal. When we set the goal as evangelism it is easy to think that once someone prays THE prayer or once someone is baptized, the goal is achieved. That again is not the model Jesus gives us. The life of the Jesus follower is a lifelong pursuit of discipleship, submission and worship. Once someone repents and turns their life over to Jesus, that is just the starting point, not the end goal. A life of worship may be the most succinct way to describe the life of a Christian because when we think of worship properly, it encompasses all areas of discipleship, submission etc. If we are to be a healthy church growing healthy Christians, our focus is critical. Our focus cannot be on people, it must be on our Lord just as Jesus modeled.

There was a simple worship chorus years ago with these lyrics:

“When I look into Your holiness
When I gaze into Your loveliness.
When all things that surround become shadows in the light of You.
When I’ve found the joy of reaching Your heart,
When my will becomes enthroned in Your love.
When all things that surround become shadows in the light of You.

I worship You. I worship You
The reason I live is to worship You. . .”

Imagine having such a view of God that everything around you, job difficulties, relationship struggles, financial problems, infertility, politics, personal loss, death, . . EVERYTHING! becomes a shadow in the light of who God is.

Right there. . . That is the main thing!

Craig Groschel wrote a book several years ago called The Christian Atheist. In it he exposes us for who we so often are. People who say we believe in God but when it really matters, we are often watching from the shore, we are not actually in the boat. In The Truth Project, Del Tackett, asks the question, “Do you really believe what you believe, is really real?” If we really believed what we believe is really real, wouldn’t our lives be significantly different? Wouldn’t our words and actions change dramatically? Wouldn’t our interactions with those around us be transformative? Wouldn’t our evangelism be as natural as talking about our favorite restaurant or our favorite sports team? And wouldn’t the church explode because unbelievers saw that we really believed what we say we believe was really real?

It’s not your church. It’s not your responsibility to grow it – that’s God’s responsibility. It’s not your responsibility to attract, appease or to make comfortable. Our goal as a church should be to shepherd a flock to recognize and pursue the main thing – to keep the main thing the main thing. When Jesus addressed the church at Ephesus He told them, I know all about all these good things you are doing but I have this against you, “you have left your first love,” HIM! Let that not be said of us. Our focus must be a lifelong and fully encompassing worship of God.

Prologue
Relevant?
Defining Church
The Purpose of the Church
The Radiant Bride
Worship
Worship in the Church
Holy Huddle
Myth of Church Growth
Our Focus